Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 125

The Case for Sanctioning Putin’s Propagandists

Last week, Moscow was shaken by a murder attempt on a journalist at the independent, liberal radio station Echo of Moscow. Tatiana Felgengauer, 32, miraculously survived after a man walked into the station’s Moscow studio and stabbed her in the neck.

Vladimir Putin spoke up about the assault yesterday, describing it as the unfortunate but aberrant act of a madman. In truth, though, the attack did not come out of the blue. It is the direct consequence of an environment that Putin has been nurturing for years: a climate of hatred, bigotry, and suspicion that has been consistently fostered by the Kremlin and its allies against enemies of the regime. Peering into the sordid circumstances surrounding the stabbing, and the wider media climate it emerged from, offers a reminder of just how cynical Putin’s propaganda apparatus really is.

There has been much talk of late in the United States about sanctioning propaganda outlets like RT, and countering the effects of Russia’s disinformation. For Western officials who are serious about the threat, the incident at Echo of Moscow should be a wake-up call—and a reminder that we could be doing much more to punish Putin’s loyal propagandists.

The attack on the journalist took place two weeks after two remarkable TV shows aired on major state-owned channels. The first was a news report on TV Channel Rossiya 24 that accused Tatiana Felgengauer, Echo’s vice chief editor and a prominent radio host, of “working for the West.”

At the same time, Channel One premiered the TV series The Sleepers. This is a story that takes place in present-day Moscow, where undercover CIA agents—the titular sleepers—have infiltrated the highest levels of the Russian government in order to stage a revolution within Russia. Predictably enough, the CIA agents are confronted by brave and decent FSB agents. The author of the screenplay did not hesitate to use very recognizable prototypes. Thus, there is an anti-corruption fighter explicitly modelled on Alexey Navalny, and another character clearly based on the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. Most ominously, there is a female liberal journalist who is murdered—by having her throat cut, no less.

The real-life assailant, Boris Gritz, a 49-year-old Israeli citizen of Russian descent, was taken into custody immediately. He pled insanity, claiming that he had a telepathic connection to Felgengauer and that she was stalking him. His LiveJournal page described such contacts in posts dating back to last year. There is just one anomaly: all the posts had been edited on the day of the assault.

For all his claims to mental illness, Gritz clearly acted with premeditation. He had a carefully drawn plan of Echo’s office, and when he passed the security checkpoint at the building where Echo is located, he acted as a well-prepared sane person rather than a psychopath (as security camera footage has shown).

Yulia Latynina, another prominent Echo journalist who fled Russia a month ago after several unsolved assaults, has cast doubt on Gritz being insane. She pointed out that security services often use mentally unstable people as their foot soldiers, for two main reasons: such people are more susceptible to control, and it’s always easy to blame whatever crime they commit on their illnesses.

Meanwhile, Echo of Moscow’s chief editor, Alexey Venediktov, blamed Rossiya 24’s news report for the assault. He demanded that the police interrogate the channel’s journalists as they investigate the case.

State-owned propaganda channels, though, have had no doubts as to the attacker’s mental health. And Putin himself was unequivocal in pushing the line: “Well, a mentally ill man did this. What has it to do with freedom of speech?”

In one sense, Putin is right: the attack has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It does, however, have quite a lot to do with state-sponsored propaganda. TV shows in Russia, whether political talk shows or fictional series, are full of hatred, xenophobia, bigotry and bias. Whether or not Boris Gritz had a mental disorder, the hateful atmosphere channeled through state-run television has become all-pervasive.

The paradox is that the people churning out this garbage are exactly the kind of globe-trotting world citizens that the propaganda is meant to demonize. The executive producer of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst, is no isolationist, nor he is an adherent of the Russkiy Mir ideology. He is a man who enjoys all the benefits of the West: he travels to Europe and the United States, he shops there, and he visits major cultural events in Western countries. He can afford all this due to his well-remunerated job, which entails spreading fake news dripping with hatred, greenlighting bigoted TV series, and generally sowing mistrust and suspicions among people. Readers may recall an infamous report of a boy supposedly crucified by the Ukrainian army in Slavyansk. That falsified report, which consisted of an interview with a woman testifying to the horrors of the Ukrainian army, first aired on the prime-time news show on Channel One. It was a famously effective instance of Russian disinformation, inspiring many Russian volunteers go to Donbas to fight “fascist Ukrainians,” as some of them later admitted in interviews. This is only one example of the malicious, cynical falsehoods spread by Ernst’s channel on a daily basis.

Ernst’s cynicism and hypocrisy are matched by Sergey Minaev, a famous writer and a TV anchor. While Minaev enjoys spending his time in Miami, he also enjoys writing shows like The Sleepers that paint the United States in the darkest, most nefarious light.

The CEO of Rossiya Holdings, Oleg Dobrodeev, is no different from his colleagues. He does not believe for a second what his TV channels say; he simply makes money from them. The same pattern holds for two other prominent faces of Russia’s mendacious propaganda machine: Dmitry Kiselev and Vladimir Soloviev. Kiselev notably thundered about “turning the U.S. into nuclear dust” and advocated “burning the hearts of gay people.” His passionate homophobia doesn’t prevent Kiselev from spending time in so fallen a place as the Netherlands. As for Vladimir Soloviev, he prefers to own real estate in places other than Russia—for example, on Lake Como in Italy, as a recent investigation by Alexey Navalny has revealed. In May of this year Soloviev was spotted and photographed strolling in New York’s Central Park. He said that he had a meeting “with very serious citizens” over there, and that he was traveling for work.

Or consider Ashot Gabrelyanov, the head of News Media Holding, another company notorious for its propaganda output. Two years ago, he left Russia and came to New York, where he was issued an O-1 visa, “for the individual who possesses extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics, or who has a demonstrated record of extraordinary achievement in the motion picture or television industry and has been recognized nationally or internationally for those achievements.” By today, Ahot Gagrelyanov may already have a green card; in four more years, he could well become a U.S. citizen.

Kiselev is the CEO of the Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) news agency, which RT is part of. And Channel One, where Konstantin Ersnt is executive producer, partly belongs to Kirill Kovalchuk, the nephew of Vladimir Putin’s sanctioned friend Yury Kovalchuk. Despite such clear ties to Kremlin elites, though, Moscow’s propagandists have largely skirted the sanctions that the United States has applied to others in Putin’s circle. Of all these Russian propagandists, only Kiselev and Kovalchuk have been sanctioned (by the EU). The rest travel across the globe unhindered, enjoying the cosmopolitan life they so assiduously scorn at their “day job.”

Sanctioning the foot soldiers in Putin’s propaganda army is not about protecting Russian citizens. Attacks like the one on Felgengauer, though distressingly common these days, cannot be prevented through foreign legislation.

But sanctioning Russian officials would send a clear moral signal—and it might help protect Americans from the evil the Russian state spreads all over the world. A year and a half ago, Americans could hardly believe Russia leveraged an army of its trolls to incite hostility and hatred among American citizens. Now we know that Russia has availed itself of stirring up passions about any number of deeply divisive issues.

If the United States is serious about standing up to Russian disinformation, it should not allow Putin’s top propagandists free rein to hypocritically enjoy the Western lifestyles that they decry at home. Imposing sanctions on the likes of Ernst and Minaev would not just send a strong signal at a time when their propaganda is causing grave harm around the world. It would also put a lie to their own messaging, exposing the hypocrisy and cynicism at the core of the cause they serve.

The post The Case for Sanctioning Putin’s Propagandists appeared first on The American Interest.

The Young and the Restless of the Maidan Generation

“I have bad news for the hucksters in power: people from all over Ukraine have gathered here to demand change!” Georgia’s ex-President Mikheil Saakashvili shouted passionately from the stage on October 17 in Kyiv. Cheered sporadically by a crowd of protesters under a canopy of party flags, including those of his own Movement of New Forces, he urged those present to demand that President Poroshenko consider resigning if their conditions were not met by the end of the day.

Other organizers of the rally were less ambitious, focusing on the original demands they had advertised as the “Great Political Reform.” That agenda had been declared about two months prior by the coalition of current MPs known as Euro-optimists (former journalists and activists who joined mainstream parties after the Maidan and entered Parliament in the 2014 general election), along with NGO activists. As the scheduled date of the protest drew closer, others, including Saakashvili’s nascent political movement, jumped on the bandwagon.

The first demand was for an independent anti-corruption court. If passed, this could help bring to justice the top officials facing corruption charges from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, whose cases now often stall in unreformed courts. Another demand was to restrict immunity for MPs. The third and final demand was to switch to a proportional, open-list electoral system. The current mixed system is highly controversial, enabling corruption over the distribution of party seats and preventing new faces from entering politics.

After two tense days marked by occasional clashes with police, the protesters had something to show for their activism—but it was far from a complete victory. On October 19, the Parliament voted for parts of a badly needed health care reform and launched the procedure to pass the bill restricting MPs’ immunity. The bill’s future is uncertain, as it still has to go through the Constitutional Court, then back to Parliament for two rounds of voting. Nothing was accomplished on the anti-corruption court, though President Poroshenko pledged to sponsor his own bill on the subject by year’s end. Meanwhile, the Parliament announced it would consider a change to the electoral law. But that crucial reform remains highly unpopular among most of the current parties and is not likely to be implemented. Protest organizers have pledged to keep pushing for it regardless.

What remained of the protest a week after it started was a handful of tents in front of the Parliament, with occasional small rallies engineered by Saakashvili’s Movement of New Forces. Most of the original demonstrators had withdrawn from the street, stressing that the protest had to remain peaceful. Some were concerned that the demonstrations could erupt in violence, as a result of outside provocation or otherwise. And the organizers seemed to diverge in their views of what to do next. “We do not abandon our demands and will continue to pursue them,” Mustafa Nayyem, one of the Euro-optimists, wrote on his Facebook page on October 19. “The Movement of New Forces stays with the people at the tent town and continues the protest. The other participants will continue to seek the results through their own efforts and means.”

Some commentators have argued that the protest was an effective case of street pressure: the organizers could not claim full success, but they at least pushed politicians to act. More have been skeptical about the readiness of average people—and even some of the organizers—to rally for the demands mentioned above. The political journalist Milan Lelich spoke for many in seeing discord behind the facade of the protesters’ unity. “It was clear from the beginning that the patchy coalition of organizers and participants is after different goals: some pursue the previously announced objectives, some are rocking the boat, some see themselves replacing Poroshenko, and some simply want to hit a policeman,” Lelich wrote. “Sooner or later these differences would manifest themselves. That’s what happened by Wednesday night [the second day of the protest].”

What virtually all observers agreed, though, is that the three original demands themselves were valid and should be respected by the President and Parliament.

October’s protests may not have delivered the sweeping and immediate change that their organizers hoped. But they were nonetheless notable as an indicator of how the post-Maidan generation may seek to influence the political process going forward. In 2013-2014, the young were the ones who sparked the revolution. In October, they were mostly at the helm of the protest.

Ukraine’s young generation is now more actively engaged in the country’s civic life than ever before, working across a wide range of fields. They can be found toiling in Parliament and the defense sector, in economic ministries and R&D labs, or doing civil society work in the realms of culture, art, public diplomacy, and education. If their influence is to last and lead to lasting changes, though, this generation must bring a new quality of leadership into Ukrainian politics and civil society. A few challenges loom on the way.

The greatest one is the lack of upward mobility for young people, the absence of what are commonly referred to as “social lifts” in Ukraine. These are the mechanisms that inject new blood into the policymaking system. Right after the Maidan, the lifts were relatively open, as mainstream political parties saw new faces on their party lists as an asset. This helped investigative journalists, activists, business professionals and politicians with relatively untainted reputations get into parliament, ministries, and top government agencies.

Soon enough, the mainstream parties proved unable and unwilling to deliver a new quality of politics. They began to slide back into the old modus operandi of balancing between the interests of various oligarchic groups in order to stay in power and keep the war-torn country afloat. Such a balancing act may be a necessary evil in a case like Ukraine’s, where a distorted system of governance exists everywhere from the national to the local levels, and takes time to change—especially in a time of war. Ultimately, though, Ukraine has to remain open to a new kind of leadership, even if it comes only gradually. Otherwise, it will freeze in place, unable to evolve or address the mounting frustrations of voters.

