Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 77

Right Book, Wrong Title

With his Clash of Civilizations thesis, Samuel Huntington intended to offer policymakers a “simplified map of reality,” an intellectual framework into which they could fit all the data that would otherwise accumulate on their desks in unsorted heaps. After 25 years, it is fair to say that Huntington failed at this. Despite its numerous impressive predictions, his thesis offers little concrete guidance beyond classic realist policy prescriptions. And his hopes for reinvigorating Western culture and a common Western civilizational consciousness have only grown more visibly quixotic, as the fault lines within Western culture have become ever harder to ignore.

Yet if Huntington’s “Clash” failed to deliver what he promised, it succeeded at something much more important. Huntington outlined an approach to studying contemporary international politics in light of the permanent motive forces of human social nature. He offered a compelling diagnosis of some of the most powerful trends that continue to shape modern geopolitics, although that diagnosis cannot be accurately condensed into any slogan or “simplified map of reality.” We could all forget the phrase “clash of civilizations” with no harm done to anyone. But to forget Huntington’s profound insights into the nature of our world would be disastrous. Indeed, if these insights do not make their way into American foreign-policy discourse, we will be very poorly equipped to handle what Huntington rightly identified as the gradual “fading of the West and the rise of other power centers.”

Nearly anyone would benefit from rereading Huntington’s attack on the instinctive American narcissism that impedes clear thinking about geopolitics on Right and Left alike. “The central thesis” of his book, said Huntington, is that “Western belief in the universality of Western culture . . . is false.” It is simply not true that everyone, deep down, wants to be just like us. In the 20th century it may have seemed that Western ideas had somehow conquered the world, but what had in fact happened was that a few Western countries had largely conquered the world. And they did this “not by the superiority of [their] ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by [their] superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” The delusions of Western universalism are moreover becoming increasingly expensive to maintain. For as Huntington points out, the world’s military and economic capacities are becoming more and more widely distributed among non-Westerners, especially since the end of the Cold War.

Given Huntington’s later status as a bugaboo of the post-9/11 Left, it is ironic that his real thesis offered significant common ground with the Left in its attacks on Western self-importance (he even cites Edward Said’s Orientalism with approval). Non-Westerners, says Huntington, make a good point when they assert that all high-minded talk of the “world community” masks the Western pursuit of Western interests through Western-dominated international institutions. For example, he points out that George H.W. Bush’s proud coalition against Saddam Hussein in support of international law and the “new world order” was in fact comprised of Western countries plus an Islamic coalition of the coerced and the bribed. Even those Muslim governments who did move against Saddam were all acting autocratically, against fierce domestic opposition to what their populations saw as an act of Western imperialism.

Huntington points out that most human beings on this planet are not terribly moved by “Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, [and] the separation of church and state,” in the senses in which the average Westerner understands these terms. The “Westphalian separation of religion and international politics,” too, is “an idiosyncratic product of Western civilization” that the rest of the world never really accepted. “Western efforts to propagate” all these allegedly universal social-political values “produce instead a reaction against ‘human rights imperialism’ and a reaffirmation of indigenous values.” Put succinctly: “The non-Wests see as Western what the West sees as universal.”

It is true that these Western values are widely shared within what Huntington memorably calls Davos Culture, which besides many Westerners also encompasses millions of non-Westerners—amounting to probably “less than . . . 1 percent” of the latter. But the fact that non-Western “Davos people” wield (for the time being) enormous influence over their countries’ political and economic systems is no reason to confuse them for genuine representatives of the populations they dominate.

Huntington proposes that we stop making foreign policy on the assumption that the whole world will increasingly conform to the model of our contemporary Western societies—or rather, the more common and worse assumption that it will conform to the model of contemporary Western societies as these are described by their own politicians’ self-congratulatory rhetoric. Instead, Huntington bases his own analysis of contemporary politics on a description of how the forces of modernity interact with perennial characteristics of human nature that modernity is powerless to change.

The facts about human nature that Huntington finds most relevant to contemporary geopolitics are the following. He takes for granted that human beings are motivated in large part by their material interests, including security, wealth, territory, and rule over others. But people “cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define their self. Interest politics presupposes identity.” In order to act collectively, a society of human beings must know the answer to the question, “Who are we?”—and “we know who we are only when we know who we are not.”

Our society’s collective and exclusive identity, Huntington shows, must give us a reason to be “committed” to its survival: It must tell us why our common “way of life” is better than those of other societies, and hence worth defending against them. Our collective identity must even “justify” and “legitimate” the wartime killing of others who seem to threaten the common way of life: It is therefore helpful, although not strictly necessary, for the common identity to contain some religious element that allows its people to think of their enemies as “‘godless’ forces.” Our collective identity must unify us “linguistically and morally” if we are to survive as a multigenerational society of humans who feel “at home” together. It must give us “certain primary structuring ideas around which successive generations have coalesced.” And our common identity must give us some basis for automatically according each other the “trust” that common life, especially economic life, continuously presupposes. We find it much easier to place such trust in people whose “language,” “assumptions,” and “social practices” are familiar to us, because it is always hard to trust people whom we do not understand.

This collective identity, necessary to the survival of any society, is what Huntington calls “culture.” A culture is “the overall way of life of a people” and includes our common mores, social-political institutions, and “modes of thinking.” A culture is transgenerational, and it governs matters of “primary importance” for the individuals who constitute it, including “relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife.” Besides “religion. . . .values, customs, and institutions,” cultural identity also includes “ancestry,” “language,” and “history,” because these too are an important part of what “means most to us” as human beings. “Faith and family, blood and belief, are what people identify with and what they will fight and die for.”

Culture is therefore an independent factor motivating human political behavior, one that cannot be reduced to ordinary material interests. “Values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests.” People will even risk their material interests to fight over mere symbols of their cultural identity, including flags, forms of dress, and particular territory that they regard as “sacred land.”

Some individuals find a substitute for traditional cultural identity in a merely ideological affiliation (“communist”) or a transnational class affiliation (Huntington compares Davos Culture to the old European aristocracy!). But when ideologies become discredited or aristocratic classes fall—and this has been quite the century for discredited ideologies and fallen aristocracies—people tend to revert to the “old standbys of ethnicity and religion.” In any case, it is educated elites who are more likely to be attracted by ideological, class, or other cosmopolitan quasi-cultural affiliations. To the extent that the common people have a say in the matter, “ethnic, nationalist, and religious” appeals tend to carry the day, now and always.

All this has been roughly true for as long as human beings have walked the earth. “‘Who are we?’” has always been “the most basic question humans can face,” and “peoples and nations [today] . . . are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them.” But culture takes on a new form of relevance to contemporary politics because of its interaction with the “processes of social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the twentieth century.”

Modernization of course “involves industrialization, urbanization, increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization, and more complex and diversified occupational structures.” It is “a revolutionary process” without parallel since the beginning of civilization itself, and involves tremendous upheavals in “attitudes, values, knowledge, and culture.” In a modernizing country, “longstanding sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted. People move from the countryside into the city, become separated from their roots, and take new jobs or no job. They interact with large numbers of strangers and are exposed to new sets of relationships. . . . These developments undermine traditional village and clan ties and create alienation and an identity crisis.” Meanwhile, the “secularism, moral relativism,” “egotism, and consumerism” fostered by this social atomization appear to threaten traditional “values of order, discipline, work, mutual help, and human solidarity.”

Modernization with its “psychological, emotional, and social traumas” thus “generates feelings of alienation and anomie as traditional bonds and social relations are broken.” “In a world that has lost its meaning and become amorphous, . . . newly felt human needs” appear. These needs include above all “a way of coping with the experience of chaos, the loss of identity, meaning and secure social structures.” “People caught in the traumas of modernization” “need new sources of identity, new forms of stable community, and new sets of moral precepts to provide them with a sense of meaning and purpose.” They are “looking for roots and connections to defend themselves against the unknown.” In short, modernity erodes and undermines many traditional cultures but cannot eliminate the deep human need for a common cultural identity. When “established identities dissolve, the self must be redefined, and new identities created.”

Modernization, then, produces not a decrease in the relevance of culture to political life, but a set of pressures that channel individuals into new cultural identifications and affiliations. For one thing, by vastly increasing people’s contact with cultures alien to their own, modernity imbues them with a “deeper consciousness of [cultural] differences and of the need to protect what distinguishes ‘us’ from ‘them.’” This makes them suddenly aware of their cultural commonalities with groups they had previously considered more alien. Huntington’s observation looks only more prescient today: “North African immigration to France generates hostility among the French and at the same time increased receptivity to European Catholic Poles.” Or as he memorably quotes Donald Horowitz, “An Ibo may be . . . an Owerri Ibo or an Onitsha Ibo in . . . the Eastern region of Nigeria. In Lagos, he is simply an Ibo. In London, he is Nigerian. In New York, he is an African.” The dislocations of modernity cause a broadening in cultural identifications—up to and including identification with one’s civilization, which Huntington claims is the “broadest level of cultural identity.”

In addition, the pressures of modernity have caused what Gilles Kepel called la revanche de Dieu, that is, the reawakening of religion as a major social and political force in the world even as secularization theory was announcing its impending irrelevance. “For people facing the need to determine Who am I? Where do I belong? religion provides compelling answers, and religious groups provide small social communities to replace those lost through urbanization.” Where “old village ways” and weak “state bureaucracies” can meet neither the psychological nor the socioeconomic needs of those traumatized by modernization, religious beliefs and religious organizations step in to meet those needs (the Muslim Brotherhood is one famous example). And where ancestral religions (Korean Buddhism, Latin American Catholicism) fail to “meet the emotional and social needs of the uprooted,” new religions begin to take their place (Korean Christianity, Latin American Protestantism).

