According to an ideological orthodoxy, which hardened after the final discrediting of communist regimes in 1989, all governments needed to do was get out of the way of individual entrepreneurs and stop subsidizing the poor and the lazy. The long, complex experience of strong European and American as well as East Asian economies – active state intervention in markets and support to strategic industries, long periods of economic nationalism, investment in health and education – was elided in a new triumphalist history of free enterprise. Non-governmental organizations as well as the World Bank assumed that the great struggling majority of the world’s population would come closer to the living standards of Western Europe and America if they made their economies more liberal, and their world views less inimical to the individual pursuit of happiness. V. S. Naipaul summed up this faith in worldwide Westernization when in a speech at a right-wing think tank in New York in 1990 he hailed the ‘pursuit of happiness’ through individual enterprise as the final and greatest quest of mankind. ‘I find it marvelous,’ he said, ‘to contemplate, after two centuries and after the terrible history of the first part of the century, that the idea – a mere phrase in the preamble to the American constitution – has come to a universal fruition.’ The American passion for happiness ‘cannot generate fanaticism’, Naipaul assured his America First audience, and ‘other more rigid systems, even when religious, in the end blow away’.
During the ‘long struggle’ against the Soviet Union, such visions of the non-West gradually converging on the liberal-democratic West usefully countered the communist programme of violent revolution. As Naipaul’s confidence indicates, they even seemed realizable for a few years after the end of the Cold War. But the schemes of worldwide convergence on the Western model always denied the meaning of the West’s own extraordinarily brutal initiation into political and economic modernity.
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Large-scale violence, uprooting and destruction had accompanied the first phase of an unprecedented human experiment in Europe and America. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), more in excitement than sorrow, the modern epoch, revolutionized by an unfettered world market, is one in which ‘all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.’ The nineteenth century’s most sensitive minds, from Kierkegaard to Ruskin, recoiled from such modernization, though they did not always acknowledge its darker side: rapacious colonialism and savage wars in Asia and Africa, the institutionalization of prejudices like anti-Semitism, and the widespread terror, aggravated by pseudo-science, of what Theodore Roosevelt called ‘race suicide’.
In the late nineteenth century, European and Japanese ruling classes began to respond to the damage and disruptions of the world market by exhorting unity in the face of internal and external threats, creating new fables of ethnic and religious solidarity, and deploying militaristic nationalism in what they claimed was a struggle for existence. In the first half of the twentieth century it wasn’t just Nazis and Fascists who embraced, while frenziedly modernizing, the theories of Social Darwinism. Support for them extended across Europe and America, and among the educated and aspiring classes of Turkey, India and China.
By the 1940s, competitive nationalisms in Europe stood implicated in the most barbaric wars and crimes against religious and ethnic minorities witnessed in human history. It was only after the Second World War that European countries were forced, largely by American economic and military power, to imagine less antagonistic political and economic relations, which eventually resulted in decolonization and the European Union.
Yet only on the rarest of occasions in recent decades has it been acknowledged that the history of modernization is largely one of carnage and bedlam rather than peaceful convergence, and that the politics of violence, hysteria and despair was by no means unique to Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or Communist Russia. Europe’s exceptional post-1945 experience of sustained economic growth with social democracy helped obscure deeper disruptions and longer traumas. The sanitized histories celebrating how the Enlightenment or Great Britain or the West made the modern world put the two world wars in a separate, quarantined box, and isolated Stalinism, Fascism and Nazism within the mainstream of European history as monstrous aberrations.
‘Totalitarianism’ with its tens of millions of victims was identified as a malevolent reaction to a benevolent Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, humanism, universalism and liberal democracy – a tradition seen as an unproblematic norm. It was clearly too disconcerting to acknowledge that totalitarian politics crystallized the ideological currents (scientific racism, jingoistic nationalism, imperialism, technicism, aestheticized politics, utopianism, social engineering and the violent struggle for existence) flowing through all of Europe in the late nineteenth century.
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This bizarre indifference to a multifaceted past, the Cold War fixation with totalitarianism, and more West-versus-the-Rest thinking since 9/11 explains why our age of anger has provoked some absurdly extreme fear and bewilderment, summed up by the anonymous contributor to The New York Review of Books, who is convinced that the West cannot ‘ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS’.
The malfunctioning of democratic institutions, economic crises, and the goading of aggrieved and fearful citizens into racist politics in Western Europe and America have now revealed how precarious and rare their post-1945 equilibrium was. It has also become clearer how the schemes of human expansion and fulfilment offered by the left, right, or ‘centrist’ liberals and technocrats rarely considered such constraining factors as finite geographical space, degradable natural resources and fragile ecosystems. Until recently, policymakers did not take seriously, or even consider, such constraints, let alone foresee such an outcome of industrial growth and intensified consumerism as global warming.
Not surprisingly, the modern religions of secular salvation have undermined their own main assumption: that the future would be materially superior to the present. Nothing less than this sense of expectation, central to modern political and economic thinking, has gone missing today, especially among those who have themselves never had it so good. History suddenly seems dizzyingly open-ended, just as Henry James experienced it when war broke out in 1914 and he confronted the possibility that the much-vaunted progress of the nineteenth century was a malign illusion – ‘the tide that bore us along was all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara’.
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