Slowly but surely, dissenting reformers have been squeezed out of the system. Some have left the parties they ran with due to disagreement with their approaches, while others have stayed and criticized their party leaders, thus minimizing their chances to run on their party lists in the next election in 2019. Some, however, have seized the opportunity to shape their own movement. Ukraine has several parties that have emerged or gained visibility in the three years since the Maidan. These include Democratic Alliance, initially a youth organization that now promotes itself as a center-right reform-oriented party; Syla Liudey, or the Power of the People, which is now trying actively to build its grassroots network across Ukraine; and Samopomich, an initially regional party established in 2012 by Lviv Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, which landed third in the 2014 election with almost 11 percent of the vote.

Many smaller initiatives and individual activists have also popped up to advance various agendas, from the fight against corruption in the law enforcement system and the military, to garnering support for political prisoners in Crimea, to pressuring local authorities into making municipal facilities accessible to disabled people. However, these forces have not yet managed to consolidate under one banner with a credible political platform.

Likeminded activists often respond as a united front to initiatives that could threaten the progress of reforms accomplished so far. They try to build up their presence outside of Facebook and large urban hotspots of political activism, albeit often without effective coordination. To a certain extent, they stand for the principles that Ukrainians seek in their political elite, including respect for the rule of law, transparency and accountability. But they will not be able to compete with the consolidated old system unless they consolidate too.

This is not easy to do. Many of the new leaders seem to have serious personal political ambitions that stand in the way of potential consolidation. Democratic Alliance offers a good example. Led initially by the charismatic economist and long-time activist Vasyl Gatsko, the movement gained visibility during the Maidan. It then received a boost after the July 2016 party conference, when it was joined by several well-recognized new politicians, such as the former investigative journalists Serhiy Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem. These days, Leshchenko is becoming more visible to the average voter as an independent politician criticizing those in power—most often for good reasons—and publicizing cases of raider attacks against small and mid-sized businesses. Meanwhile, Nayyem is seen touring Ukraine’s regions with the Initiative of Real Actions, a new group of reform-minded activists trying to build support and recognition at the grassroots level. A plurality of political affiliations is not a bad thing in itself, and some disagreements are to be expected during the evolution of new political forces. In Ukraine’s political environment, however, this phenomenon threatens to marginalize the new political forces.

Some of the actors that present themselves as part of the new political movement prefer tried-and-true populist tactics. Saakashvili’s conduct at the latest protest or during his earlier crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border are illustrative of this. “I promise to those in power that they will have a lot of problems, wasted nerves, money and time. And I promise to all of us a peaceful, calm, organized, legitimate victory. We will make it happen together,” he said at a rally on October 19, referring to the eventual replacement of those currently in power. “Let’s have a referendum on a vote of no-confidence in them,” someone from the crowd shouted. Whether Saakashvili has in mind a snap election or another Maidan is unclear. Whether he has in mind the consequences of any of those moves when the country is at war and wracked by painful economic changes is equally unclear.

Saakashvili has at times been joined by former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who appeared alongside him when he crossed the Polish-Ukrainian border in September. Tymoshenko has already announced her presidential ambitions, and her approval ratings are currently rising thanks to her personal charisma and populist rhetoric. Given her political history, though, some reformers see her as a liability. During her time in office, Tymoshenko failed to deliver necessary structural reforms, and couldn’t avoid coming into conflict within the post-Orange Revolution political camp, which helped pave Viktor Yanukovych’s path to power. Based on that experience, many in Ukraine find it hard to believe that she would do any better this time and see her growing popularity as a threat. Yet that did not prevent Saakashvili from accepting her support—whether genuine or aimed at a PR effect—in the border-crossing adventure.

Appearing with such characters may well help young forces attract more visibility and voters. But it will not bring about a new quality of politics, and it may even discredit the young forces by association. The dilemma is further complicated by the fact that the new movements have far fewer financial resources compared to the mainstream parties or populists.

The geopolitical environment presents yet another serious challenge to the young generation in Ukraine. The Transatlantic community is now predominantly focused on its own survival. It has little appetite for encouraging Ukraine’s integration aspirations, which remains a major priority among the youth. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, by contrast, has strategic patience and expects Ukraine eventually to return into Russia’s sphere of influence. Ukraine’s young generation needs to figure out how it will shape the country’s strategy in these circumstances, and how it will help Ukrainian society remain optimistic about its geopolitical future.

The run-up to the 2019 elections will be a time of serious fighting over the short- to mid-term future of the new generation in Ukraine’s politics. The path to political power for reformers is a murky one. If this fall’s events are any indication, we will likely witness more chaos in terms of alliances, hopefully some consolidation of reasonable forces, and more attacks against them in the years to come. One thing is certain, though: All the previous “young generations”—from the dissidents of the Soviet Union, to the students that drove the Revolution on the Granite in 1990, to the youth that took part in the 2004 Orange Revolution—have, in the end, pushed Ukraine a step forward.

The post The Young and the Restless of the Maidan Generation appeared first on The American Interest.

Political Consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Part I

The Protestant Reformation was indeed one of the most consequential events in modern history, and its 500th anniversary represents an excellent opportunity to take stock on how it has affected the nature of politics in the present.

There have been prolonged discussions about the Reformation’s impact on a variety of phenomena linked to modernity, but there are three that are of particular importance. The first concerns the Reformation’s impact on the development of modern states. The second has to do with the Lutheran Reformation’s role in shaping the modern concept of identity. And the third has to do with the Reformation’s impact on modern liberalism.

Before beginning this discussion, it will be helpful to distinguish between the two wings of the Reformation, the Lutheran/evangelical and Calvinist/reformed movements that had emerged by the middle of the 16th century.  Whatever their theological differences, the two had distinct political effects in the long run.

The Lutheran phase began with Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses in 1517, and his subsequent struggles with both the Papacy and the Empire that culminated in his confrontation with the Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521.  Luther’s doctrines, helped enormously by the recent invention of the printing press, had spread rapidly throughout Germany and to more distant parts of Europe on a grassroots level in these years.  His ideas were highly attractive to both aristocrats and ordinary people who were disgusted with the behavior of the Catholic Church and ready to see its authority undermined.  But his cause was taken up, critically, by a number of princes like Luther’s protector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, and the subsequent consolidation of Lutheranism and the spread of Lutheran churches became the work not of primarily of grass-roots proselytizing but of Lutheran princes who simply imposed the doctrine on their subjects.

The second phase began with Calvin and a new generation of Protestant thinkers in Geneva in the 1550s and 60s. After several decades of attempts at a negotiated settlement with the Lutherans, Charles V decided that their differences were irreconcilable and initiated a long-awaited war that culminated in his defeat of the Schmalkaldic League in 1547.  At the same time, the Catholic Church gathered its ideological resources at the Council of Trent (1545-63), and was energized by new movements like the Society of Jesus of St. Ignatius Loyola.  Under these circumstances the territorial expansion of the Reformation was halted.  The new Calvinist phase had to operate against a backdrop of much stronger political resistance from the Counterreformation, and tended to be organized on a more grass-roots, decentralized basis.  Calvinism therefore did not spread in a territorially coherent way; it moved across central France to the Huguenot bastion of La Rochelle, to the Netherlands, to England, to parts of Switzerland and Germany, and indeed all the way to North America.  If Lutheranism was the work of princes, Calvinism was the work of local congregations, disaffected aristocrats, and others who had to build political organizations from the bottom up with less princely support.

The Reformation and the Emergence of Modern States

The Reformation had huge impacts on the development of modern states in Europe, through a variety of causal channels.

The state was defined by Weber as a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory.  A modern state is generally characterized by the existence of a centralized bureaucracy with direct taxing authority, that seeks to govern impersonally.  This is distinct form from patrimonial states in which political power is held by friends and family of the ruler, in which access to the state is not a right of citizenship but a function of one’s personal relationship to the ruler.

While China laid the groundwork for a modern state already in the 3rd century B.C., the first modern states did not appear in Europe until the 16th century.  The Medieval state in Europe was not modern.  In the first place, sovereignty was divided under the theory of the “two crowns.”  Princes were not sovereign; God was sovereign, and the prince shared political power with God’s representative on earth, the universal church of Rome.  The Catholic Church possessed substantial worldly power, in the form of land, chattels, and direct taxing authority that each year sent enormous revenues directly to Rome.  Feudalism further fragmented political power.  Kings did not have the authority to directly tax the subjects of their vassals; the latter were independently powerful lords who exercised territorial authority and maintained their own armies, judiciaries, and bureaucracies.  Within a particular lord’s domain, there were many classes of rights, dependent on the historical relationships that had developed between the lord and his vassals; hence even the local lord was not sovereign over the territory he nominally controlled.  Feudalism was simply a formalization of patronage politics, in which kings traded rents for political loyalty.

State modernization in early modern Europe thus consisted of the building of centralized bureaucracies with direct taxing authority over a defined territory, growth in their scope and resources, and the elimination of a host of particularistic relationships between the state and the various bodies and individuals that inhabited it.  In particular, it meant the unification of sovereignty in a single ruler who had at least nominal and uniform authority over not just his personal domain but over the entire territory that owed him nominal allegiance.

Patrimonial states were ubiquitous at the beginning of the Reformation; by the time it had established itself at the time of the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War, modern states had begun to appear in England, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark.  It is not an accident that all four of these countries were largely Protestant, and the Protestant legacy would be critical in later-modernizing states like Prussia.  State modernization is not a binary condition; rather it occurs by degrees.  The Lutheran phase of the Reformation laid the groundwork for a modern state, but did not in itself bring this about.

The Lutheran Phase and State Resources

The most obvious way in which the Lutheran phase of the Reformation aided in modern state-building was the way in which it added to state resources through the simple expropriation of the resources and taxing authority of the Catholic Church.  This occurred first and foremost in England which, as is well-known, broke with the Church not over doctrinal issues but because of Henry VIII’s desire to obtain a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.  The Catholic Church at that point owned perhaps one-fifth of the territory in England, and possessed enormous moveable wealth in the form of gold, jewels, buildings, and the like.  It was clear that as Henry’s despoiling of churches and monasteries continued that he and his noble allies were primarily interested in confiscating this property for their own uses.  Henry himself had no particular interest in Luther or the doctrines coming out of Wittenberg; indeed, he was happy to suppress schismatics in his own realm.  What he wanted first and foremost was to exert political control over a national church that would not challenge his authority as the Pope had done.

The beginnings of a modern state really began, perhaps unintentionally, under Henry’s powerful secretary Thomas Cromwell, who served from 1532 to 1540.  Elton (1953, 1974) has argued that Cromwell led a “revolution in government” during this period.  Prior to that point, the English state was run like a large private estate; afterwards, it became far larger, national, centralized, and uniform (Elton in Williams, 1963).  The monies from the tithe that had gone directly to Rome now went to the English Exchequer; Cromwell created a bureaucratic system for managing this wealth and distributing it according to national priorities.  Previously taxes had been linked to specific requirements (usually the fighting of wars); after Cromwell, they were imposed on a regular basis.  One of the results was that the king and his circle of courtiers became increasingly detached from the task of raising revenues, which was delegated to a Privy Council with regular membership (Schofield 2004).  The specifics of the Elton thesis have been much debated (see Block in Tittler and Jones 2004), but it is clear that England participated in a process of modern state-building that was taking place in other parts of Protestant Europe in that period.

The English Reformation had a huge impact on English national identity as well.  National identity is crucial for social cohesion, and hence for state power.   Henry VIII’s Reformation made the English monarch sovereign over all aspects of his subjects’ lives, both material and spiritual; the shift from Catholic ritual to Protestant worship through promulgation of works like Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer established a distinctive English national language and culture.  This was reflected as well in English foreign policy, where Tudor England became the dominant Protestant power balancing would-be Catholic hegemons in Spain or France.  According to Smith (1984, p. 89),

…the feeling of national identity and uniqueness continued to grow, reaching an apogee in the reign of Elizabeth when it was given classic expression in one of the most influential works in the whole of English literature.  John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments… was a resounding statement of the theory that Protestant England was God’s ‘elect nation’, superior to the enslaved Papists of the Continent and entirely independent of all authority apart from that of the Crown…  That was the theory of English and later of British nationhood which was to prevail from then onwards until the 1970s, when membership of the European Community once more subjected the country to the decisions of an external authority.

The normative belief in the existence of a single English community was reinforced by events like the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and by the material interests of the nobility and gentry that had profited from the sale of confiscated Church lands.