This is the basic analysis of the nature of modern social life on which Huntington rests his Clash thesis. I regard this analysis as essentially true, extremely important, and woefully neglected by the American political establishment, whose recent rediscovery of what it calls “tribalism” cannot be compared to Huntington’s political psychology in its depth and sophistication.

Huntington combines his analysis with a handful of related observations about the post-Cold War world in order to arrive finally at his Clash thesis. Modernization, he points out, has also caused a recent spike in “economic, military, and political power” among non-Western societies, which then naturally increases their “self-confidence, arrogance, and belief in the superiority of [their] own culture.” Autocrats and imperialists (both Western and Soviet) had managed to run states along lines that paid less attention to their people’s culture, but mid-century decolonizations followed by late-century democratizations shifted power to the global masses and hence increased the political importance of cultural differences. And to all this he adds a handful of other facts, such as the “second-generation indigenization phenomenon,” in which the earlier generation of Western-educated decolonizers and modernizers often come to be seen by their descendants as sellouts, provoking a backlash that reinvigorates the traditional culture jettisoned by those earlier “Kemalists” (a process that has continued apace in Turkey and elsewhere these past 25 years).

Huntington thus clearly shows that cultural similarities and differences remain a major factor in determining political friendships and enmities, both across state borders and within them. He also shows that modern conditions favor certain cultural identities over others, including the broader-based over the merely local, and the religious over the merely traditional.

But how does all this establish the “Clash of Civilizations” as a helpful geopolitical paradigm for contemporary policymakers?

Huntington’s analysis allowed him to predict ongoing, widespread, and serious clashes of culture: violent inter- and intrastate conflicts along fault lines of cultural identity. This prediction is by now incontestable, although for that reason also rather less exciting than his famous title. The reason he chose to focus particularly on the broadest, “civilizational” level of culture was that he wanted to examine the phenomena that pose “the greatest dangers to stability” and “the greatest threat to world peace.” And conflicts between “states or groups from different civilizations,” he asserted, are the ones “most likely to escalate into broader wars” and even into “global wars.” This was because “other states and groups from these civilizations” risk getting pulled into such intercivilizational conflicts when they “rally to the support of their ‘kin countries.’”

To prevent these escalations, Huntington proposes something like traditional balance-of-power politics with a civilizational twist. The “core states” of each civilization (the United States for the West, Russia for Orthodoxy, and so on) should acknowledge each other’s responsibility for policing disputes within their respective civilizations. And whenever their respective kindred decide to start fighting each other, the core states should negotiate an end to the conflict and restrain their kin so as not to be drawn into a devastating world war. Hence the conclusion to his book: “The world will be ordered on the basis of civilizations or not at all. . . . An international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.”

The Huntingtonian alternative to global chaos is thus that “core states” should recognize and accept their responsibility as civilizational mini-hegemons. Unfortunately this advice will be of little value in “civilizations” that by Huntington’s own account lack a core state (Islamic, Latin American, Buddhist, African), or whose civilizational borders extend barely if at all beyond their core state (Hindu, Japanese). That already eliminates some 60 percent of the world’s current population from the hoped-for “international order based on civilizations.”

Huntington himself admitted that his new world order of core states was “most clearly visible” with respect to China, Russia, and the United States, in conjunction with that minority of the world that shares some civilizational kinship with them (Sinic, Orthodox, Western). Yet at this point the whole civilizational paradigm dwindles to insignificance. Huntington deserves credit for predicting in 1996 the future breakup of Ukraine. But one need not have read a word of him to see that, should hostilities there escalate tomorrow, NATO would be well advised to negotiate directly with Russia in order to prevent things spiraling out of control. One similarly does not have to call North Korea “Sinic” to see that China will be a linchpin of any eventual solution to the ongoing problems there.

Nor, for that matter, does one have to accept any civilizational paradigm in order to agree with Huntington’s admonition that we would be risking world war by intervening in some future China-Vietnam dispute in the South China Sea. In fact, although his thesis admonishes that China must be permitted to work out its own intra-civilizational disputes with its kin “Sinic” state, he could have made virtually the same point about a non-Sinic “Buddhist” state like Laos, Myanmar, or Cambodia. Huntington even documents how East Asian countries have been seeking to unite around areas of cultural commonality that they share in opposition to Western culture—this despite the fact that these countries overlap six different “civilizations” according to Huntington’s schema. We can expect such East Asian bandwagoning to continue into the future, given the rise of China in all its anti-Western cultural assertiveness (which Huntington naturally predicted). Since the “civilization” thus turns out not to be the highest level of cultural commonality as Huntington asserted it was, the Clash paradigm looks even weaker. Within the world of core states, at least, the Clash paradigm offers no obvious improvement on the traditional statecraft of great-power competition.

Even without a core state, Islamic civilization could become involved in a Huntingtonian “clash” if Muslim peoples were indeed developing a strong enough sense of common civilizational kinship to affect geopolitics, as Huntington claimed they were. He was struck that Islamic governments from Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to Pakistan and Malaysia had all set aside their differences to help support the Bosnian Muslims, and he predicted that Muslims throughout the world would be increasingly motivated by what they saw themselves as having in common over against non-Muslims. Yet he also shows extensive parallels between Europe’s Protestant Reformation and the massive late-20th-century sociopolitical movement that he rightly calls the Islamic Resurgence. That historical parallel alone should be enough to cast suspicion on any prediction of newly harmonious civilizational kinship among Muslims. And the subsequent 25 years have confirmed this suspicion. The Muslim world shows no evidence of coalescing around some stronger civilizational identity, even as it abundantly vindicates Huntington’s more general prediction of continued identity-based conflicts (in this case sectarian and/or ethnic).

There is then little reason to narrow our attention from clashes over cultural identity to the small subset that we could call clashes of civilizations. Huntington argued in 1996 that “the bloody clash of tribes in Rwanda has consequences for Uganda, Zaire, and Burundi but not much further,” whereas “the bloody clashes of civilizations in Bosnia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Kashmir could become bigger wars.” Yet in the end, it was the Rwandan conflict that spiraled into humanity’s deadliest war since World War II. None of the other conflicts Huntington named there has escalated significantly. The Iraq War went poorly for many reasons, but civilizational “kin-country rallying” by other Muslim states was not one of them. The horror of Syria’s intra-Islamic civil war has so far done more to threaten the stability of neighboring Europe than has Western/Orthodox inter-civilizational fighting in Ukraine.

Classical great-power conflict, and “clashes” between sub-civilizational cultural identities, both matter more to contemporary world politics than any supposed clash of civilizations. That will not fit on any bumper sticker. But Huntington’s own arguments for the “Clash” give us no reason to have expected any different outcome.

The civilizational identity that matters most to Huntington is clearly that of Western civilization. For most of its history, the West’s “innards” were at least as “bloody” as those that Huntington infamously attributed to contemporary Islam. But after the exhaustion of two world wars, Westerners largely decided to stop killing one another wholesale for the foreseeable future. Perhaps, then, Huntington’s resounding calls for a renewal of Western civilization, with its concomitant strengthening of peaceful Transatlantic ties, could seem to be one practical conclusion from the Clash thesis that will stand even if the others may fall.

Yet here we encounter what seems to me the biggest blind spot of Huntington’s thesis, and the weakest point in his otherwise acute analysis of modernity. Although Huntington briefly mentions the Enlightenment as one of the formative historical experiences of the West, his discussions of the unique character of Western civilization never mention the Enlightenment principles—social, political, moral, and religious—that have now become deeply embedded in our Western DNA. “The West was the West long before it was modern,” he insists, arguing that our civilization remains distinguished by the unique combination of characteristics that already distinguished it in the Middle Ages (representative institutions, rule of written law, the Classical heritage, Western Christianity, and so on). He asserts that these are the true characteristics of Western or, as he would have preferred to call it, “European” civilization. He also admits in passing that significant chunks of Europe have at times been Muslim or Orthodox, so that the most descriptive term would really have been “Western Christendom.” For some reason he chooses not to repeat this fact during his clarion calls for a revival of “Western civilization.”

There is an obvious reason why not even Huntington could call outright for a revival of Western Christendom. It is that nobody in the modern West actually wants a revival of Western Christendom. The Enlightenment, with its roots firmly planted in early-modern political and religious thought, taught us to reject the role that ethnicity and religion played in the politics and culture of the premodern West—a role that ethnicity and religion still play in the culture, and to varying degrees the politics, of most non-Western countries to this day. No American politician, and few European ones, will call outright for the preservation of Christian and Euro-ethnic culture over against non-Christian and nonwhite culture. It is an article of faith for modern Western culture that we have put serious cultural clashes behind us, and we are prepared to clash with any culture that denies that faith.

This helps explain why the term “Huntingtonian” carries such opprobrium among the American political class. People assume that a defender of “Western civilization” must be an Anglo-Christian jingoist. Huntington was of course the opposite of a jingoist, at least in intention. His explicit conclusion was that “the security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.” He was adamant that the “Western belief in the universality of Western culture” is “false,” “immoral,” and “dangerous,” since the “Western arrogance” that follows from that belief “could lead to a major intercivilizational war.” Our ideas of “individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom” are what “make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique.”

This civilizational pluralism would sound lovely if it were not so utterly implausible. If Huntington honestly did not believe that individual liberty, the rule of law, and self-government are objective goods that are desirable for human beings as such, then he was the only Westerner I have ever encountered who held that view. The term “human rights” itself gives the game away: Who believes that human rights are not “universal”? In its premodern Christian form, the West thought it was morally superior to all non-Christian cultures; in its post-Enlightenment modification, the West thinks it is morally superior to all pre-Enlightenment cultures, including premodern Western culture. Huntington may well have been right that “Western universalism” threatens “world peace,” but his hope that the West could ever abandon that universalism is as futile as…well, the hope for world peace.