The English experience was replicated in Denmark and Sweden.  Like Henry VIII, Christian II was interested less in theology than in creating a national church under his control.  The Medieval Danish Catholic Church was proportionately even richer than in England, controlling about one-third of Danish land and half of Norway’s (Lockhart 2007).  Christian began this process with the Land Law of 1521-22, which cut off the right of bishops to appeal to Rome, and in his packing of ecclesiastical positions with his own political appointees.  After the accession of Frederik I Lutheranism began to sink roots at a grass-roots level, as Lutheran preachers took advantage of the king’s tolerance and even encouragement.  The Catholic Church began to disintegrate under this rule; the mendicant orders were driven from the towns and their goods confiscated (Elton 1990).  Denmark became the first consolidated Lutheran state with Christian III’s victory in the Count’s War in 1536.  In order to pay his enormous war debts, the king secularized church property and dismissed its bishops (Elton 1990).  Henceforth prelates were no longer permitted to sit in the king’s Council.  As Duke Christian of Holstein, the new king had already had experience of building a princely church in his territory similar to those of the Lutheran princes of Germany; he applied these lessons to the creation of a national church in the whole of Denmark (Grell 1995).  This process continued under Frederik II, who increased state control over Church appointments in the face of a renewed threat form the post-Tridentine Catholic Church.  As in England, these developments increased the resources available to the Danish state, and were critical in forming a distinct national identity.

A similar process unfolded in Sweden under Gustavus Vasa, who sought to weaken the Church through his control over appointment of bishops.  He was not a particularly pious king, rather, “His church policy was determined primarily by the wealth of the Catholic Church rather than Luther’s teachings.”  Luther simply “provided him with the theological rationale for crushing the church’s political power and confiscating its supercilious riches” (Grell 1995, p. 48).  As in the case of Christian III, these revenue needs were driven by Sweden’s protracted war of independence.  In 1527 he threatened the Church with resignation if it did not meet his revenue demands, to which it acquiesced (Elton 1963).  Fiscal concerns were dominant throughout Gustavus Vasa’s long reign, as he discovered that income from his domain state were not sufficient to cover his expenses.  He was hence driven to centralize revenue collection and create a system for the direct administration of taxation.  To this end he was willing to trample on traditional values; according to Grell (1995, p. 51), “he was prepared to have beautiful, ancient ecclesiastical parchment manuscripts torn up and used for covers of his bailiff’s account books.”

Lutheranism did not spread as widely in Sweden as it did in Denmark, however.  The top-down destruction of the old church provoked popular uprisings in the countryside to defend the ‘old religion,’ including a very serious one in the south of Sweden in 1542.  This was quite similar to the Pilgrimage of Grace rebellion experienced by Henry VIII in 1536 (Ackroyd 2014).  Gustavus Vasa successfully put down these threats to his rule, but he was not as successful an institution-builder in terms of creating a national Lutheran Church as Christian III.  The country was not declared an evangelical kingdom until 1544, and on Gustavus’ death in 1560 there were still unresolved doctrinal questions that his sons would have to deal with.

The post Political Consequences of the Protestant Reformation, Part I appeared first on The American Interest.

Turkey’s Ukrainian Gambit

Reading the headlines, one could be forgiven for thinking that Russia has become, all of a sudden, Turkey’s new best friend. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his loyalists are up in arms against the U.S., which they have branded the archenemy. The EU, and especially Germany, has long been on Turkey’s bad side. Vladimir Putin, on the other hand, wins praise as a trustworthy partner—whether in Syria, in the fight against Fethullah Gülen and the movement he heads, or on Turkey’s quest to become an energy heavyweight.

But appearances can be misleading. Ankara’s so-called pivot to Moscow is, in actuality, consistent with a broader trend in Turkish foreign policy of late. It is a bid to assert autonomy in foreign affairs, rather than a step towards a lasting alliance with the Kremlin. Case in point: Erdoğan’s visit to Kyiv on October 9 was a reminder that Turkey’s interests often diverge from Russia’s. Though the media picked up on Erdoğan fighting off sleep during a news conference with President Petro Poroshenko, there is nothing soporific or dull about the links between Turkey and Ukraine. On the contrary, over the past two years those connections have become stronger than ever.

Take Crimea for instance. Despite its recent rapprochement with Russia, Ankara’s views of the 2014 annexation have not changed one iota. “Turkey will continue to support Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Erdoğan said during his Kyiv visit, echoing a statement made by Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in February after the regular session of a joint planning group between Turkish and Ukrainian ministries of foreign affairs, also held in Kyiv.1

Turkey has also gone out of its way to back its ethnic kinsmen, the Crimean Tatars. Turkish dignitaries have used every occasion to demonstrate support to the exiled leaders of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar community’s umbrella structure which the Russian authorities blacklisted as an extremist organization in 2016. And Turkey’s government has been providing assistance to the Tatar volunteer battalion involved in the blockade on land connections to Crimea (though it has been careful not to send arms). In March 2017, Turkey went so far as to ban ships under its flag from visiting Crimea. Ukraine’s Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who was in Turkey at a time, greeted the move as “a very strong signal.” Turkey also rolled back an earlier decision taken in November 2016, soon after the rapprochement with Russia got off the ground, to start a ferry service with the ports of Sevastopol and Kerch.

The uptick in security ties between Turkey and Ukraine is another story mostly missing from the headlines. Few noted that General Hulusi Akar, the Turkish Armed Forces’ chief of staff who gained international fame on the night of the failed coup in July 2016, was at Erdoğan’s side throughout the Kyiv visit.

Cooperation first picked up speed in November 2015, during the Russo-Turkish spat triggered by the shoot-down of a Russian Su-24 by Turkish forces at the Syrian border. By February 2016, Turkey’s then-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu was already overseeing the conclusion of an agreement with Ukraine for the joint manufacturing of aircraft engines, radars, military communication and navigation systems. This sort of cooperation is very important to Ankara: Turkey hopes to advance its plans for developing an indigenous defense industry, thereby minimizing its dependence on Western contractors. Turkish officials view Ukraine as a potential supplier of technology and equipment to that end. Joint production of phased space rockets, ballistic missiles systems, and even cruse missiles is under discussion.

In Ukraine, Turkey is seen a welcome customer to compensate for severed links with Russia’s military-industrial complex. In April, the commander of Ukraine’s navy, Vice Admiral Ihor Voronchenko, toured the Gölcük shipyards on the eastern coast of the Marmara Sea, where Turkey has been building a new class of corvettes under the MILGEM (“national ship”) project. This wasn’t a one-off signal, either: the Turkish navy trains on a regular basis with its (greatly diminished) Ukrainian counterpart. That includes NATO-led exercises as well as bilateral drills.

Last but not the least, there’s an important investment and trade angle to Turkish-Ukrainian relations. Recently Erdoğan, along with a number of cabinet ministers, took part in the sixth session of the so-called High-Level Strategic Council with Ukraine, a joint intergovernmental body for the promotion of economic ties that has been around since 2011. The Council’s goal is to raise  trade volumes from their present level—at just under $4 billion—up to $10 billion. That figure may seem trifling next to the $30 billion turnover between Russia and Turkey; but if one subtracts the Russian natural gas imported into the Turkish market, the comparison starts to look a lot more even. During this most recent session, a slate of new agreements were signed, including provisions to protect investment and avoid double taxation. In recent years, Turkish contractors had already won contracts for various construction projects in Ukraine in excess of $5 billion, including building the Donbas Arena in the separatist-held town of Donetsk for the 2012 European soccer championship. Tourism is another bedrock of the trade relationship: more than 1 million Ukrainians visited Turkey in 2016, and as of March 2017, Ukrainians and Turks have been able to travel between their countries passport-free, using only an ID card.

Of course, it’s important not to exaggerate the significance of this relationship. Erdoğan’s trip to Kyiv does not mean that Ukraine could replace Russia as Turkey’s main interlocutor in the former Soviet sphere. And Moscow has two points of leverage that Kyiv lacks: First, its military is deployed around Turkish borders, in Syria, in Armenia, and in Crimea. And second, Turkey’s remains dependent on Russian energy imports and is vulnerable to trade embargoes.

Still, it is truly remarkable how Russian leadership in particular seems to be altogether oblivious of the Turkish-Ukrainian affair. It’s possible that the Kremlin does not think Turkey’s overtures to Ukraine count for much in the grand scheme of things. Alternatively, it may discount this burgeoning relationship because it is held hostage to two familiar narratives: that Turkey is being inexorably drawn into Russia’s fold, while Ukraine exists as primarily a Western vassal with no foreign policy of its own.

Whatever the reason, Russia isn’t outwardly recognizing an important shift in a region that’s vital to its immediate interests. And that could have lasting consequences.

1To be fair, all this hard-hitting talk has not been met with much action. The Turks have refused to join Western sanctions against Russia. And they keeps a low profile on the war in the Donbas, even though a Turkish diplomat currently presides over the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) monitoring mission there.

The post Turkey’s Ukrainian Gambit appeared first on The American Interest.

Welcome to Democracy Square

It is my pleasure to welcome you to this blog about the issues and challenges confronting democracy at home and abroad.  I plan to address these issues frequently and concisely, and in a civil tone.

But civility does not require passivity or tedious neutrality. Globally, democracy is facing a deepening recession that Russia and China are eagerly exploiting and accelerating for geopolitical advantage. At home, we have a President who has shown repeated and diverse forms of contempt for democratic norms, and who is now browbeating most Congressional members of his party to fall meekly into line behind him, lest they face a primary challenge from puritanical “true believers”.

Our democracy is suffering from crippling polarization and now tactics of political intimidation reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy, with the same political fear and indulgence that gave McCarthy free rein to roll out his demagogic campaign of anti-communist scare tactics until his fraud and bullying were finally exposed and confronted. I had hoped that Senator Jeff Flake’s eloquent and courageous speech last week might begin to turn the tide against this growing danger to our democracy, but it is clear that we are now in for a much longer and harder struggle. I hope you will join me here in thinking about how we can make America think again, and how we can renew democracy at home and abroad.

The post Welcome to Democracy Square appeared first on The American Interest.

The Official Future Is Dead! Long Live the Official Future!

One of the defining characteristics of our current moment is the unbelievably wide aperture of plausible political possibilities that seem to spread out before us. No matter your political persuasion, the range of potential “outcomes” that one can imagine over some middle-term horizon—say, five to ten years—seems fantastically broad in range. And this is equally true on both domestic and international fronts.

To better get a handle on how wide open the future seems today, it’s useful to draw on the concept that the futurist Peter Schwartz once dubbed “The Official Future.” For any human group, be it a family, a corporation, or country, there exists a set of (usually unstated) shared assumptions about what is going to happen in the future. For a corporation or nonprofit organization, for example, this Official Future might entail a sense of what lines of business one plans to be in, how much growth to expect, or where the business will be conducted. For a country, the Official Future typically consists of assumptions, for example, about peace (or enmity) with certain neighbors, about the durability of the constitutional order (or lack thereof), or about how the economy will be organized (and to whose benefit). If national identity describes how a people looks backward together, the Official Future defines how a people looks forward together.

In the United States for much of the last quarter century, the Official Future might be described this way: Domestically, the United States was destined to remain what it had always been: a two-party multicultural federalist democracy, dedicated to capitalism, technological optimism, and creating better lives for our children; likewise, internationally, the United States would remain the center of the global order as well as the world’s greatest military power, what Madeline Albright called “the indispensable nation,” dedicated to promoting economic growth, democracy, and human rights the world over.

As Schwartz pointed out, the Official Future always entails a certain degree of wishful thinking, and arguably self-delusion. When the assumptions embedded in the Official Future are named explicitly, we can readily recognize that they may not, in fact, be entirely reliable. The future, after all, is inherently uncertain, especially over the medium to long run. An unwillingness to challenge the assumptions of the Official Future can lead to strategic blindnesses. At the same time, however, the Official Future is a necessary form of delusion. It represents a kind of ideological glue that holds a collectivity together by defining a shared horizon of expectations. It makes social and political peace possible, and creates a basis for collective action.

Today in the United States, a year after Donald Trump’s improbable election, an event that the Official Future had declared was categorically impossible, the post-Cold War Official Future has collapsed. For better or worse, the aura of inevitability associated with old Official Future has evaporated.

In its place have emerged a bewildering array of plausibly possible futures. Today in Washington and across the country it is not uncommon to hear even “reasonable people” articulate political possibilities that a couple of years ago would have been confined to science fiction novelists and the tinfoil milliners of Reddit or 4chan. Mainstream TV channels and prestige publications give an earnest hearing to theories of how U.S. democracy could be abrogated into some sort of quasi-fascistic dictatorship, perhaps in the wake of a major terrorist strike on the homeland, subtended by some sort of race war. Others envisage the possibility of the wholesale dismantling of the Federal government, or even the collapse and breakup of the United States. And yet others are discussing an explicit embrace of “socialism,” focused on major wealth redistribution and state-managed delivery of universal basic income and services.