Of course, Huntington was correct to point out major commonalities between premodern and modern Western culture. On points where premodern Western traditions are most at odds with later Enlightenment principles, modern Western societies remain conflicted (each in its own way) between their inherited past and their hopes for a yet-unachieved Enlightened future—as elections within some of those societies have been reminding us recently. This means that the clash within Western culture cannot be reduced, as Huntington wanted to reduce it, to a clash between a valuable patrimony and a “small but influential number” of pointy-headed multiculturalists who wish to put it on the auction block. Westerners’ confusions and disagreements about our own heritage—about what it means to be Western—are essential, consequential, and ineradicable. They will continue to produce serious political conflict within the West, most obviously between Davos Culture and ethno-nationalist movements. They will foreclose any hope for the civilizational unity Huntington desired. And they will produce, for better and for worse, transcivilizational alliances that neither Huntington nor our conventional wisdom would have predicted (as we are starting to see, for example, between rightist European parties and Putin’s Russia).

At this point Huntington would surely object that every paradigm for viewing world politics “omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others.” The goal of his admittedly “highly simplified” Clash paradigm was merely to “account for more important phenomena than any of its rivals.” His professed model was the Cold War paradigm, which had described the whole world in terms of the “ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military competition” between the Free World and the Communists, and so provided “an essential starting point for thinking about international affairs” from 1947 to 1989. “The rivalry of the superpowers,” he asserts, has now been “replaced by the clash of civilizations.” Any quibbles with his Clash thesis must then face his simple rebuttal: Do you have an alternative paradigm that can do better?

I for one do not. Nor do I see why I should. Whatever may be said for and against the Kuhnian theory of “paradigm shifts” that Huntington appeals to here, that theory was never intended to describe a practitioner’s understanding of the art of politics. Great statesmen have little use for bumper-sticker slogans.

Huntington seems to think that the success of the “Cold War paradigm” proves that we now need a new paradigm to take its place. But was the Cold War paradigm such a success? George Kennan, often thought of as its originator, would later publicly lament how his ideas had been butchered by the “simplified map of reality” for which Huntington seems unaccountably nostalgic: Kennan thought that the popular Cold War paradigm had confused ideological with military competition and had distorted our relations with Third World countries by viewing them primarily as battlegrounds with the Soviets. Huntington himself mentions that the seemingly new “identity wars” of the 1990s had already been a major feature of non-Western politics since decolonization, but that this fact had “attracted little attention” at the time because those wars “were often viewed through the prism of the Cold War.” Why on earth should we want to imitate the “paradigm” that blinded American policymakers to, among many other things, the actual motivations of belligerents in conflicts from El Salvador to Afghanistan to Vietnam? Is this a record to be proud of?

In just one respect, Huntington seems to have fallen prey to the post-1989 triumphalism that he so eloquently criticized. He seems to have assumed that since one “paradigm” of foreign policy had apparently won us the Cold War, we must now find a new paradigm for our new circumstances. He of course could not know then how long we would be living with the consequences of the foreign-policy blunders into which that Cold War paradigm had led us.

Really, Huntington sells himself short by claiming to offer merely a replacement for the Cold War paradigm, as if his own work would become equally obsolete in 42 years or so. Huntington’s basic insights into the political importance of cultural identity have applied for centuries, including during the Cold War itself. Every American child knew that we were fighting the Cold War in defense of our cultural identity, against the “godless Communists.” The “ideology” of liberal democracy was just one of the essential elements of American culture, as social-political institutions are in any culture. Self-proclaimed Communist leaders, for their part, managed to “adapt” Marxist ideology to their own purposes, which included cultural nationalism (as Huntington mentions in passing). Moreover, culture always matters more to the common people than to elites: it will therefore be less relevant to the politics of despotisms and colonized peoples, and will acquire greater relevance as a society achieves self-government.

The Clash paradigm was obsolete before it was published. But the insights behind it will remain valid until we see some essential change in the nature of modernity or of human beings. Those insights cannot be summarized in any “highly simplified” paradigm. They will inevitably be misunderstood and distorted by our political process. Perhaps a statesman like Kennan should have anticipated this and attempted to simplify his own views into election-ready policy slogans. But our democracy also needs political scientists who leave that necessary rhetorical task to others. The formation of statesmanly prudence has very little to do with Kuhnian paradigms, and a great deal to do with reading good books—books that tell the unvarnished truth about the nature of politics and our contemporary world.

Huntington wrote books of this kind, and the Clash is emphatically one of them. It deserves to be read by statesmen and imitated by political scientists. But we can and should reject the Clash as a “paradigm” without offering some equally crude paradigm in its place. We honor Huntington’s work the better when we do.

George Kennan, American Diplomacy (University of Chicago, 2012), pp. 170–75.

The post Right Book, Wrong Title appeared first on The American Interest.

Reading the Tea Leaves in Canberra

The constant eruption of news out of Washington has forced some commentators into the awkward position of arguing that American policy can best be understood by ignoring what the President says, and instead focusing on what the Administration does. Whether or not that is true, a similar dynamic is now playing out in the capital of one of America’s closest allies.

On Friday, Malcolm Turnbull was replaced as Prime Minister of Australia by his Treasurer, Scott Morrison, after an extraordinary week of bitter infighting in the center-right Liberal Party. Amidst the government’s chaos and disunity, the odds have significantly increased that the Opposition Leader Bill Shorten will lead his center-left Labor Party to victory in an election by May of next year.

From Washington, last week’s events might just look like another round of blood-sport in a parliament beset by repeated political coups. After all, every Australian Prime Minister in the last decade has been removed from national leadership midway through their three-year term, by their own party: Julia Gillard knocked off Prime Minister Rudd in 2010, who then reclaimed the leadership in 2013, before losing the general election to conservative Tony Abbott, who governed for only two years before he was challenged and defeated by Malcolm Turnbull in 2015, who last week lost the confidence of his party and was replaced by Scott Morrison.

The recent political chaos, however, masks growing political cohesion on Australia’s China debate across the two major parties. For different reasons and with different political pressures, both the current government (a coalition led by the right-of-center Liberal Party) and the opposition (Labor) are converging on a similar set of national security decisions, even if the language they use to describe these decisions is vastly different. More importantly, the old contours of Australia’s national security debates are changing.

Knife-Fighting Down Under

In Australia’s parliamentary system, the Prime Minister “serves at the pleasure of the party,” as John Howard famously said. Much like the current and previous Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives—Paul Ryan and John Boehner—as Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull always faced rumblings of discontent from the right of his party. Now, the more right-leaning Morrison is ideologically positioned to unify the party on policy in the lead-up to the next election, but that will not be an easy task.

The foreign policy positions of new Prime Minister Morrison are relatively unknown. He held the Immigration, Social Services and Treasury portfolios in the Abbott and Turnbull governments, and said relatively little about Australia’s foreign and defence policy or regional security publicly, although the Treasurer is a member of the National Security Committee of the Cabinet, so Morrison would have had considerable exposure to national security decision-making. Morrison’s most notable actions on international policy have come as Treasurer, particularly blocking the sale of Sydney’s “poles and wires” in 2016 to a Chinese state-owned enterprise and a Hong Kong-based investor due to national security concerns. Most recently, in the midst of the leadership drama, Morrison and cabinet colleague Mitch Fifield issued a statement that effectively blocked Huawei from playing a role in Australia’s 5G network: “The Government considers that the involvement of vendors who are likely to be subject to extrajudicial directions from a foreign government that conflict with Australian law, may risk failure by the carrier to adequately protect a 5G network from unauthorised access or interference.”

It is unclear how, exactly, the foreign policy of Morrison’s government will take shape, but those on the right of the party—who ultimately ended Turnbull’s leadership—have championed many positions similar to U.S. Republicans on issues such as immigration and withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. That said, Morrison has selected Marise Payne and Christopher Pyne as his Foreign and Defense Ministers. Both are moderates who served as Defense Minister and Defense Industry Minister, respectively, in the Turnbull government. And, as a relative foreign policy novice who will be squarely focused on uniting the Liberal Party and making it competitive in the months before the next Australian election, Morrison may take a less hands-on approach to foreign policy and regional security than his predecessor.

The change in leadership has occurred at a most interesting moment, as the Australian national security debate is gradually taking on new shapes. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Foreign Policy White Paper of 2017 took note of rising regional risks to Australian interests and called for a more active foreign policy. The decision to revamp the Australian Navy and harder language on Chinese activities in the South China Sea were both about responding, albeit gradually, to changes in the region while trying not to upset Beijing too much. Moreover, President Trump’s disruptive style and deep unpopularity in Australia have prompted considerable discussion down under about America’s role in the Indo-Pacific and, critically, the U.S.-Australia alliance.

National Security with Australian Characteristics

But if things had been moving slowly in the background to reorient Canberra’s focus and priorities, it is Beijing’s influence efforts across Australia and the entire region that have altered the tone and tenure of the Australian national security debate.

For the past two years, Australian politicians, media, universities and the business community have engaged in an increasingly fierce debate about the nature, purpose, and pervasiveness of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence efforts in Australia. While intelligence agencies and political leaders have been aware of Chinese activities for years, public attention is a relatively recent development. Meanwhile, over the past twelve months there have been significant developments affecting the national security debate. A raft of new anti-interference legislation became law in June, with the intent of tightening the rules surrounding political donations, obliging individuals acting as foreign agents to register their activities, and clarifying the legal authorities required to combat foreign interference. Critically, the laws enjoyed bipartisan support from the opposition Labor Party.