Now, it’s true that many of these possible futures seem to be imagined and discussed less by advocates (though there certainly are advocates) than by people who fervently oppose such outcomes. But the significant point is that all of these possible futures no longer seem like mere political pornography, but instead have come to be perceived by even “reasonable folks” as live possibilities. Indeed, a central reason that politics today arouses such passionate intensity is that the gaping range of plausible outcomes makes the stakes seem enormous.

It’s not just on the domestic front that politics are wildly unsettled and the range of possible futures vastly expanded. Internationally, fears of nuclear apocalypse are higher than at any time since the depths of the Cold War, at least according the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which since the dawn of the nuclear era has been maintaining a “doomsday clock.” The United States’s seventy-year run as global hegemon seems in doubt, not least because the President seems intent on ripping up as many as possible of the international agreements which have institutionalized that hegemony since the end of World War II. The future of the European Union seems more uncertain than ever. But what will fill these voids seems entirely uncertain: A rising China? “A world of chaos”?

In short, as the old Official Future has collapsed, the range of credibly possible futures has exploded. For political insurgents, the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute have fallen away and the budding rose of possibility is abloom. For veteran political observers, by contrast, the sensation is something more akin to intellectual vertigo.

One way to try to understand the uncanniness of our political moment is by analogy to the Overton Window, a policy concept developed by the late Joseph Overton, a lawyer at the public choice economics-oriented Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan. The Overton Window refers to the fact that for any given policy debate, there are usually limits on the range of “acceptable” possibilities, with ideas outside those boundaries dismissed as “fringe” or “radical” or “unthinkable.”

Overton’s central point was that what’s considered “reasonable” can and does shift over time. Ideas that were once considered too radical for serious consideration can, as a result of sudden events or concerted public relations campaigns, come to seem acceptable; conversely, ideas that were once considered sensible can come to seem unconscionable. In other words, as political norms shift, the window of so-called reasonable policy positions can open and close.

Now, if we combine the concepts of the Official Future and Overton Window, what we get is a way to think about the range of “plausible” potential futures, that is, futures that supposedly sober and judicious people believe can actually take place. And my thesis here is that this window of plausible futures—what I will call the “Schwartz Window”—has since November 2016 been blown wide open, with the winds of Hurricane Trump threatening to tear it right out of the wall.

How should we make sense of this wide-open moment? The last time the Schwartz Window was anywhere near as open as it is today was during the 1970s. Between political and economic upheavals at home and military and diplomatic failures abroad, the 1970s resembled our own time in the sense that many of the old verities about politics no longer seemed credible, which in turn generated a sense that many possible political futures could plausibly unfold.

Domestically, in addition to those dedicated to defending the postwar Official Future that the Keynesian/New Deal consensus would last forever, all sorts of dramatic alternatives were in the air. There were proposals for new sorts of communal living and economic organization, from the back-to-the-land movement to urban communes. Leftists debated without irony about what life would be like “after the revolution,” and domestic terrorist movements of various persuasions were committing acts of violence on a near daily basis, sincere in the belief that their political objectives were within reach. On the other side of the political spectrum, the 1970s also saw the glimmering beginnings of the rightist militia movements, as well as full-throated libertarian dreams of achieving the “night watchman state.”

In international affairs, the Schwartz Window also stood wide open during the 1970s. Détente heralded the West’s grudging acknowledgement of the supposed institutional permanency of the European Communist alternative, even as Maoist and Castroite movements from Cambodia to Angola to Nicaragua seized power. Where violent overthrow of governments was not in the cards, the newly independent states of the so-called G-77 were given polite hearings in many Western capitals while proposing a New International Economic Order based on a broad-based redistribution of resources from the Global North to the Global South. At the same time, pointing in the opposite direction, as the term “globalization” first began to be whispered in obscure political science journals, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) pushed for integration of global commerce and capital markets. In other words, Americans in the 1970s could imagine possible futures encompassing anything from global capitalism to global collectivism.

Of course, the Schwartz Window of the 1970s didn’t stay open forever. The key events that began to close that window were the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States 1980. Reagan’s straightforward rejection of North-South transfers and unabashed celebration of the invigorating power of capitalism signaled that more radical alternatives being considered during the 1970s were being taken off the table. Thatcher’s central party slogan—“There is No Alternative”—can be read as a militant demand to close the Schwartz Window. Throughout the 1980s, as what today is often referred to as “neoliberalism” consolidated, the Schwartz Window kept narrowing.

The definitive closing of the 1970s Schwartz Window was famously announced in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama with his essay on “The End of History”: “The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” Fukuyama declared, “is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” and conversely, in “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

While Fukuyama’s idea has perhaps been the most derided concept in political science over the past three decades, much of the mockery has been rooted in a misunderstanding. In fact, Fukuyama was not making a normative argument, but rather an empirical claim about the openness of the Schwartz Window, one that in hindsight seems accurate: for the next twenty years, the Schwartz Window would only be open a crack, with liberal-democratic capitalism under the sign of U.S. hegemony as the only credible future in the West. Despite impeachments and terrorist attacks and failed wars and bursting bubbles, the Official Future of neoliberalism forever seemed to hold, and the Schwartz Window stayed tightly shut.

What Trump heralds—and in this respect he is arguably more symptom than cause—is that the Schwartz Window has once again swung open. Trump’s election in 2016 was precisely the sort of event that was outside the post-Cold War Schwartz Window, that is, outside the realm of plausible futures. The Official Future held that no candidate like Trump could ever be elected. “The party would decide” to prevent such a nomination, and if nominated, the good sense of the American people would make it impossible for a pathological liar and traducer of every political tradition to actually get elected. All the sensible people knew this. All the sensible people were wrong.

Virtually every day since it become apparent that Trump was likely to secure the GOP nomination, and with increasing velocity since he actually entered the White House, political events have taken place in the United States that would have strained credibility prior to 2016. This unending train of unbelievable events is precisely what has shaken the complacency of the establishment, the blithe confidence in the Official Future that marked the decades after the end of the Cold War. What was formerly unthinkable now most definitely must be thought.

But the real question we should ask is: how will this moment of radical openness end? In other words, which of the many widely divergent possible futures that seem splayed out before us will actually arrive? One way to think about this is by asking what lessons can we draw from the open “Schwartz Window” moment of 1970s. The most important of these lessons is that the Schwartz Window rarely stays this wide open for long. This is true first and foremost because living with a radically open future is cognitively exhausting—people crave a sense of certainty about the future, which is precisely what the Official Future is meant to provide. This means there is unmet demand for political leadership that has the confidence and charisma to impose a compelling new vision for the future. It is in the nature of complex social systems that if incumbent elites fail to reassert control, they will be replaced by new elites who are willing and able to do so. This is precisely the role that Thatcher and Reagan played when they came to power in United Kingdom and the United States at the start of the 1980s.

Who will be the Thatcher and Reagan of our unsettled, Schwartzian moment? In other words, who will have the political vision and strength to establish a new Official Future? Well, what we know is this: in revolutionary situations, it’s usually the Leninists who win.

The post The Official Future Is Dead! Long Live the Official Future! appeared first on The American Interest.

Social Media and Democracy

The last few weeks have not been good ones for the large internet platforms—Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asserted after last year’s election that it was “crazy” to think that his company had any influence on it. But Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, had to spend a week in Washington doing mea culpas as it was recently revealed that the Russians had bought political advertising during the campaign. Twitter had been notified that a handle called @TEN_GOP pretending to be the mouthpiece of the Tennessee Republican Party was actually a Russian troll spewing racist and divisive messages, and that it had not been taken down for months after the real Party organization notified the company. More executives from the platforms will be dragged in front of Congressional committees in the coming week and grilled over their responsibilities to American democracy.

The internet and the rise of social media has changed the terms of the free speech debate worldwide. There has always been bad information, propaganda, and disinformation deliberately put out to affect political outcomes. The traditional free speech defense has been the marketplace of ideas: if there is bad information, the solution is not to censor or regulate it, but to put out good information, which will eventually counter the bad. More information is always better. But it’s not clear that this strategy works so well in the internet age, when thousands of bots and trolls can amplify the bad messages without anyone knowing. The platforms’ business models exacerbate the problem with algorithms that optimize for virality and accelerate the rate at which conspiracy stories and controversial posts are passed along.

The platforms, for their part, argue that they are just that: neutral technology platforms on which their users share information, just as a phone company connects telephone users. The legal regime left over from the 1990s reinforces this view, since it exempts them from liability for materials they host on the grounds that they are conduits and not media companies. But they are not neutral: their business model is built around their knowledge of their users’ likes and preferences, which they use to tailor advertising toward them. This is precisely what politically-driven firms like Cambridge Analytica did deliberately on Trump’s behalf during the campaign. Only the platforms have the power to do this on a global basis.

The sudden recognition of the prevalence of fake news, targeted advertising, and manipulation of these systems by a hostile foreign power has naturally led to a reaction in the form of calls, and in some cases action, to regulate the internet. The most notable case is the German law passed by the Bundestag over the summer to criminalize fake news, setting huge penalties of up to €50 million for platforms that allow such content to appear. In the United States, Mark Warner, John McCain, and Amy Klobuchar have introduced a bill that would require platforms to disclose information about purchasers of political advertising on the internet; others have suggested banning foreigners from doing so altogether. Such measures would simply bring internet rules in line with those already set for television, though enforcing them would be considerably more difficult.

In confronting the social media challenge to democracy, a longstanding political divide has appeared between Europe and the United States. Among developed democracies, the American First Amendment stance on free speech has always been exceptional, putting few if any limits on political expression. Most European countries by contrast have been more willing to criminalize certain forms of hate speech such as Holocaust denial. In general Europeans are more willing to use state power to regulate behavior, based on their more benign view of the state as a neutral protector of public interest. State-sponsored public broadcasting—one obvious way of combatting fake news—is far more prevalent in Europe than in the United States, and indeed is a condition for membership in the Council of Europe. Americans, by contrast, are much more ready to see the state as a threat to individual freedom. The Public Broadcasting Service has never been seen as a neutral purveyor of public interest. It has been attacked from the start by conservatives, with some justice, as a captive of the the Left.

It is not clear at the present moment whether state regulation is even possible in the United States, given the country’s underlying degree of polarization. Banning foreigners from buying political ads might work, but any effort to control content will run afoul both of First Amendment protections, and of political disagreement. It is hard to imagine government regulation of fake news when the President himself is one of the biggest purveyors of the genre, and has turned the very words “fake news” into an epithet he uses against his critics.

This means that the burden of any move towards control of bad information will have to rest in the United States on the platforms themselves. They are coming under huge pressure from their users, advertisers, and their own employees to step up to the responsibility of seeing themselves not just as neutral platforms but as media companies that have a responsibility for curating the content they provide. They have already been forced to play such a role with regard to terrorist content, child pornography, and cyber-bullying through changes to their terms of service. They need to go further than this, however, by changing the algorithms that promote certain kinds of sensational stories that have harmful political effects. This is not a free speech issue: the First Amendment does not, as far as I am aware, protect the rights of bots to replicate messages on a global scale at a speed limited only by network latency.

There is a further problem, however, that will not be solved by self-regulation, which is the problem of scale. In a healthy democratic political system, media companies will compete with one another to provide alternative points of view, subject to certain baseline journalistic standards. Such companies take particular political slants, but there is enough diversity to ensure some form of overall balance: if you don’t like the New York Times, you can always turn to the Wall Street Journal.

This is not the situation that prevails in today’s internet world. There are not a variety of competing platforms with differing points of view; rather, there is Facebook, which has become a sort of global utility. Facebook does not have a clear political agenda, and is motivated by profit-maximization, which probably ensures that it will not want to annoy any large group of users by appearing biased. On the other hand, it de facto exercises a huge amount of control over what its users see on a virtual monopoly basis. There are entire countries where Facebook Messenger has replaced email as the primary channel by which people communicate. This kind of power wielded at such a scale is unprecedented in human experience, and we need to think carefully about whether American democracy can continue to coexist with such power concentrated over the longer run.

The post Social Media and Democracy appeared first on The American Interest.

An Asian Club of Democracies

After months of condemning Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi over the persecution of its Rohingya Muslims, the world’s democracies have belatedly caught on to the Burmese military’s culpability. The State Department has announced that the United States is cutting back on contacts with the military and “exploring accountability mechanisms” including sanctions against individual military personnel. Meanwhile—in a “sharp reversal,” says Joshua Kurlantzick—European leaders “infatuated” with the armed forces commander-in-chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing are also reviewing defense cooperation with Myanmar.

Suu Kyi’s approach to the Rohingya has deeply disillusioned her admirers and dealt a devastating blow to her international standing. By contrast, the military’s record of brutality against the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities was well known. So were the systemic barriers to consolidating democracy in Burma. Suu Kyi does not have authority over the military, which is a law unto itself. The constitution gives the armed forces control over the security ministries and guarantees the military enough seats in the parliament to thwart amendments.

All of this was clear before the United States lifted sanctions. In its rush to declare a rare foreign policy success, the Obama Administration squandered the decades of sacrifice by the Burmese people, political prisoners, and, of course, Suu Kyi herself during long years of house arrest and enforced separation from her family in the U.K.

America’s objectives in Burma have always been twofold: supporting the democracy movement, and gaining a strategic foothold that would prevent China from gaining access, through Burma, to Indian Ocean ports, among other things. The question remains: Is democracy desirable but dispensable? Or do America’s interests in Burma and around China’s periphery rely on both military strength and support for democracy—that is, the “the configuration of power and ideas” that Robert Kagan argues enabled democracy’s “third wave” late in the 20th century.

Asia lacks the type of institutions that helped Central and Eastern European countries emerge from Soviet domination, establish democracy, and reform their institutions. How much differently might things have turned out in Burma if Asia had such supporting organizations?

Certainly the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), based on the principle of “non-interference” in members’ affairs, cannot play such a role. Efforts to introduce a more democratic character to the organization ended in the late 1990s with the admission of autocratic Burma, Laos, and Cambodia. Ironically, Suu Kyi opposed her country’s admission at the time because of the junta’s repression and its failure to respect her party’s election victory in 1990. Now a member, Burma can block criticism of its treatment of the Rohingyas.

Historically, it has been an article of faith among defense experts that Asia isn’t suited to a multilateral organization of democracies. Post-war enmities and nationalism, the argument goes, makes such an idea impossible. Accepting the idea that Asia could not, like Europe, support such an approach, the United States has relied on bilateral agreements often referred to as the “hub and spokes” model.

The country that benefits most from the lack of democratic multilateralism in Asia is now leading a multilateral effort against democracy. After decades of aloofness from multilateral organizations, China’s involvement in them has surged—and not to the benefit of democracy. In the UN, China is dictating terms in the Human Rights Council. In ASEAN, its proxies fend off censure over its aggression in the South China Sea. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which China leads, helps member nations resist and reverse the spread of democratic norms.

China is gaining sway in Southeast Asian countries where democracy is deteriorating. In Thailand, a U.S. treaty ally, the military has unseated democratic governments twice in a little more than a decade. The military government has postponed elections, drafted a new constitution strengthening military rule, and cracked down on activists and journalists. Prosecutions for criticisms of the monarchy have increased.

In Cambodia, Hun Sen has been in power for more than 30 years, thwarting elections and using deadly violence against political opponents and rights activists. The leader of the opposition has been jailed. Foreign NGOs are being expelled, while an independent newspaper, the English-language Cambodia Daily, has been shut down. America’s military alliance with the Philippines hangs in the balance, as President Rodrigo Duterte endorses extra-judicial killings.

George W. Bush suggested a new approach. During his first presidential campaign, he spoke of a “fellowship of free Pacific nations as strong and united as our Atlantic partnership.” It was a worthy idea, and coming soon after the triumph of democratic transitions in Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Indonesia it might have prevented the democratic backsliding the region faces today. With the United States preoccupied after September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the idea never got going.

Any serious effort to build a democracy-based organization must include Taiwan lest it become incoherent, conceding from the outset the main goal of protecting and advancing democracy. That is particularly important because of the emphasis General Secretary Xi Jinping placed on acquiring Taiwan at the 19th Communist Party Congress. Another problem is President Trump’s admiration of autocrats and disdain for the geostrategic value of even trade agreements.

The existence of a democratic club doesn’t by itself prevent backsliding or guarantee democracy’s success. It must articulate principles, enforce standards, and stiffen backbones. It should create a dynamic for democratic expansion and against retrenchment while Xi advances alternative norms abroad and revives Marxism-Leninism at home.

Suu Kyi has remarked that you don’t choose your neighbors. True. You do, however, choose your friends and your principles. There may have been better moments to pursue greater coordination among democratic nations in Asia. Missed opportunities and new challenges that have emerged since only make the pursuit of a new effort more urgent.

The post An Asian Club of Democracies appeared first on The American Interest.

The New-Old Fatalism

Historical inevitability is back in vogue for the first time since the aftermath of the Great Depression. Now as then, a rather crude form of economic determinism is the single engine of this supposed inevitability, and now as then, too, it purports to offer simple and precise answers to a range of complex social and political questions. In its heyday, midway through the previous century, reductive materialism held up simple answers for emerging problems of class and political agency in a still-developing industrial world. Now this same reductive materialist approach claims to understand the apparent divide between open and closed societies, between norms of embracing toleration, social innovation, and cultural diversity and those that would slow or arrest change in order to restore an imaginary past that sheltered fragile, insecure identities. It appears that a datum as mundane as whether an economy achieves 2 or 4 percent GDP growth per annum averaged over a decade can predict as much of the political future as anyone should need to care about. This zombie-like resurrection of yet another iteration of historical inevitability and economic determinism is intellectually unjustifiable and politically dangerous.

A few generations ago, philosophers of history reconsidered some very old philosophical (and theological) questions about historical contingency and necessity such as: Is history inevitable irrespective of individual choice and action? Is history cyclical, progressive, regressive, or directionless? What is the role of the individual, or “hero,” in history? Does history repeat itself, or merely rhyme? Can we learn from history?

Totalitarian ideologues were quick to answer: History is inevitable. Large, impersonal forces such as race and class determine history, or at least history reduced to caricatures of biology or economics. The totalitarian concept of history was cyclical. History repeats itself in periodic cycles of class or racial conflicts. The aim of totalitarian utopias was to transcend history by putting a stop to it, by massive coercion if necessary. If history is necessary, inevitable, then nothing is to be learned from it. Like the revolutions of the earth around the sun, it will happen whether we understand it or not, because even if we understand it there is nothing we can do about it. If the historical process can be likened to a pregnancy, we can at most “shorten the birth pangs,” as Marx put it.

Liberals, in the European or philosophical sense of the term—well-known thinkers like Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin serve as examples—retorted that history is contingent. Individual choices do matter. Yes, modernization, conceived as some combination of attitudinal change, technological development, and social adjustment, nudges history in a certain direction, often back then called “progressive.” But there is no inevitability of “progress.” Moreover, history does not, or at any rate need not, repeat itself; “some people believe that history repeats itself, others read the Economist,” the advertisement for the liberal magazine went. Liberals believed that much could be learned from history, especially from past mistakes and wrong turns. And indeed, at the end of World War II liberal policymakers in the West set out to construct a political, social, and global order that would institutionally prevent repetitions of the mistakes of the first half of the 20th century. It is not obvious that they failed.

Unfortunately, those persuaded of this liberal philosophy of history in due course entered a “post-historical” phase. The end of the Cold War contributed to this turn of mind, but its origins predated those years. The belief in individual and collective free will became reified into the necessity of historical progress—that great arc of history, someone recently said, bending inevitably toward justice. (That is a position some philosophers call “moral realism,” the latest reincarnation of 19th-century Whig progressivism: history as the story of the survival of the most morally fit societies.1) With progressive change eventually inevitable, despite acknowledged historical twists and turns, history obviously would not repeat itself. For example, the better angels of our nature will continue to lead humanity away from its violent barbarian past to a pacifist progressive future without human agency or vigilance.2 Nevertheless, these thinkers converged on a similar conclusion to that of totalitarian philosophy of history: There is nothing to learn from history, and individuals do not matter.

Accordingly, studying history and the philosophy of history was perceived as redundant at best and regressive if it got in the way of the modernizing agenda of constructing a progressive world of empathetic equality. That agenda privileged solving the age-old problems of human existence through the technocratic mastery of marketing (the most popular major at American colleges), computer science, engineering, and management. The contingency that civilization might have to fall back on its historical lessons when the godly engine of economic progress jumped the track did not appear realistic.

The economic track jump of 2007-09 and the political track jump of 2016-17 that followed—not inevitably, as we shall see below, but followed all the same—together mark “Santayana’s revenge,” namely, the return of history to haunt those who denied it. From the perspective of the philosophy of history, contemporary populism is an extreme if deviant version of post-historical progressivism in the sense that it is entirely ahistorical. It is not just ignorant of the mistakes of the past that it unwittingly attempts to repeat, but at least in its American version it lacks any historical orientation in time, any historical consciousness at all beyond a vaguely reactionary, hence mostly inarticulate, authoritarian conviction that history has lately been very regressive; but that a great leader may halt the decline if not return us to a tribal Eden.

Thanks to the few totalitarians among us, the decadent “inevitability” progressives who used to be more subtle-thinking liberals, and the new populists, a sense of helplessness seems to have overtaken Western societies. Even members of the educated and sometimes privileged thinking classes have deemed themselves powerless as they watched recession, slow growth, and rising inequality undermine social comity and trust, and then spread out over borders to crack the postwar liberal world order itself. A wave of irrational political passions has propelled to power vulgar and vile populist politicians that remind—rhyme but not repeat—us of some of the odious characters who came to power in Europe after the previous global recession. Now as then we behold an oxymoronic nationalist international in formation, and if we recall any history at all, we sense a noxiousness spreading in our body politic.

This self-inflicted sense of helplessness fits a belief in historical inevitability no less than the sense of historical déjà vu fit a cyclical concept of the history of the past two centuries.3 Today’s populists, like the Marxist ideologists of old, promote a narrative that presents their march through history as inevitable. Their opponents fear that such a march would undo at least Samuel Huntington’s “third wave” of democratization that began in the mid-1970s, but the populists, knowing nothing of that writer or his work, think that they themselves are the true vanguard of democracy. Having turned liberalism on its head to render democracy something between a cult and a mob, they declare that resistance is futile. And indeed, before the populist wave crashed against the historical sea barriers of continental Europe this past June, Marine Le Pen fancied herself as surfing the same wave as Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, Kaczynski in Poland, Modi in India, and Erdogan in Turkey, as well as the Brexiteers in Britain and Trump in America. A lot of people who feared she was correct took the prospect very seriously, for they had become inured to the idea of inevitability.

If the politics of self-destructive passions are inevitable and economically determined, the most that rational policymakers can hope for is to moderate the populism of the Right, as in Larry Summers’s “Responsible Nationalism,” or absorb the populism on the Left, as in Robert Reich’s “New Populism.” The likes of Summers and Reich (and one can mention the Democratic effort to adopt some of Trump’s vacuous populist rhetoric, as in their promises of a “better deal”) may perceive themselves as being in a situation not unlike that of the biblical Aaron, who, facing an agitated and hell-bent-on-sin mob, assisted in committing the lesser sin of worshipping a golden calf as an image of God in order to prevent the mob from committing the graver sin of worshipping false gods. But there is no economically determined, historically inevitable populist wave rising up before us, and so it would be far better to preempt illiberalism than attempt to moderate it.

Let us now look more closely at the case for economically determined, historically cyclical inevitability as an explanation of the past ten years. As Sidney Hook advised years ago, one must debunk a bad idea at its most articulate if one expects to debunk it successfully.

As Marx foresaw, capitalism is a wonderful force for innovation, economic growth, and the globalization of prosperity through trade. Since the end of the Cold War, the global economy underwent what Richard Baldwin called the great convergence and consequently experienced the largest reduction in poverty in world history.4 The gap between the global rich and poor has contracted to levels not seen since the 18th century, when greater global equality resulted from universal poverty. (That doesn’t necessarily mean that inequality within societies has contracted; in some cases it has and in others it has grown, depending on specific contexts.)

Unfortunately, however, global capitalism also has a fatal flow: It is given to unpredictable and, yes, inevitable financial recessions. When capital managers make different mistakes at different times, economies compensate and remain at an overall equilibrium. But when, sooner or later, they all over-extend credit in more or less the same way at more or less the same time, the global economy keels over. Technocratic and political elites cannot prevent misallocations of credit or effectively reverse them once it becomes apparent that they have happened. Instead, elites react to severe economic downturns by attempting to preserve their own social and economic status, leading them to block social mobility because, in a close-to-zero-sum game, upward mobility for some necessitates downward mobility for others. In short, when the pie stops growing, the elites “rig” the rules of the socio-economic game, as Donald Trump and Robert Reich agree.