In the business community, things have been uneven. Behind the scenes, senior government officials are talking to senior business executives and company boards, briefing them about existing threats, and asking them to confront uncomfortable questions about due diligence and risk assessment. Outside of Canberra, however, significantly louder voices remind Australian commercial interests that China is by far Australia’s largest export market, accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s exports.

Meanwhile, Chinese activities in the South Pacific and the potential for sweeping changes in Australia’s security environment have caused a sea change in Canberra across the political spectrum. In terms of strategic geography, the Pacific Island nations have long constituted Australia’s backyard—or, in the case of those that sit at Australia’s northern approaches such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu, its front door. Despite China’s increasingly provocative approach in areas such as the South China Sea, the general sentiment among the Australian people seemed to be that China’s actions were concerning, but far away and unlikely to directly affect Australian interests.

Vanuatu may have changed that. Media reports surfaced in early April of discussions between China and Vanuatu about establishing a military base for China’s People’s Liberation Army. As Rory Medcalf, a leading Australian strategic thinker, put it, the establishment of a Chinese military presence in Vanuatu would constitute “a negative turning point in Australian defence policy” that would offer China a foothold to “coerce Australia, outflank the US and its base on US territory at Guam, and collect intelligence in a regional security crisis.” Both the Chinese and the Vanuatu governments denied these allegations, but the reaction in Australia was both swift and bipartisan. Within 24 hours, Prime Minister Turnbull, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, and Labor’s Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong all issued strong statements opposing any such development. Turnbull said “we would view with great concern the establishment of any foreign military bases in those Pacific Island countries,” while Wong called it a “potential game changer for the region and for Australia,” which Australia “should regard. . . as a wake-up call. . . .in terms of our position in the South Pacific and the leadership role we are expected to play and we need to play in that region.” For Australian policymakers who were concerned, but not overly alarmed about China’s actions in the South China Sea, Vanuatu served as a dramatic realization of what this would look like closer to home. Recent developments in nearby Tonga and Papua New Guinea have further underscored regional concerns of spreading Chinese political intimidation, debt-trap diplomacy, and military build-ups.

An Emerging Consensus?

The degree of bipartisanship in Australian foreign policy in the last decade has been noteworthy, remaining broadly consistent when government has changed between the major parties. That pattern looks set to continue should Labor take the reins of government within the next year. Indeed, since Labor was seen to be weak on national security and the U.S. alliance in the 2004 election, which it lost, it has been at pains to “match” the Liberal Party on most if not all major national security decisions—a pattern that has continued with Labor in opposition through the Abbott, Turnbull and now Morrison governments. While bipartisanship has provided consistency, some, such as Andrew Carr from the Australian National University, have argued that it is in fact a weakness, because “a default approach of bipartisanship restricts policy creativity and accountability, reduces public engagement with critical issues” and prevents open debates on “what principles this country stands for, how we will act and what costs we will pay to protect other states and ourselves.” Whereas foreign policy differences receive considerable airtime in congressional and presidential debates, Australia’s state of play on national security is counter-intuitively at odds with the fierce disagreements across most aspects of politics in Canberra.

Over the past several years, both major parties have hardened their positions on China. The Liberal government has increased defence budgets since taking office in 2013, drafted and pushed through sweeping non-interference laws, undertaken a major bureaucratic restructuring, and has acted to curb foreign investment on certain decisions, pressure from Beijing notwithstanding. In his last major foreign policy speech as Prime Minister, and on the eve of the government’s decision on Huawei, Malcolm Turnbull neatly and cheekily quoted Xi Jinping in front of an audience that included the Chinese Ambassador and several Chinese diplomats, endorsing “the equality of all countries before international rules.” Turnbull made forthright comments on China at his keynote address at the 2017 Shangri-La dialogue, speaking out against “unilateral actions to seize or create territory or militarise disputed areas” and winning deals “through corruption, interference or coercion,” and warning that “some fear that China will seek to impose a latter day Monroe Doctrine on this hemisphere in order to dominate the region, marginalising the role and contribution of other nations, in particular the United States.” Similarly, then-Foreign Minister Julie Bishop called out China in March 2018 at Kings College London for “ignoring international law and rules for narrow advantage,” and imposing “unfair agreements on less powerful nations.” Last month, the government also found roughly $100 million USD to lay an undersea internet cable between the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Australia amid criticism from China that Australia is trying to contain its influence in the region.

Though some high-profile former Labor politicians, such as former Prime Minister Paul Keating and former Foreign Minister Bob Carr, have been critical of the Turnbull government’s approach to China and the alliance with America, for the most part the parliamentary Labor Party has not followed suit. Australia’s opposition and likely future government is moving towards a more realistic approach to China, albeit in a slower and less deliberate manner than the Liberal government, as they have not been in power since 2013. What specific policies a Labor-led government might pursue remains an open question as they have so far only been only been outlined or offered in opposition.

Typical of this was a recent speech at the United States Studies Centre on the U.S. alliance and the U.S. role in Australia’s region by Penny Wong, Labor’s foreign affairs spokesperson. Wong was at pains to show Labor’s support for the U.S.-Australia alliance, declaring that “there’s no partisan ownership of the alliance here in Australia.” Wong hails from the left of the Labor Party—historically fertile ground for scepticism regarding treating the alliance as an article of faith in Australian foreign policy—and is no fan of President Trump, but the speech was noteworthy for its emphasis on the “deep values-alignment” between Australia and the United States. Such a phrase might seem commonplace to Americans, but is notable in Australia where politicians are generally far less comfortable talking about values. The speech also called on Australians to recognize that Trump’s anti-democratic inclinations do not represent America’s values, and used values to directly criticize China and therefore elevate the U.S. alliance, by stating “the self-evident point that unlike the US and Australia, China is not a democracy nor does it share our commitment to the rule of law.” Additionally, Labor supported last year’s Foreign Policy White Paper, this year’s anti-interference legislation and is committed to spending 2 percent of GDP on defense should it win government—low by U.S. standards, but far higher than the 1.59 percent under Julia Gillard’s Labor government just five years ago.

As a general election looms in the months ahead for Australia, it is unlikely that foreign policy will become a major issue, likely preserving the broad contours of the emerging convergence between the two major parties. The government and opposition, and in turn the media, are set to focus on the major domestic policy differences: taxes, energy, health care, and immigration. To the extent that foreign policy will get an airing, it is likely that familiar trend lines of past debates will emerge: The government will cite its national security credentials and tell voters not to trust Labor, which will in turn point to its history of multilateral diplomacy in Australia’s region and suggest it will engage more with states such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The two main discussions of foreign policy will center on Chinese influence and the state of the China relationship, particularly given China’s displeasure at several of the Turnbull government’s actions and the gap between the public perception that China is not a threat and the bipartisan worry in Canberra about China’s activities in the region. The two sides will likely criticize each other for Chinese influence in the Western Pacific: The government will argue Labor is weak on national security, while Labor will sharpen its attack on the government’s cuts to the aid budget. However, given that both sides focus on Australia’s budget deficit, and with the election set to be fought on domestic issues, a major new injection of funds for national security seems unlikely.

A wild card here is the question of what impact the new anti-interference laws will have on public debate. With the legislation now on the books, it is likely that a range of public prosecutions are in the hopper. When those prosecutions occur, they could very well shift the public mood—and political temper—quite a bit depending on their timing, the nature of the charges, and how much media attention they end up attracting.

The End of Mateship, the Beginning of Partnership

At least in Australia, one can ignore the chaos and the politicians’ tweets and look at what they’re doing. As if to underscore this point, in the midst of intense political jockeying, parliamentary manoeuvring, press conferences, horse-trading and arm-twisting over whether Prime Minister Turnbull would survive to the end of last week, the government quietly rolled out the announcement of its decision to block Huawei from building Australia’s 5G network. This was a momentous decision that had been building for months and one where politicians of both parties were subject to intense lobbying efforts by both sides of the debate. Domestic and foreign observers—friendly and otherwise—had been focusing on this decision as the yardstick by which to judge Canberra’s willingness to stand firm in the face of Beijing’s (and certain parts of Australia’s business community) displeasure. On any other day than one in which the Prime Minister might fall, this would have been front-page news. Instead, it was not rolled out at a press conference, but rather issued as part of a perfunctory government statement.

For keen observers looking past Canberra’s latest round of political Game of Thrones, in this at least the lesson was clear: Pay attention to what the government was saying and what it was doing. Those in Washington seeking a more assertive response to Chinese pressure, down under and elsewhere, should take note. Political change in Canberra might bring different figures to center stage. Their language will differ, their tones will diverge, they will have different policy priorities, and they will have to appease different constituencies.

As befits a democratic nation, having emerged from an open, and sometimes bruising political debate about the role of Chinese interference in Australia and across the Indo-Pacific region more broadly, there’s an emerging consensus in Canberra—if not yet across Australia—that Australia’s sovereign interests demand a different set of responses than have guided them to this point. For those reasons, the grammar of the debate will be uneven, even as the logic hardens. There are, of course, any number of factors that could change things. But, given the drift of events, the politics of Australia’s national security policies are converging, however haltingly, under the radar. And, over the horizon, the American-Australian alliance will likely change and grow into an increasingly equal partnership that relies less on nostalgia and bonds of affection (“mateship” as it’s referred to) and more on a willingness to work together not just to admire the problem, but to do something about it by showing policy creativity and initiative, developing greater operational capabilities, undertaking an appropriate division of labour, and committing real resources. In short, shared interests and values in Australia’s region will drive greater focus on combating challenges in the Indo-Pacific.

The Trump Administration’s unpredictable approach, coupled with the debate within the United States over whether Washington will prioritize the resources necessary to maintain its long-held role in the region, are all prompting Canberra to think about how to do more both inside and outside of the alliance to boost regional security. Such moves should be encouraged by Washington as amplifications of allied power, even if they arise out of concern about America’s attention and staying power. Unless, of course, Trump’s tweets derail that.