As this process continues, the argument goes, the elite become increasingly concentrated, closed, and alienated from those below them in the social hierarchy. This short-term elite strategy inevitably leads to the long-term self-destruction of the elites as a class, because it generates a backlash from groups whose mobility is blocked or pushed downward. The “revolt of the masses” pushes back through the political extremes of the Right and Left. The Right tends to aim downward at those even weaker and more unfortunate than the right-wing vanguard; the Left tends to aim upward at the elites. The combination is toxic; the center cannot hold.

Prolonged recessions undermine personal, professional, and vocational security and identity. Consequently, they awaken from their evolutionary slumber parts of the psyche that were useful when our simian ancestors lived in small tribes and were subjected to extreme natural selection. Sensing existential threat, people look to their tribe for protection; thus enfolded in the group, they look for a scapegoat upon whom to lay responsibility for their troubles, and seek out other tribes to attack to ensure group solidarity. They sometimes engage in extreme risk-taking, flocking to a possibly pathological chieftain who lacks empathy in the hope that he will successfully lead the fight for survival. So instead of facilitating trade and migration to stimulate the global economy and generate growth that can shorten and moderate the severity of recessions, instinctively people limit them to rely on their own flints and scrapers to conquer the neighboring waterhole.

Once these archaic demons awake, the argument continues, it is difficult to lay them back to rest, even when the economy is well on its way to recovery. This turns a bad economic situation into a catastrophe. A vicious cycle of economic decline, breakdown of trade, economic and political hostilities, and isolation takes over. When personal identity is linked to the market value of one’s labor and that market generates little demand, people look for alternative identities. When being human, a reflection of the image of God, is too universal or unconvincing in post-religious societies, constructed tribes, races, nations, and ethnicities create the illusion of filling in the void.5

Historically, this downward economic and political spiral has ended in wars. War opens alternative channels for upward mobility, which increase with economic reconstruction after the war decimates the former elites. The economy improves and so does prosperity, trade, and migration, generating a virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity and social and economic openness, until the next inevitably unexpected financial recession—and so on and on. Arguably the world economy is now in the fourth or fifth iteration of such a cycle. Marx’s mistake was to impose an eschatological-messianic Judeo-Christian linear narrative on cyclical, economically determined, history. There is no historical equivalent of nirvana, no escape from the historical cycle of destruction and rebirth. Central planning only makes things worse because it consistently misallocates capital and blocks innovation, thus generating sustained decline or, at best, low growth.

This inevitable cycle of ideal eternal history (to borrow Vico’s term) is independent of human volition. Nobody wills it, yet no one can stop it. Economic risk cannot be managed and controlled indefinitely. During recessions, individual members of the elite concentrate wealth and power and use it to block upward mobility despite the long-term self-destructiveness of this strategy for the elite as a class. It plays out a lot like a classical Greek tragedy. Since behind the thin veneer of civilization people are irrational, over-grown simians, when subjected to economic pressure they react as though they were under selective evolutionary pressure and turn tribal, xenophobic, authoritarian, and, given the context of the modern global economy, self-destructive. Reasoning with people in this state is futile, for they are too consumed by passions, fear, and hate to act in their own enlightened self-interest. Passions trump rationality; De Maistre gets his last laugh at the ideals of the Enlightenment; modern populist democracy that commenced with Robespierre concludes with Trump.

This argument can sound pretty convincing. But then all determinist arguments can sound convincing—Marx using class, Freud deploying the unconscious, some contemporary sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists brandishing the double helix. And so now to debunk.

Examining whether humanity is imprisoned in history like mice in a treadmill, cyclically running forward only to stay put, requires understanding a conceptual distinction between historical necessity and historical contingency. I have suggested that we can base this distinction on the sensitivity of historical events to initial conditions.6 Processes that would have turned out entirely different had things been slightly different, like the proverbial “butterfly effect” when the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas, or as in the saying “for want of a nail, the kingdom fell,” are contingent. Necessary processes are insensitive to initial conditions, often because they are overdetermined—in other words, when multiple causes lead to the same effect. For example, a firing squad overdetermines execution because of the causal redundancy of most members of the firing squad. That makes the outcome necessary.

There can also be such phenomena as tipping points, such that we can reach a kind of point of no return after which only very improbable heroic exercises of agency can obviate a particular outcome. That means that agency that might have been evoked before the point of no return, but wasn’t, makes the outcome contingent after all. But even granting the complexities, for all practical political purposes the basic distinction makes useful sense.

There is no denying that the Great Recession of 2007-09 and the anemic recovery in North America and Europe were necessary conditions for the current crisis of liberal democracy. But they were not sufficient conditions. Very small, even minute, differences in initial conditions could have led to entirely different political results. Understanding these historical contingencies is useful not just for avoiding the fatalistic conclusion that periodic civilizational breakdown is our inevitable destiny, but more importantly for designing institutions to better withstand the kind of self-destructive pressures that economic recessions generate and will continue to generate.

The contingency of election results on both sides of the Atlantic is manifest in the different outcomes of very similar distributions of votes in different electoral systems. A substantial minority of voters sufficed to decide the U.S. presidential election. An even smaller minority of votes gave absolute parliamentary majority to anti-liberal populists in Poland. The populist Austrian candidate for the presidency lost with an almost identical percentage of votes to the one that allowed Trump to win. If the United States had an Austrian or French electoral system with two rounds, no candidates other than Trump and Clinton would have been permitted in the final round. In that scenario, if only most of the principled Green voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had voted in the second round for what they considered the lesser evil, we would have a different President today and the Greens would have preserved the U.S. commitment to the Paris Accord.

Though illiberal governments assumed power in Hungary and Poland before the Brexit vote in the summer of 2016, Brexit signaled that the crisis has reached the Western core. But Brexit did not have to happen. It resulted from Prime Minister David Cameron’s “gambler’s ruin”; he believed he had a sure thing, bet the farm on it, and lost everything. Theresa May, amazingly, followed with a similar massive misjudgment, leading one to wonder if Tory cock-ups comprise the new normal in Britain. May has not lost everything, yet; and she doesn’t have to. She has real choices.

So did Cameron. He could have continued to tolerate a Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party and the loss of some votes to UKIP. The British tradition of government does not include plebiscites, for good reasons. Plebiscites oversimplify complex issues. The English who voted against the European Union had irreconcilable political agendas and different party affiliations. Some wanted a deregulated Singapore on the Northern Sea if they could only gain export markets; others wanted Little England without foreigners and edible food. Still others were punks who would have voted for anything that would have upset the establishment, abolished the monarchy, disestablished the Anglican Church, or replaced the national anthem with the Sex Pistols’ “God Shave the Queen.” Any vote that did not oversimplify the issue into a “yes” or “no” choice would have fragmented the Brexit vote. If it were not for the ruinous gamble of a single politician on a plebiscite, one nitwit butterfly flapping its wings, there would have been no perception of political crisis in Western Europe.

Other contingent “small” decisions by leaders, less dramatic and singular than Cameron’s, are just as independent of the large, impersonal economic forces that have facilitated, but not made inevitable, a crisis of liberal democracy. Nothing and nobody forced the European Union to unconditionally continue to subsidize and prop up hostile illiberal regimes in Hungary and Poland. EU leaders misjudged the durability of illiberal democracy and the extent to which governments in countries with weak civil society and nascent liberal institutions, such as an independent judiciary and a free press, can entrench themselves once they assume power. When they eliminate or weaken checks and balances such as constitutional courts, change the electoral rules, and gain control over the mass media, they can maintain the semblance of elections without fair political competition.

European leaders could have done then what French President Emmanuel Macron is doing now: use the imbalance of political and economic power to isolate the illiberal Hungarian and Polish regimes, not just from Western Europe but also from the other post-Communist countries, and then apply pressure at their Achilles’ heel. For example, despite its anti-immigrant rhetoric, Poland is actually the largest source of immigrant labor in the European Union, and it depends on taxes and remittances from its citizens abroad. Poland is also collecting taxes from Ukrainian workers who receive work permits in Poland to work elsewhere in Europe as work “transfers.” Conditionalizing such membership benefits on adherence to the rules of the club could have preempted the anti-liberal slide, or at the very least limited it.

Similarly, there is little doubt that Russia has been using a variety of dark arts to underwrite, support, and promote extremist anti-liberal and anti-democratic political parties, movements, and ideologies. Some of the dark arts are old and Soviet: underwriting fronts through intermediaries; bribing politicians who can be useful; using ideology to recruit useful idiots and fellow travelers; and collecting compromising materials for blackmail. Other methods are new, especially the use of cyber warfare technologies to spread disinformation, divide, fragment, and manipulate, a much more effective replacement for spreading rumors by word of mouth.

All that said, Vladimir Putin is not a fascist or a reactionary nationalist today any more than he was a Communist a generation ago. After totalitarianism, ideologies are distinguished by their usefulness, not their veracity. Ideology does not have to be coherent to be useful for manipulating others. Russia promotes at the same time the economically and culturally contradictory agendas of the extreme Right and Left. It promotes nationalism and decries supra-national alliances and organizations like NATO, but condemns Ukrainian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Georgian nationalisms as fascist, even while supporting fascist movements across the Western world. This is not obvious only to people who are not paying attention.

The acquisition of corrupt politicians has been going on since Putin consolidated power in the early 2000s. Gerhard Schroeder’s facile transition from representing Russian interests as German Chancellor to becoming an employee of the Russian state was an early and obvious harbinger of this Russian methodology. The use of Russian energy companies and European banks and public relations firms as conduits for funds for political influence has also been going on at least since the mid-2000s. Open societies are and will continue to be vulnerable to such manipulative interventions in ways that closed, authoritarian societies are not. Yet overconfidence in the stability and resilience of liberal democracy, and failure to understand the threat that cheap and mostly invisible methods can pose to rich and militarily mighty states, have allowed and encouraged the expanded and effective use of these methods. Nobody seems to recall the plagiarized rewrite of ridiculous fake news by the Russian secret police more than a century ago, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Designed to manipulate anti-Semitism to dissuade disaffected Russians from joining revolutionary movements, it did not save the Czar but acquired a life of its own, and has been used by other autocratic regimes as one of the most destructively effective propaganda tools in history.

Isolationist disinterest in Europe, timidity, and indecision have not helped, either. Better vigilance and understanding of this new Russian challenge, and of its old and new methods of operation, could have preempted their effective success.

Since the current crisis of liberal democracy was not inevitable or economically determined, it is possible to consider what we can learn from the past decade to devise institutional reforms that may preserve the eventual remission and preempt another dysfunctional reaction when the next economic cycle hits a recession, as it very likely will. Much as the order created in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II preserved and expanded liberal democracy in North America and much of Europe, moderating the effects of the economic crisis in whose political echoes we live, lessons from the current episode could lead to preemptive “circuit breakers” better attuned to the current and likely future conditions. “You have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice,” Bob Dylan warned, so it’s better to pay a little attention now to planning for the future than to pay a big bill later.

Odysseus famously ordered his sailors to bind him to the ship’s mast before he heard the sirens sing because he knew he would not be able to control his passions once he heard them. Political theorist Jon Elster suggested that constitutions resemble Odysseus’s bonds; the state binds itself when it is sober but can foresee the possibility of intoxication by irrational passions. For example, the deflationary effects of tightening credit in the 1930s and inflationary effects of loosening monetary policies under populist governments led to the construction of politically and institutionally independent central banks that set interest rates. As much as tightening credit during a recession is a destructive yet intuitive response, restrictions on trade and labor mobility—protectionism and immigration restrictions, nationalization and central planning—are instinctive responses to recessions that deepen and prolong them, and then spread them around the globe. So international trade and labor mobility could benefit from similar constitutionally independent boards to protect the global economy from self-destructive political passions. We have a framework organization in the WTO that could facilitate international agreement to create such a board.

On the national level, some propose an “immigration algorithm” that would factor in various economic variables and produce an optimal immigration level and distribution for economic growth, without political passions and a bloated immigration bureaucracy. Algorithms are as good or bad as the theories and assumptions of those who write them, but at least they are immune to political pressure and short-term self-destructive passions.  They may preempt the “Japanese Disease,” of deflation and low growth that have lasted for a generation as a result of severe immigration restrictions in combination with an aging indigenous population.

If social security and the welfare bureaucracy did not suffice to calm the economic anxieties that feed political extremism, it may be time to try something like guaranteed universal basic income. This is an old idea, at various points going under the name of a negative income tax or a guaranteed minimum wage. Perhaps it is an old idea whose time has come: Such an innovation can reduce economic anxiety and save on the administrative overhead of welfare. It may also encourage unemployment, be prohibitively expensive, and have unwanted cultural consequences. But it is worth thinking through, if for no other reason that even expensive innovations may end up much cheaper than the wages of populist economics.

The sizes of the large minorities of voters that supported populist candidates in the U.S., Austrian, and French (Left and Right together) elections, and in the Polish and French parliamentary elections, were quite similar. In France, when no candidate wins a decisive majority in the first round, a second round decides between the top two contenders. This system allows voters to vote idealistically in the first round and strategically in the second round. When voters vote for the lesser evil or the second-best candidate in the second round, the more centrist candidate tends to have a broader appeal than an extremist. There are exceptions, but second-ballot systems are generally less conducive to extremism than proportional representation systems where extremist minorities can become ruling majorities. Revising constitutions to adopt second-ballot electoral systems may preempt minority extremist parties from achieving electoral majorities.

The use of plebiscites by populists and totalitarians to produce illiberal results via over-simplified questions with only “yes” or “no” options, and to appeal to visceral emotions, has been known since their frequent use by interwar fascists. After Brexit and the failure of Renzi’s plebiscite in Italy, it is unlikely that non-populist politicians will try them again—that would amount to carelessness, not just misfortune. It would be even better, pace California and Switzerland, to prohibit them altogether on every level from the municipal to the national. Democratic representatives are paid to deal with complex issues and negotiate compromises; they should do their job.

Ancient direct democracy justly acquired a bad reputation because it was associated with the manipulation of passions by unscrupulous demagogues who sometimes betrayed their cities to their enemies, and always put their personal interests before those of their polities. Demagoguery as the doppelgänger of direct democracy led to the self-destruction of Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic. The agora and forum were not the ideal rational spaces of deliberative democracy that Hannah Arendt or Jürgen Habermas made them out to be, a lesson the American founders took to heart. They designed the U.S. Constitution to resist the demagogic aspect of democracy and preempt its self-destruction via a multi-layered system of representative government and separation of powers.

However, just as the invention of the radio facilitated the return of demagoguery in a totalitarian guise in the 1930s by reconstructing the demagogic forum on the airways, the internet has recreated the forum in the cloud. In the ancient forum, the demagogues were expected to have superb knowledge of their language and a mastery of rhetoric, and their speeches were longer than 140 characters. They had their gangs and mobs, but no armies of bots and trolls programmed to spread disinformation. Legislative innovations must regulate the internet, block disinformation, or warn readers of dangerous websites, while protecting freedom of speech and political expression, much like the 1927 “Wireless Act” regulated the U.S. radio industry in its infancy.7 European states and American internet companies have already begun such efforts. They are much cheaper than building ships and airplanes, but are far more effective in defending liberal democracy against its current adversaries.

Social mobility is the best antidote to class resentment and populism. Economic growth and growth-promoting policies like deregulation, free trade, and labor mobility can encourage it, but when the economic pie does not grow and “all the boats” do not rise in tandem, it is prudent and in the elite’s own enlightened interest to introduce legal mechanisms to guarantee social mobility. One concept here is to retool affirmative action to be based on class rather than ethnic background. To prevent the entrenchment of an inherited class, instead of preferring the “legacy” children of alumni, universities should do the opposite, disadvantaging them in admission to their parents’ own schools. The scope of the phenomenon may be overblown in popular consciousness, but this is exactly why total transparency in admission criteria is necessary. Likewise, Federal employment and contractors should be prohibited from hiring more than a modest percentage of employees from among the alumni of any single school.

As Wynne McLaughlin, author of The Bone Feud, put it, “maybe history wouldn’t have to repeat itself if we listened once in a while.” If people learn only from their personal historical experience, every two generations they repeat the mistakes nobody remembers. Much of the resistance to populism in continental Europe today benefits from lingering memories of previous experiments with populist and nationalist politics before and during World War II.  A comparison of the demographics of the supporters of Trump, Brexit, and France’s Le Pen is instructive: They all appeal to the uneducated and the rural as opposed to urban, educated, and professional voters.

There is a huge gap in the support for xenophobic nationalism among old people. Older French voters who remember Pétain, Laval, and the Nazi occupation, or who lived sufficiently close to Vichy to receive and retain the memories of others, are the least nationalist voters in France. Macron (a former assistant of the philosopher Paul Ricoeur who specialized in the phenomenology of historical memory and narration) was wise to remind voters of their history by visiting Oradour-sur-Glane immediately before the elections. Old Americans and English do not have personal memories of living in anything but liberal democracy. Globally, younger voters do not have personal memories of the collapse of communism or the earlier crisis of social democracy and the stagflation of the 1970s. This means that societies must find ways to transmit historical experiences and lessons from one generation to the next, and from one society to another, by studying history.

Democratic philosophers at least since Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill have warned that democracy can thrive only when voters are educated. An educated citizenship is the “infrastructure” of democracy. Scolding populists for being historically ignorant when they are in the grip of fear, anxiety, and personal insecurity is useless or even counterproductive: When formal education is used for blocking social mobility, accusing somebody of historical ignorance or economic illiteracy is interpreted as the condescending assertion of class superiority that begets resentment rather than consideration. Ignorance needs to be preempted before it becomes a badge of honor.

There are two arguments against investing resources in historical education. If the purpose of education is exclusively vocational and there are few “jobs” in “history,” it is irrational to spend time and resources studying it. Donald Trump himself has said so: He is “not interested” in the past. If “education” is devoid of content, a euphemism for purchasing a commodified, homogenized, and branded social class and alumni network, only a minority of citizens can benefit from formal education in a static economy. In societies whose social structure is more or less frozen, an increase in education does not expand the middle or higher classes. It only makes the entrance into the middle and upper classes more costly and competitive. Most students will have little or no return on an investment in education.

Populist policies and xenophobic international conflicts are not exactly cheap—they are much costlier than historical education. The experience of 2016-17 should serve as a “Sputnik” moment for education in history and the social sciences in the West, as the Soviet launching of Sputnik forced the United States to re-examine American education in STEM subjects and foreign languages. The ease with which Russia was able to undermine Western democracy in the past year should lead Western democracies to re-examine the quality and type of education they provide in history and the social sciences. Historical education can work as a circuit breaker for destructive political ideas that were tried and failed miserably.

An older purpose of education was to build character, especially by teaching young people how to deal with strong emotions—“sentimental education,” it was called in archaic English. It may still prove useful to teach them how to deal with fear and failure without seeking scapegoats. Education may also offer training in critical thinking, distinguishing reality from fiction, and evidence-based assertions from mere strong emotions. If we are afraid and feel insecure, it does not imply that minorities who look different want to poison our wells, rape, or kill us. They may just be interested in selling us spicy food.

Unlike earlier outbreaks of xenophobia and populism, at least for now, there are no significant intellectual inspirations, legitimizations, or fellow travelers. Contemporary populism is more anti-intellectual than anti- anything else. I do not envy future historians who will have to write an intellectual history of contemporary populism on the basis of tweets.

Yet philosophical schools—no need to mention any specific names—that reduce truth to power relations and deny objective reality can now observe how their worldview works in practice. What has posed as very progressive, even radically so, has given rise to demons of a very different persuasion. The inability (or unwillingness) to distinguish fiction from reality, the transmutation of strong emotions (a.k.a. authentic subjectivity) and wishful thinking into perceived truth, and the argument against the very significance of truth have been the hallmarks not just of contemporary authoritarian and populist politics, but also of “reality shows” and wrestling matches, carefully scripted situations that are presented as authentic and spontaneous human interactions. Reality shows and the World Wrestling Federation are the cultural and institutional contexts from which current American populism has emerged. Voters may have believed on some level that they would become a part of a reality show where excitement and drama follow in quick succession, all problems have easy solutions, and political truth is whatever the viewers want it to be. The duty of intellectuals in such a cultural milieu, to borrow Havel’s expression, is to live in truth, to uphold the ideal of searching for the truth in public, expose the lies of the powers that be, and act on their knowledge.

Marx famously compared Napoleon Bonaparte with Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon III) to observe that when history repeats itself it does so first as tragedy and then as farce. Political scientist Shlomo Avineri suggested that history repeats itself for the third time as theater of the absurd, referring to Paris in 1968. Now, the fourth rerun of history seems to be as a “reality show.” Indeed, President Macron, too clever by half for his guests, escorted the Trumps to the grave of Napoleon in Les Invalides.

Tragedies end when the choices of the heroes leave them dead on Saint Helena. Farces ends when the clown starts taking his lines literally and seriously, stops being funny, and ends up in exile after losing Sedan while humorless Prussians borrow Versailles to declare a united Imperial Germany, the prerequisite for the First World War and the self-destruction of Europe. An absurd play ends because the audience grows tired of waiting for somebody or something to arrive, the workers go back to work, the students to study, and de Gaulle wins by a landslide. A reality show ends when sub-professional actors lose control of the script, reality invades, the actors improvise without talent or skill, and the show needs to be cancelled.  La commedia è finita!

1See Peter Railton, “Moral realism,” The Philosophical Review (April 1986), pp. 163-207.

2Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, (Penguin Books, 2012).

3For an overview see Nikil Saval, “Globalisation: the rise and fall of an idea that swept the world,” The Guardian, July 14, 2017. Saval notes that globalization had extensive benefits mainly for six Asian countries, but fails to name them, so that the reader misses that they comprise the majority of humanity. For a more academic and nuanced approaches see Dani Rodrick’s work, especially “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” NBER Working Paper No. 23559, June 2017.  See also Harold James, The Creation and Destruction of Value: The Globalization Cycle (Harvard University Press, 2009). Even the worldview of Steven Bannon, such as it is, seems to have been inspired by a cyclical philosophy of history, namely William Strauss & Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy—What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny (Broadway Books, 1997).

4Richard Baldwin, The Great Convergence: Information Technology and the New Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2016).

5See Małgorzata Fidelis, “Right-Wing Populism and the New Morality: A Historical Reflection,” Aspen Review Central Europe (2017), pp. 60-67.

6Aviezer Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 220-39 and Yemima Ben-Menahem, “Historical contingency,” Ratio (1997), pp. 99-107. Another debate has been about whether human and natural history is contingent or necessary. Stephen Jay Gould was a noted exponent of contingency while Richard Dawkins tended to advocate necessity. Some recent contributions to these debates include Rob Inkpen & Derek Turner, “The topography of historical contingency,” Journal of the Philosophy of History (2012), pp. 1-19; Kim Sterelny, “Contingency and History,” Philosophy of Science (October 2016), pp. 521-39.  I argued that if history had a single contingent episode, technically all that followed must be contingent. Yet, historical episodes may be considered contingent or necessary in relation to causes. Historians need then to assume a historical counterfactual, “erasing” a cause and examining how different would have been the effects. If very different, the effects were contingent on the cause, if similar, there is a strong reason to claim they were necessary. Historical evidence may or may not suffice to support such counterfactuals. For example, rules of succession allow us to examine with confidence the contingency or necessity of some processes. We know for sure that had President Eisenhower died in office, Richard Nixon would have become President in the 1950s. Given everything that we know of Nixon, we can surmise how much were the policies of the Eisenhower Administration contingent on him and to what extent they were necessary irrespective of who happened to be President, over-determined by larger economic, social, and geo-political forces. On the usefulness of historical counterfactuals see the recent special issue of The Journal of Philosophy of History, Volume 10 No. 3 (2016) with contributions by myself, Alexander Maar, Yemima Ben-Menahem, Gavriel Rosenfeld, Daniel Woolf, Cass Sunstein, Daniel Nolan, and Richard Evans.

7Konrad Niklewicz, “Taming the Beast,” Aspen Review Central Europe (2017), pp. 16-21.

The post The New-Old Fatalism appeared first on The American Interest.

Parsing the Liberal International Order

“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire,” famously wrote Voltaire (born François-Marie Arouet) in his 1756 book, Essai sur l’histoire générale et sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations. And he was of course correct. The Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was utterly temporal, not holy just because the Pope blessed the emperor upon his coronation. It was not Roman but German. And it was not an empire in the ordinary sense of the term, since the emperor’s powers were quite limited amid a crazy quilt of duchies, principalities, “free” states, and heaven-knows-what else; and in the whole very long history of this particular political contraption, which lasted from the time of Charlemagne, crowned in December of the year 800 (or, some persuasively say, Otto I, crowned in 924), until 1806, it never conquered anything. Some empire.