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Rand Paul’s Bizarre Mission to Moscow

As the sanctions war between the United States and Russia escalates, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has embarked on a bizarre mission to pull U.S.-Russian relations out of the tailspin caused by Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, intervention in U.S. elections, cyberattacks on the U.S. energy infrastructure, and alleged use of nerve agents in the United Kingdom.

Paul stands beside U.S. President Donald J. Trump as a champion of dialogue between Washington and the Kremlin. On August 17, Paul called on Trump to lift sanctions imposed on members of the Russian legislature, who are widely seen as a rubber stamp of the Kremlin. He wants to invite them to hold talks with his colleagues in Congress. And this past weekend the Senator accompanied Trump to his New Jersey golf club and said he would lobby the President to allow the Russian politicians to have talks in Congress.

Importantly, Paul also undertook a trip to Russia on August 6 that may have done more harm than good for Trump. In Moscow, Paul met with senior members of the Russian Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee, including its chairman, Konstantin Kosachev, and former Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak. The Senator delivered to his interlocutors a letter from Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and expressed his support for a continuation of a dialogue between the United States and Russia.

Here is where Paul’s journey went off the rails. The White House was furious with the Senator going off the script and implying that he had carried a confidential message from Trump to Putin. A fuming senior U.S. administration official told me that the Senator wrote the letter himself and that he insisted that U.S. Embassy personnel not accompany him to his meetings with Russian officials. This follows a pattern established by Trump in Helsinki in July, where only a translator was present at his two-hour-long meeting with Putin.

That’s not all. Paul also invited Russian lawmakers from the Foreign Relations Committee to Washington in the name of “engagement with our adversaries,” a move that found minuscule support in Congress and the White House.

There are two problems here: first, the Senate leadership does not see it fit to host Russian members of parliament when they are pushing for more sanctions on Russia. Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, distanced himself from Paul’s private diplomacy. Second, Valentina Matviyenko, the chairman of the Federation Council, Speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin, Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Leonid Slutsky, and Kosachev are all subjects of U.S. sanctions. Granting them a U.S. visa would be a challenge unless the President decides to lift sanctions on the individuals against the opinion of his top advisers.

Yet this does not seem to deter Paul.

“Even in the height of the Cold War, I think it was a good thing that” U.S. President John F. Kennedy “had a direct line to” Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, Paul said.

These calls for dialogue seem like a 180-degree turn by the Senator who called on then-U.S. President Barack Obama to “isolate Russia as a rogue nation” following its invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea in 2014. Paul insisted at the time that Putin be punished for his actions.

Even more curiously, Paul was once one of Trump’s most prominent Republican Party critics, particularly during the 2016 presidential election. In one Comedy Central TV interview, Paul went so far as to call then candidate Trump “a delusional narcissist and an orange-faced windbag” adding that “a speck of dirt is way more qualified to be President.”

Paul’s tone has certainly changed in recent months. He was one of just a small handful of Senators who refused to criticize Trump on his performance next to Putin in Helsinki in July, which drew ridicule from both sides of the aisle.

He was also one of only two Senators to vote against imposing new sanctions on Russia in June 2017. On his visit to Moscow, Paul told Russian lawmakers he would vote against any new sanctions proposed by his colleagues in the Senate.

So, what is behind the Senator’s seemingly inexplicable support of perhaps this President’s most widely unpopular positions on Russia? Paul and Trump share an aversion to foreign entanglements, foreign wars, and foreign aid—all common threads in the President’s “America First” tapestry. As Paul reportedly grows closer to the President, his influence in executive foreign policymaking may increase. So too will support from his traditionally libertarian base. Yet his views are as far from the Washington mainstream as Kentucky is from the Kremlin.

In a March foreign policy manifesto titled “It’s Time for a New American Foreign Policy,” Paul blasted U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, criticizing the Trump Administration for continued engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, support of Saudi Arabia, and sanctions against Iran.

The article was a mix of deserved criticism of those who supported the Iraq War and the destruction of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime in Libya, but Paul also managed to conflate Republican neoconservatives and the Obama Administration’s Wilsonian institutional internationalists. It was either deliberate misdirection or sheer ignorance, but the net effect was to sound simplistic, naive, and misinformed.

Since then, he has apparently came around, throwing his support behind Trump’s Putinversteher policy.

Paul’s privateer mission to Moscow is not going to improve U.S.-Russian relations. Only a change of heart in the Kremlin can do that. The mission, disavowed by the White House and the Senate, hurts both Paul and the Trump presidency.

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The New British Exceptionalism

“Despite having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony,” the leader of Britain’s Labour Party, the Right Honorable Jeremy Corbyn, announced in an attempted joke about British Zionists that has tumbled into a debate about the extent and nature of his anti-Semitism. But what is just as striking as his attitude toward “Zionists” is his definition of Englishness as being gifted with a supposedly unique sense of humor.

He is far from alone in this assertion, and it often pops up in official political discourse. At a citizenship ceremony I attended recently, the Mayor of Camden described new British passport holders as now being able to understand English “eccentricity.” And on the other side of the spectrum from Corbyn is the Pantagruel of English politics, the Tory Boris Johnson, who also uses humor as a shorthand for exceptionalism. He is well known for his “eccentric” demeanor and tirelessly provocative jokes about women in hijabs looking like “letter boxes.” Corbyn would probably say he is appalled by Johnson’s japes, but perhaps he and Johnson have more in common than it seems, tying humor, national identity, and an attachment to England’s imperial importance in ways that lead to opposite political tribes but point to common national pathologies.

Johnson was the most important vote-winner for the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum. If there was one underlying motif to the vote (which actually tapped into many different grievances) it was an insistence on national exceptionalism: We are still a great country, we can do things our own special way. Part of English exceptionalism has always been to define ourselves as Not European. The trouble with EU immigration isn’t that newcomers are so unlike the English, but that in many ways they are pretty similar, with similar ideas about family, work, faith, and fun. For a nation that has always defined itself as exceptional, unique, eccentric, different, it was disconcerting to suddenly feel it might not be so special after all.

Unlike previous immigrants, the new EU ones didn’t make the English feel unique.

Take the (often Jewish) Eastern Europeans who arrived in England in the early 20th century. They were so keen to join the most powerful club in the world they would amputate their names to fit in: from Vinogradov to Grade; Brokhovich to Brook. No one would bother doing that today.

When my family arrived here in the 1970s as political refugees from the Soviet Union, the English welcomed us partly because it showed that England’s political system was superior. The Empire was gone but England was still a force in the Cold War.

Postwar immigrants from former British colonies often came from cultures more “different” than EU migrants. But they also reminded the English of their colonial grandeur, some sort of special destiny. Immigrants and their descendants from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia have often been treated appallingly (and a dedicated segment of racists does exist in England), but there is still a sense that these people form a part of a greater national legacy.

As the Brexit vote became a way to insist on England’s exceptional nature, the campaign became a competition between two different styles, both of which laid claim to expressing the essence of Englishness. The Remain Camp were all Common Sense and Prudence, warning of the irresponsible financial risk of exit, and of the economic value of immigration. The Leave Campaign, led by Johnson and Michael Gove (who had tried his hand at television comedy after university), went for eccentricity laced with fear of foreigners. In the country of Silly Walks, eccentricity won hands down; John Cleese, inevitably, is a Brexiteer.

Jeremy Corbyn’s stance on Brexit has always been confusing. Officially, he was Remain, but he campaigned sub-optimally. Throughout most of his political life, he has been opposed to the “neoliberal constraints” of the European Union. Since the vote, he has readily embraced the idea of British Jobs for British People.

England’s sense of uniqueness (or is it just superiority?) is deeply connected to memories of imperial grandeur. This pride has had to be stifled beneath the shame of the racism which fed colonialism. The Leave campaign, and Johnson especially, managed to dislodge this by constantly claiming England was now a benighted colony of Brussels—an absurd claim from a country that intimately knows exactly what colonialism entails. Suddenly, it was OK to take pride in the British Empire. If we’re all victims, why can’t we celebrate our past, too? Johnson’s humor specifically plays at resurrecting taboo imperial references: calling Africans “piccanninies,” or nastily jesting that President Obama didn’t like Britain because of his Kenyan heritage (the British pioneered the use of concentration camps in Kenya). The problem with Africa, “is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” Johnson likes to claim his type of Brexiteers are not Little Englanders but in fact open to the world—by which he means that they are open to ruling it again.

Jeremy Corbyn’s attitude to Empire is at first glance the opposite of Johnson’s. He sees colonialism as the root of all evil (and Zionism). But as the SOAS academic Yair Wallach has insightfully pointed out, Corbyn’s thoughts regarding Zionists’ lack of English irony also play into classic tropes of writing by British officials in Mandatory Palestine, which contrasted “crass Zionists” with “refined Arabs.” Moreover the school of thought which sees colonialism as the main cause of all political events reveals a heavy dose of self-regard, still seeing one’s country as the source of all things, albeit negatively. It also robs others of their own agency, leaving them somehow below-par humans. Putin, Assad, Hamas—they’re not responsible for their own actions. All they ever do is a consequence of the actions of real people, the ones with that special sense of irony.

As England’s achievements grow ever less remarkable, so the desperate need to have something to see that sense of specialness through becomes more pronounced. Eccentricity becomes the last exceptionalism. Ironically, it’s making us into a laughing stock.

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Huntington’s Legacy

Since Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations has been contrasted with my own End of History in countless introductory International Relations classes over the past two decades, I might as well begin by tackling at the outset the issue of how we’re doing vis-à-vis one another. At the moment, it looks like Huntington is winning.