Why dredge up the Holy Roman Empire? Because many fear that we are fast approaching our own “1806,” except that the extravagantly named, soon perhaps to be deceased three-word symbol now to hand, we call the Liberal International Order.

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare. The answer turns out to be rather a lot. The “Holy Roman Empire” linked the leaders and the peoples of the HRE to the legal, religious, and aesthetic legacy, however distorted and idealized, of the (Christianized) Roman Empire. It provided a symbol of continuity even when reality disappointed hope. Similarly, the name “Liberal International Order” resonates with American values and enables many to persuade themselves that the United States has been a benign power, famously called an “empire by invitation.” Names such as these function as ideological nests, psychologically cozy and generative of new energies.

In any event, there is no mystery about the proximate source of concern: An American President who has scorned U.S. allies, refused to sincerely endorse Article V of the NATO Treaty, and more broadly but more importantly clearly cannot wrap his mind around the concept of a non-zero-sum game. Almost entirely lacking normal impulse control, the man cannot help but exude evidence of his primitive and dark Randian, social Darwinist soul, and that kind of attitude in the President of the United States is, crudely put, going to leave a mark. Indeed, in less than a year it has already left an ugly mark, and no amount of post hoc re-do speechwriter spin is going to change any sensible person’s mind.

As before, however, the name is not for nothing—but in a way few seem to appreciate. The Liberal International Order does not name a circumscribed political contraption as such, like the HRE, but rather a more abstract set of attitudes and correspondingly expansive institutional arrangements and habits. It embodied a striving deemed necessary in the wake of the carnage of the first half of the 20th century, and as a wish can be father to the thought, so the congealing definition of that striving helped to coordinate conceptions, and then efforts, that did indeed bring about a better situation. At one point not so long ago we came close to a Europe whole, free, and at peace nestled in a still larger community of democratic nations. Had we, in the West, been able to decisively seal that deal, it would have been an epochal achievement.

But the term Liberal International Order (LIO) itself does not date from near the inception of what it supposedly names. The phrase “liberal international order”— at first not capitalized but more recently inclined to be capitalized—came into mainstream use only during the past 20 to 25 years or so. Yet it names an arrangement presumably dedicated to freer international trade, democratic government, and collective security—under the leadership of the United States but embodied in an array of international institutions—whose origin dates to Bretton Woods (1944), the United Nations (1945), and the creation of NATO (1949).

This is not a one-off; indeed, examples of post hoc naming abound. The term “American exceptionalism” isn’t nearly as old as most presume: It came into existence only in the mid-1950s and took on its eventual, current meaning even some time after that.1 For that matter, the term Holy Roman Empire did not come into common use (Heiliges Römisches Reich, in German) until the middle of the 13th century, at least three centuries after the fact.

What does this mean? Probably that the cognoscenti of any given epoch only strain to name an abstract thing when it needs protecting, justifying, reforming—or all three. If so, a natural affliction to exaggerate the virtues of what is being named, and to round off any pesky dissonant edges from it, will be present. The process of naming, the communications transactions that produce acceptance of the name, and the name itself all have the function of concentrating collective attention. Taken together it amounts to a circling of the wagons.  This is what I meant, above, by the phrase “but in a way few seem to appreciate.”

So why did a collection of concepts and institutional habits we now call the Liberal International Order need a name, that name, except for the fact that as those concepts and habits weakened, some wanted to objectify the “thing” in order to preserve it? From whence the weakening? Several sources are obvious in retrospect.

The American-led postwar order had as its organizing principle opposition to the spread of Soviet Communism. When the USSR went out of business at the end of 1991, that organizing principle disappeared with it. So had, earlier and more gradually, the bipolar nature of the early postwar period: Europe and Japan recovered from the war and discovered their own interests separate sometimes from America’s; China, India, and other countries grew wealthier and more influential, too.

Just as important, the power delta and reputation of the United States as leader suffered multisided attrition. The United States lost its nuclear weapons monopoly early on in the post-World War II period and then in time its overweening advantage in strategic weaponry; it suffered from the disaster that was Vietnam, and then from Watergate; and it suffered also from a series of economic swoons dating to the early 1970s that, more tightly connected to an emerging global economy as time went on, cast doubt on the pocket-book reliability of American leadership.

The sum of it all is that American leadership over time became less trusted, more expensive to manage, less self-assured in Washington, and more openly contested in a variety of ways from both outside and from within the “order.” The less the actual liberal international order resembled the conditions of its early zenith, the greater became the need to name it.

It also dawned eventually on most serious people that the institutional expressions of the postwar world—the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the GATT and then the WTO, and NATO as well, to name the main ones—did not really possess a life of their own, but were shadow-like projections of the power and reputations of the states that espoused their purposes and supported their undertakings.  If those states ran into trouble, so would the multilateral jerry-riggings they had thrown together. To have expected otherwise would have been to believe that the position of a shadow can be affected by things done to the shadow.

It is worth noting too, at least in passing, that some who in due course wished to contest the ILO, even as others sere trying to preserve it, felt obligated to rename it as the International Liberal Economic Order, also known as the Washington Consensus. This pigeonholed the meaning of “liberal” from a suitably ambiguous but nice-sounding general idea about freedom into a materialist critique of globalized capitalism (of which more anon).

And why not? This attempted renaming occurred only after the USSR ceased to exist, and many out in the broad world far from American shores feared what an unbalanced American unipolarity might mean for them. Those fears were not entirely empty, not I think because of any aggressive U.S. malice aforethought, but because of what turned out to be one or two large, generic misjudgments. The critical decisions of the Clinton Administration’s economic managers in the mid- to late-1990s to treat capital the same as goods, services, and labor caused an enormous amount of serial disruption around the world—social and political following economic—and led willy-nilly to the perception, if not also the reality in all cases, that what Edward Luttwak early on named “turbo-capitalism” was causing sharply rising inequality within national economies.

Now, some have claimed in recent years that the only problem with the Liberal International Order is that Vladimir Putin’s Russia has been trying, with all too much success, to undermine it. Putin certainly has been trying to undermine something, but to conflate the lately named Liberal International Order with the roughly simultaneous geopolitical settlement of the Cold War is a category error.

The Soviet Union was of course never part of the LIO, except insofar as it served as its foil. It and its immediate post-Soviet Russian successor signed on to the post-Cold War settlement at a time of yawning weakness, and hopefulness in the benign future conduct of the victors. Looking at the confluence of traditional Russian attitudes about Russia’s world role and the perceived slights and injuries done to Russia by the West in the early post-Soviet period, it is no great surprise that a Russian government would come to contest the post-Cold War settlement when it believed itself able to do so.

Does that subsume also Russian opposition to the LIO as it has existed since 1991? I think not. The Putin regime no doubt finds the marquee democratic values structure of the ILO to be something of a threat, but many of its attendant institutions that have evolved over the years are confluent with Russian interests—for example, the UN Security Council, given Russia’s position within it; and certain WTO rules, to the extent they are enforced, that constrain Russia’s economic competitors.

Far be it from me to put myself in the same class of inspired wits as Voltaire, but there is a sense in which the Liberal International Order, for all its virtues, has never been liberal, fully international, or an order. That we eventually found it necessary to claim as much, even for a worthy purpose, does not change that. Let’s take a closer look at these three words matched against reality.

The word “liberal” has to rank as one of the most fungible, shape-shifting, locutions around. It began life as a 19th-century term for anti-mercantilist politics. The rising British bourgeoisie had wished to be free of the state’s long restrictive arm, first with respect to religion and later also with respect to commerce; so yes, the older word “liberty” and the newer one “liberal” do share a common etymology.

Europeans still use the locution “neo-liberal” to refer to arguments for less government intrusion into markets, a perspective usually identified with right-of-center politics today. This confuses a lot of Americans, who have long since understood “liberal” to mean pretty much the opposite: a larger state role in the economy in the interest, variously in the minds of its supporters, of fairness, equality of opportunity, egalitarianism, a larger social idea, or an array of specially plead meliorist projects. Americans are rarely troubled by etymological incoherence, so they manage to live with the use of “liberal” as an adjective meaning simultaneously “anti-authoritarian” when it comes to politics in general and “more statist” when it comes to politics in the United States.

So when we plunk the word “liberal” into a phrase followed by “international order” we get a cornucopia of likely confusion. Some will think it means an order defined by free trade, and others will think it means an order defined by political democracy joined to Whiggish good works such as fighting poverty or advancing “human rights,” however defined. Since the post-World War II arrangement was decidedly American in emphasis, Americans have tended to think the latter as the phrase “liberal international order” came into common currency, and that is what worried Americans emphasize today: the threat to a system of collective security ultimately founded on shared democratic political values. The stuff about the money is secondary, but that’s partly because we have a lot it and a lot of others don’t.

It also bears passing mention that during the heyday of the liberal international order, before it was named and before it was routinely capitalized, the collective security arrangements brokered by successive U.S. administrations included states that were in no way liberal—Franco’s Spain and Salazar’s Portugal, for example, not to speak of a host of other “friendly tyrants” scattered hither and yon around the planet. More glaring, perhaps, in its first fifteen years, at least, that order included by association the colonial appendages of the fast-faltering European empires. What was liberal about that, either in terms of economics or politics? No wonder, then, that the citizens of these new polities tend to think about the phase “liberal international order” from a somewhat jaundiced perspective, and no wonder that the broad-brushed phrase “free world” never sounded exactly accurate even to many Westerners.

International? That sounds very encompassing, especially since its (questionable) graduation to employment as a synonym for global. But the ILO never included the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries, or China, or India before it abandoned its London School of Economics inheritance, and one could go on. It included before the age of decolonization only the United States and Canada, the countries of Western Europe, post-occupation Japan and some then much smaller East Asian economies (South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines), the scatterings of the Anglosphere in Australia and New Zealand, and more or less by default, and as an afterthought most of the time, the rest of the Western Hemisphere (except Cuba after 1959). This was, then, a roughly Atlantic-centered grouping that contained way less than half the world’s population, but that, because it was so wealthy, simply tucked the rest of the world away in a miscellaneous folder.

Order? If by order one means a Kissingerian, grand-strategic arrangement that prevents hegemonic war, then yes: The post-World War II ILO has done that, if barely. And even if barely, that is no small thing.

But if by order we mean a less demanding condition of general peace and progress, then, once again, it sort of depends on who you are and where you live. As for peace, plenty of orders—Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, and so on—populate the history books, and most of them have entailed almost constant warfighting by the hegemon on the periphery of empire. This was a “good enough” setup, or not, depending on which side of the battle-lines you and yours stood.

As for progress, it is well known that since the end of the Cold War many millions have been lifted from abject poverty, not by foreign aid, but by freer trade and the settling in of a sober macroeconomic orthodoxy in places where it had never before existed. But absolute gains in living standards do not satisfy everyone; relative position matters too, for deeply engrained psychological reasons. Affluence does not subsume dignity, after all. Can a person be “better off” by someone else’s reckoning if he doesn’t feel that way himself? Can an affluent Westerner who has a positive take on the Liberal International Order pronounce a recent poverty escapee in Tanzania “better off” on account of that order? It depends, but not just on cold numbers. As R.H. Tawney once put it, “No increase in material wealth will compensate…for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom.”2

Whatever we call it, the headlong erosion of the collective security and commercial arrangements the world inherited from the Cold War era would be a big deal, were it now to accelerate in earnest. That erosion did not start with the onset of the Trump Administration, but it does seem to have been accelerated by it. Are things by now tumbling out of control, so that there is no way for men and women of sober temperament to preserve what is benign about that inheritance?

A good question; I know not the answer. But we can know this: We live at a time when for a variety of reasons the state-centric character of the modern Westphalian system is under great stress, and it happens to be a time, too, when technological change has enabled violent revisionist, and sometimes apocalyptically minded, non-state actors to cause great disruption and destruction.

The combination could portend great trouble ahead, such that even rescuing the cooperative habits of mind, and the institutions that have arisen from them, that have stood us in fairly good stead for the past seventy years might not be enough to guarantee any kind of decent order at all. But without those habits and institutions at least as a basis for a habitable future, it seems to me that we are at significantly greater disadvantage. All the same, let us not through the warped psychology of retrospective naming distort the past. Nostalgia, in any form, is an indulgence. And as any clergyman worth his salt will tell you, indulgences come with a price tag.

1See Walter A. McDougall, “The Unlikely History of American Exceptionalism,” The American Interest (March/April 2013.)

2Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Penguin, 1969), p. 28.

The post Parsing the Liberal International Order appeared first on The American Interest.