The world today is not converging around liberal democratic government, as it seemed to be for more than a generation. The Third Wave of democratization that Huntington himself observed progressed in the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s from about 35 electoral states to perhaps 115 by 2008. But since then the wave has gone into reverse, what Larry Diamond has labeled a democratic recession. Not only has the number of democracies declined somewhat, but important qualitative changes have taken place. Big authoritarian powers like Russia and China have grown self-confident and aggressive. Meanwhile, existing liberal democracies have lost much of their appeal after the financial crises in America and the Eurozone during the 2000s, and are suffering from populist uprisings that threaten the liberal pillar of their political systems.

In place of the Left-Right ideological split defined largely by issues revolving around the relative economic power of capital and labor in an industrialized setting that characterized 20th-century politics, we now have a political spectrum organized increasingly around identity issues, many of which are defined more by culture than by economics narrowly construed. This shift is not good for the health of liberal democracy, and the number one exemplar of this dysfunction is the United States, where the rise of Donald Trump has posed a serious threat to America’s check-and-balance institutions. The phenomenon of rising populist nationalism is one that I have explored previously in this journal, and at much greater length in my most recent book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

Huntington was very prescient in his depiction of “Davos Man,” the cosmopolitan creature unmoored from strong attachments to any particular place, loyal primarily to his own self-interest. Davos Man has now become the target of populist rage, as the elites who constructed our globalized world are pilloried for being out of touch with the concerns of the working class. Huntington also foresaw the rise of immigration as one of the chief issues driving populism and the fears that mass migration has stoked about cultural change. Indeed, Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post has labeled Huntington as a prophet of the Trump era.

What no one in the current debate can say is whether the current democratic recession will turn into a full-blown depression, marking a more fundamental shift in global politics toward some alternative regime type, or whether it is more like a stock market correction. The causes of the current recession in Western countries are reasonably clear: Populism has been driven by the unequal effects of globalization, as well as a cultural revolt against the large numbers of migrants moving across international borders and challenging traditional notions of national identity.

There are a number of reasons, however, to wonder if these forces will be strong enough to eventually overcome the factors driving the world toward greater convergence in economic and political institutions, or lead to serious geopolitical conflict on a scale matching that of the early 20th century. Neither the China model nor the emerging populist-nationalist one represented by Russia, Turkey, or Hungary will likely be sustainable economically or politically over an extended period. On the other hand, democracies have mechanisms in place for correcting mistakes, and a big test of American democracy will occur in November when Americans get to vote on whether they approve of the presidency of Donald Trump. Moreover, the rural, less-educated parts of the population that are the core of populist support are, in countries experiencing economic growth, in long-term decline. At this point, however, such assertions amount to no more than speculation.

Culture Matters

Let me turn then to a more specific analysis of Huntington’s argument, looking back at a review of the Clash I did for the Wall Street Journal back in 1996.

There is a common theme that runs through all of Huntington’s later works, which includes not just The Clash of Civilizations but also Who Are We? (2004), Culture Matters (a volume published in 2001 and co-edited by Lawrence Harrison, to which I contributed), Many Globalizations (edited with Peter L. Berger), and even his book The Third Wave (1991). That theme is culture. Huntington argued that people’s political behavior are heavily shaped by culture, and that these culturally defined preferences are persistent in the face of socio-economic modernization and will ultimately trump rational self-interest as defined by modern economics.

His last book, Who Are We?, for example, focused on American identity and argued that the success of the United States as a nation depended heavily on the fact that North America was settled by what he labeled “Anglo-Protestants”:

Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.

The Third Wave chronicled the rise of liberal democracies around the world following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But a cultural argument was embedded here as well: According to Huntington, the democratic wave was not based on broad acceptance of a set of universal values around democracy, but rather on the fact that the new democracies in Latin America and Europe had a Christian—indeed, often a Catholic—cultural background. What had changed, according to Huntington, was the Catholic Church’s reconciliation with modern democracy after Vatican II, which then permitted countries from Hungary and Poland to Argentina and Brazil to accept democracy as a form of government.

As I said at the time in reviews of his books, Huntington is indubitably right in his general assertion that culture matters. My own book Trust explained how shared culture was the basis for high levels of social trust in particular countries and contributed greatly to their economic success. Huntington was accused after the publication of Who Are We? of being an anti-immigrant racist, but it seems to me that his statement quoted above is quite correct: The “Anglo-Protestant” settlers of North America contributed to the country’s success not because of their ethnicity, but because of the cultural values they carried, including the Protestant work ethic, belief in a Lockean individualism, distrust of concentrated state authority, and other values. What I said at the time in defense of continued immigration into the United States, however, was that these cultural values had become deracinated from their particular ethnic roots and had become a possession of all Americans. But the cultural proclivity still matters.

Beyond this broad affirmation of the durability of culture as a determinant of political behavior, however, there are many problems with Huntington’s argument in the Clash. Huntington argues specifically that culture is ultimately rooted in religion, and that broad religious affiliations rather than more specific identities will structure future world order. Both of these assertions are highly problematic.

Huntington was way out ahead of most observers when he noted the return of religion as a rising force in modern politics: not just in the Middle East, but in India, where the Hindu BJP is now the ruling party; in Latin America, much of which has gone Protestant in recent years; and, indeed, in the United States, where religious conservatives have played a growing political role. Were he still alive, he might also point to the phenomenon of militant Buddhism in countries from Sri Lanka to Myanmar.

But assertions of identity in the contemporary world are based on many other types of group solidarity, of which religion is only one. For example, socioeconomic modernization has led to the rise of a global women’s movement that seeks both political and social rights for women. This movement is powerful not just in Europe and North America, but has taken root in the conservative countries of the Gulf. It will be an important counterweight to conservative Islam in both Iran and Saudi Arabia, two countries in which women graduating from universities outnumber men. Similarly, old-fashioned nationalism has reappeared in many places. Japan, Korea, and China have been at each other’s throats in recent years over their historical legacies; the fact that they belong to a common Confucian civilization is of no consequence to contemporary politics. (Huntington tried to get around this problem by arguing that Japan belonged to its own separate civilization; it is much more parsimonious to say that it is following its own view of national interest.) Religion may lie in the background of the new populist movements in Europe and the United States, but they are powered by plenty of old-fashioned nationalism as well, as well as factors like ethnicity, race, economic inequality, and shared historical memory.

Huntington made some very specific assertions about the nature of future global order that are easy to forget at this juncture. He didn’t say simply that cultural groups would clash, but rather that the old ideological divisions would give way to a world order based on the six or seven big religiously grounded civilizations. There would be more solidarity within these civilizational units than across civilizational boundaries, to the point where civilizations would start behaving like imperial 19th-century states, forming alliances against one another.

As I argued when the Clash first appeared, the only culture with identifiable numbers of people who think in such civilizational terms is the world of Islam, in which the idea of a Muslim umma, or global community of believers, still has some traction. Osama bin Laden certainly believed that he was fighting Christendom on behalf of Islam. People in the West, East Asia, Latin America, or sub-Saharan Africa tend not think in these terms: Apart from a handful of populists like Pat Buchanan, no one in the West still sees it as “Christendom,” as opposed to a civilization built around liberal Enlightenment values. The world of Islam itself is hugely divided today: The fanatics of the Islamic State do not believe that Shi‘a are genuine Muslims, and have been busy trying to kill as many of them as possible. The greater Middle East is divided today between the two big branches of Islam backed by nation-states, Saudi Arabia and Iran; so great are the internal divisions within the region, ethnic and tribal as well as sectarian, that Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria, Libya, and Yemen have not even been able to hold together as countries. Nor does the fact that Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia all share a common Orthodox background diminish the intensity of the political conflicts between them.

Identity, Not Culture

Identity is a much broader and more flexible concept with which to understand contemporary politics rather than religiously based culture or civilizations. Identity is the modern concept that arises out of the belief that one has a hidden inner self whose dignity is at best being ignored or at worst being disparaged by the surrounding society. Identity politics revolves around demands not for materials goods or resources, but for recognition of the dignity of one’s ethnicity, religion, nation, or even one’s unique characteristics as an individual. Viewed in this light, both nationalism and Islamism—that is, politicized Islam—can be seen as different manifestations of identity. The Serb nationalists in 1914 resented the fact that the world did not recognize the Serbs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; anger at this fact is what led Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Similarly, Osama bin Laden as a teenager came to his parents with tears in his eyes after watching a news broadcast of the mistreatment of Palestinians; striking back at the United States on September 11 was a way of forcing it to recognize that Muslims were people with agency and thus dignity.

Indeed, if we unpack the psychology of identity, we see that much of what is labeled religious extremism is actually not driven by religious belief per se, if by that one means personal piety and individual commitment to a particular doctrine. Many of the young European Muslims who left the countries of their birth to fight for the Islamic State in Syria were trapped between two cultures, the traditional one defined by the piety of their parents, and the secular Western one in which they were brought up. This identity confusion could easily be answered by a radical Islamist who presented an ideology that answered the question, “Who am I?”, and connected that individual to a larger community of Muslims around the world.

In a less violent manner, many of the Muslim women who have taken to wearing the hijab are doing so not because they have suddenly become so much more pious; the hijab rather is a marker of identity that tells those around them that they are proud and unafraid to be seen as Muslim. In this respect, religion simply becomes a useful device by which ambitious politicians can mobilize political support, much like European politicians of the 19th century (and some in the present day) used national identity as a means of mobilizing their followers.

Seeing the same phenomena through an identity lens rather than through the lens of religiously based culture better conforms to today’s realities. Huntington argued that civilizations were becoming more cohesive at the expense of nations; social integration was happening, but at a transnational cultural level. In my view, something of the opposite is true: Assertions of identity tend to fracture societies into smaller and smaller identity groups. We’ve already noted this happening in the Muslim world, where different Muslim factions have been in effect excommunicating one another rather than working together. Although the new populist nationalists in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and other parts of Europe have tried to build solidarity with one another, they run up against the fact that their national interests often are in conflict, and that in some cases they have put themselves in conflict with their own national minorities.

One of the most salient cases of assertions of identity leading not to civilizational solidarity but to endless fractionalization is the United States. Identity politics took hold in the United States in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s, in which African-Americans, women, the disabled, indigenous Americans, gays, and lesbians all came to feel that they had experienced discrimination and marginalization in distinctive ways. The different “lived experiences” of each group led some to assert that those who were not members of the group could not even begin to sympathize with its struggles. There was the constant emergence of new identities: not just gays and lesbians, but transgender and intersex people; “intersectionality” appeared with the realization that overlapping categories of marginalization led to the creation of entirely new identities. In both the United States and Europe, the Left which had been built during the first part of the 20th century around working class solidarity came to embrace these new identity groups, even though this tended to alienate older working class voters.

The rise of identity politics on the Left has stimulated and legitimated new assertions of identity on the Right. Donald Trump has received support for being politically incorrect, that is, for not respecting the identity niceties that characterize contemporary American political discourse. In doing so he has greatly abetted the rise of white nationalists and the alt-right, which see themselves as persecuted and marginalized minorities in much the same way as the leftwing identity groups. The Trumpist right in the United States today includes many Christian evangelicals, but it would not be accurate to say that the Trump phenomenon is driven primarily by religion. Many of his voters would like to preserve a traditional concept of American national identity that was partly defined by Christianity, but also by ethnicity and conservative social values more generally. None of this squares, of course, with the sort of liberal civic identity that America had slowly built for itself in the wake of the Civil War.

Identity, as opposed to Huntington’s concept of culture, is a better descriptor of today’s politics because it is both socially constructed and contestable, as today’s debates over American national identity illustrate. Huntington’s cultures are, by contrast, fixed and nearly impossible to change. Contrary to the views of many nationalists and religious partisans, identities are neither biologically rooted nor of ancient provenance. Nationalism in the modern sense did not exist in Europe prior to the French Revolution; the Islam of Osama bin Laden or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi does not conform to any of the major traditional schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Contemporary identities based on concepts of nation or religion were created by political actors for specific purposes, and can be displaced by other identities as the outcome of a political struggle.

So while culture does matter, Huntington’s theory really does not fit the current reality in many ways. Western democracies are at war with themselves internally over national identity; there is a slipping consensus that they fit into a broad category like “the West.” When Donald Trump spoke of “the West” in a speech in Poland in 2017, his West was a different one from the West of President Obama. Similarly, in other parts of the world, civilizational fractures are just one among many that are dividing people politically. The only countervailing forces are strong states like the ones governing China and Russia, not transnational entities based on shared cultural values.

Universal Values

The most important issue that Huntington raises in the Clash and related writings is one that for the moment remains a contested assertion, which has to do with the question of universal values. Huntington did not believe that universal values exist. Each of the world’s big civilizations, according to him, was built around a certain set of shared values whose roots lie in a complex historical past, and which were ultimately incommensurate with one another.

In particular, Huntington argued that there were no universal values underlying liberal democracy. The latter sprang from Western experience and was very much rooted in Europe’s Christian past. There is thus no particular reason to think that liberal democracy will spread and take root in other, culturally different parts of the world. To the extent that democracy has spread to places like Japan or South Korea, it is the result of American political, military, and economic power; but should that power decline relative to that of other civilizations, the appeal of democratic ideas will diminish with it.

This is a serious argument. George W. Bush in his second inaugural address spoke of democracy as a universal value that was not dependent for its success on certain prior cultural values. This was obviously untrue in the short-run cases where his Administration sought to create functioning liberal democracies, Afghanistan and Iraq. But this belief in democratic universalism also failed to acknowledge the West’s own history. Democratic institutions have been around for only the past couple hundred years and did not become fully established even in many parts of the West until well into the 20th century. Other forms of government were deemed legitimate for many centuries in Europe and continue to receive support in other parts of the world. The moral equality of all human beings is not something universally accepted by all cultural systems, and is explicitly denied in certain ones.

To the extent that one can maintain an argument for the universalism of a certain set of values, it has to be linked to a broader historical process. If we step back and take a macroscopic view of human history, we see that there has been a long-term evolution of human institutions through a variety of stages, from band-level hunter-gatherer groups to tribal forms of organization, then to settled agrarian societies with state-level political institutions, and then to large scale urban-industrial societies with highly complex state-level governance. What is remarkable about this history is that these different stages occurred around the world in varying geographical, climactic, and cultural conditions.

For example, patrilineal segmentary societies with very similar forms of social organization appeared across a variety of places, from China to India to the Middle East to the Germanic tribes that overran the Roman Empire. These were gradually displaced in most parts of the world by state-level institutions, and then by societies that increasingly found it necessary to defend property rights if they were to remain economically viable in the long run. The emergence of modern China does not violate this pattern: Chinese society in many ways looks very similar today to that of earlier modernizers in being urban, industrial, with social hierarchies built around education and acquired skills, in which women are slowly displacing men in an increasingly service-based economy. As noted above, Saudi Arabia and Iran are educating large numbers of women, and the latter are forming the leading edge of a grassroots movement for liberalization in their respective societies. Where these countries continue to diverge is their political systems.

Modernization, in other words, is a coherent process that in certain respects is not culturally determined. There are clearly universal forms of social organization that have responded to the functional needs of different societies at similar levels of development.

The long-term unanswered questions posed by Huntington then are: Will deeply rooted cultural values be so durable as to prevent certain societies from ever modernizing; and if they modernize, will they fail to converge in terms of political institutions? The jury is still out on these issues. For many decades, people in the West thought that modernization could only occur on the basis of Western values, but the rise of East Asia has disproved that point of view. We need to be cautious in thinking that certain parts of the world will always remain poor. And if Saudi Arabia, Iran, and China become rich, high-tech societies with large middle classes and highly educated populations, will they still be content to be ruled by poorly educated clerics or Communist party apparatchiks? The possibility that they will not, and that they will demand greater political participation, is the grounds on which one might believe that convergence in regime types remains a possibility.

In one of the panels I took part in memorializing Sam Huntington after his passing away in December 2008, it was notable how many of his students expressed great love and respect for him, both as a scholar and as a person, but then went on to disagree with particular ideas he had articulated. I was one of them. Like many other great social theorists of the past, his contribution does not necessarily lie in the fact that he was right about everything. Rather, his greatness lay in his ability to conceptualize big ideas in a wide variety of fields, conceptualizations that then served to organize the way that people subsequently thought about and debated them. This was true of the Clash of Civilizations, as of most of the rest of his extensive corpus.

Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy (January 2015).

Fukuyama, “The Populist Surge,” American Interest (March/April 2018).

Lozada, “Samuel Huntington, A Prophet for the Trump Era,” Washington Post (July 18, 2017).

Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 59.

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Does Harvard’s Undergrad Admission Policy Discriminate?

The latest controversy over affirmative action in higher education, involving Asian-American applicants rejected by Harvard, does not raise any novel legal issues but only two very old ones: one, the legality of race-based affirmative action; and two, the legal standard for proving intentional race discrimination. Both of these questions have been well settled for decades: race-based affirmative action is lawful as long as it is narrowly tailored to achieve the university’s interest in a diverse student body or to remedy specific instances of past discrimination. Otherwise, any consideration of race in admissions is unlawful.

The Harvard case has received much more attention than these legal questions deserve for two reasons. One, it involves Harvard, the best-known brand name in higher education. Two, the media, and to some extent the plaintiffs themselves, led by anti-affirmative action activist Edward Blum, have cleverly collapsed the two distinct legal questions: Is affirmative action lawful? And did Harvard discriminate against Asian-American applicants? This conflation wrongly suggests that affirmative action is the cause of any disadvantage suffered by Asian applicants to Harvard and attempts to turn a simple claim of race discrimination into an attack on affirmative action as such, needlessly pitting one minority group against another.

In fact, there are several admissions practices that put Asian-Americans at a disadvantage relative to some other racial groups, as well as several that advantage them. Asian-American applicants to Harvard have higher average grades and test scores than other racial groups—so much so that if these were the only criteria for admission, Harvard’s entering class would be 43 percent Asian-American. But Harvard also considers a host of other things such as athletic and artistic talent, underrepresented geographic region, and “legacy” status. Many of these considerations are more likely to benefit white applicants as a group at the expense of applicants of other races, Asians included. Indeed, according to an internal study, athletics and legacy preferences alone reduce the expected Asian-American representation in Harvard’s admissions to roughly 31 percent while extracurricular activities and personality ratings further reduce it to 26 percent. Each of these preferences is controversial, but none are unlawful.

Should Harvard rely exclusively, or at least more heavily, on objective measures? Much of the public conversation about university admissions implies that objective measures are almost synonymous with merit; hence the subtle but unmistakable suggestion that consideration of other factors is, if not a scandal, then at least an embarrassment. And unfortunately, many high school students see university admissions as a measure of their self-worth, a misconception that to some extent elite universities encourage.

From the perspective of individual fairness, one can defend consideration of athletic and artistic talent, but legacy preferences and consideration of geographic diversity, which benefits disproportionately white applicants from rural areas and land-locked states over more heavily minority urban areas and coastal states, are harder to justify. But admission to a selective university is not a reward for individual virtue or hard work; indeed, it is not even based exclusively on individual merit at all. From the perspective of a university, considerations of things like legacy status and geography make sense because universities are not looking for the “best” individual applicants but for the best ensemble in the same way a theater company is not looking for the best actors as individuals but the best cast.

Moreover, grades and test scores are not, in and of themselves, merit, but only imperfect proxies for it. Both are meant to measure less tangible virtues such as intelligence, diligence, and academic potential. It’s well known, however, that performance on standardized tests predicts family wealth more accurately than anything else, in large part because family wealth corresponds with test preparation, both in schools and in specialized test preparation tutoring.

But of course test preparation is not a virtue: It actually undermines the accuracy of academic aptitude tests. From the perspective of test administrators and universities, it would be ideal if no one prepared specifically for the test at all. In this light, there is some irony when those lamenting Harvard’s admission process point out that many families of applicants rejected by Harvard sacrificed to send their children to test preparation classes. Of course, this speaks well of the families in question and their commitment to their children, but from the perspective of a university seeking an accurate assessment of applicants and their potential, test preparation is something to be discouraged, or at least adjusted for when considering whether test scores reflect underlying potential.

Harvard’s use of subjective criteria, such as “likability” or “courage,” seems to have disadvantaged Asian applicants. This might reflect a persistent stereotype that Asian-Americans are boring grinds with poor interpersonal skills. If the plaintiffs can prove that Harvard’s subjective evaluations are tainted by this type of bias and stereotyping, they should prevail on a straightforward theory of intentional discrimination. Of course, this would discredit only a racially biased application of subjective criteria, not affirmative action, nor even the use of subjective criteria generally. For instance, in the employment context, subjective criteria are routinely used in making hiring and promotion decisions. When plaintiffs cite statistical disparities as evidence of discrimination, they ultimately must prove that differences in both objective and subjective qualifications do not explain the disparity or that the subjective criteria are really a cloak for discrimination.

This doesn’t mean that Harvard isn’t discriminating, and its history shows that if it is discriminating today it would hardly be for the first time. It just means that a statistical disparity alone doesn’t prove that it is. Civil rights advocates have long argued that the legal standard for proof of discrimination is too demanding: Indeed, according to recent studies, discrimination complaints are the least successful civil claims heard by the Federal courts. Employers and governmental actors, they insist, should be required to justify questionable decisions and unexplained racial disparities. In response, many of the same people who attack subjectivity in university admissions have insisted that businesses shouldn’t have to defend or even explain all of their decisions to courts or juries who often don’t understand the demands and complexities of the enterprise. Of course, one could make precisely the same arguments for deference to university admissions decisions.

One of the reasons for these differing expectations is of course that many of the strongest defenders of free enterprise in the market tend to be less sympathetic to the enterprise of higher education. But perhaps some of the reason for the difference is also that few people think that employers can be ranked in the way U.S. News & World Report ranks universities or that their individual self-worth or shot at a good life is accurately measured by a single employment decision.

By contrast, selective universities have carefully cultivated an image of both elite status and of infallibility and precision with respect to admissions: They benefit from and encourage the myth that their students are “the best and brightest.” Now they are also suffering from it. It’s telling and troubling that one of the plaintiffs in the Harvard lawsuit, who was in his own words, “super disillusioned” by the university admissions process, was admitted to and attended Duke, one of the most selective and elite universities in the world. If college admissions were supposed to reflect some sort of ordinal ranking of both schools and applicants, maybe he deserved to get into Harvard. But in the real world no one “deserves” admission to an Ivy League school—a lucky few just win the admissions lottery.

Understandably, in a society full of injustices, many people want to create a pure meritocratic competition with simple criteria and clear rules. But successful institutions—whether profit-making businesses or exclusive schools—know that merit can’t be so easily measured, people can’t be so easily ranked, and there is no “best” applicant. And despite what some publications may claim and some schools may imply, there is, for that matter, no “best” university or college either.

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The China Challenge

Beijing is sending a trade delegation to Washington for talks aimed at resolving the trade war, but this is unlikely to resolve the changing political risk factors at stake for companies doing business with China. Understandably, most analysis has focused on the dynamics of the ever-escalating trade war between the United States and China. This obscures the potentially more important dynamic of the growing consensus among Western governments of risks posed by China’s security, industrial and commercial policies. And it obstructs the increasing willingness of these governments to intervene in market activity for reasons of national security.

Given Trump’s erraticism and transactional approach to foreign policy, it is important not to mistake the general trend of a hardening trade relationship with China across the West. A desire to put more pressure on China is not simply a Trump phenomenon. Indeed, it’s one of the few areas where there’s bipartisan agreement in the United States and among its traditional allies Japan, Canada, and Europe right now.

When Jean-Claude Junker, President of the European Commission, recently appeared next to Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden to announce an easing of their incipient trade spat, the media coverage almost missed their statement pledging to work together “to address unfair trading practices, including intellectual property theft, forced technology transfer, industrial subsidies, distortions created by state-owned enterprises, and overcapacity.” Even without mentioning China by name, the point was obvious and represented a growing consensus among many nations that China’s unfair practices are putting the rest of the world at a disadvantage.

Despite China’s courting of the European Union, Europeans leaders have expressed significant skepticism about Chinese commitments, increasingly viewing Chinese investments in Eastern and Central Europe as Trojan horses. In fact, they have started restricting Chinese investments into their economies and have been at pains to point out that Europe shares Washington’s core concerns about Chinese industrial and commercial policies. And it is not just Western countries expressing concern over the nature and intent of Chinese investment of strategic national assets. Across Southeast Asia, wariness is growing over the dangers of unsustainable Chinese investment, lack of transparency and accountability, and projects that erode the foundations of national sovereignty. This has given rise to fears that China is, in the words of Malaysia’s newly elected Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, coercing smaller nations into “unequal treaties.”

With constant news coverage of the escalating trade war between the United States and China, the story that is being overlooked is the growing consensus among Western nations that a response to China’s industrial and trade policies is necessary. While this gradual shift in policies reflects broader concerns that Chinese economic liberalization has stalled for the foreseeable future, there are three specific concerns that help explain why this is occurring now.

First, there is emerging consensus that under his drive to solidify the Chinese Communist Party’s grip on the country, Xi Jinping has accelerated China’s embrace of authoritarianism in a way that fundamentally undercuts Beijing’s reformist rhetoric. The result is a country that is increasingly closing itself—and its markets—to outside trade and investment, insisting that the price of doing business in China is forced technology transfer, and lurching away from transparency. As an independent research firm has observed, the global conversation about China’s evolution has been pushed to a “tipping point-moment of discussion” by policy changes in Beijing. Where previously there was debate about the policy balance, with market-oriented and state-control ideas competing for the lead, the Xi-era has led China away from convergence with the OECD. One result has been that American and European businesses and governments now recognize that voluntary mechanisms to open China’s economy have not worked and likely will not work.

Second, China’s push to dominate artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and other fields has begun to raise appropriate alarm in the United States and Europe. In 2015, Beijing announced “China 2025,” its industrial plan to dominate the core components of a future economy by investing in cutting-edge innovation in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and aerospace industries among others, while also increasing Chinese acquisitions of U.S. and Western firms. The goals are to upgrade Chinese industry, localize production, make it more competitive globally, and put it at the forefront of multiple cutting-edge industries. While that might make sense from China’s perspective, it leads to obvious questions about whether foreign companies will be boxed out of working in China or forced to do business in China under increasingly disadvantageous terms. Indeed, Beijing states that its goal is to increase the domestic content of core components and materials to 40 percent by 2020 and 70 percent by 2025. In tandem with this, the Chinese government has issued nearly 300 new national standards related to cybersecurity. The result is a vague set of regulatory tools that is rapidly shifting the business environment for foreign firms operating in China. A new report by the Washington-based think tank CSIS has concluded that for foreign firms engaging with China, this shift will “create security risks, add costs, and overall underscore that Beijing is ultimately in control.”

Third, there is growing worry about the nature and intent of Chinese investment in, and acquisition of, Western technology and critical infrastructure. Concerned about the risks of supply chain disruptions, information and data security, the acquisition of military or dual-use technology, and threats to critical infrastructure, the United States and Europe are taking steps to investigate and limit Chinese investment in their economies. Behind these concerns lies growing recognition of persistent Chinese efforts to manipulate financial networks, political processes, and public debate within the United States and among its allies. As a result, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is in the midst of a legislative overhaul that will likely expand its powers, and in late July Britain rolled out its new National Security and Investment White Paper, which was intended to strengthen the government’s ability to prevent foreign purchases of security-sensitive British assets. Although the document is broad, UK officials have confirmed that “this is mainly about China” and preventing Beijing’s acquisition of sensitive technologies and critical infrastructure. London’s move follows similar ones in Germany and France, which have both intervened to halt deals with Chinese companies that raised security concerns and worked to strengthen their foreign investment laws.

All of these factors mean that the business community should be prepared for uncertainty ahead. Given Beijing’s increasingly assertive foreign policy and aggressive industrial policy, democratic governments are likely to increase the pace of their interventions into the commercial sector to halt or amend deals for strategic and geopolitical reasons, as they enhance regulations that govern foreign investments. Second, Donald Trump’s erraticism and transactional approach to foreign policy and economic issues will likely make this less a coordinated approach among allies than one that moves forward by fits and starts. This trend, however, is not based on Trump’s trade war, but rather is reflective of multiple nations’ financial and security concerns and is likely to persist. Finally, governments are now attempting to ensure that they are not overly leveraged on a single market and therefore vulnerable to economic coercion or macroeconomic shocks. All three of these trends are likely to intensify, and the smart investor would be wise to pay heed to them.

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Naipaul’s India

Nobel laureate Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s relationship to India was as complicated as the man himself. Naipaul, who died on August 11, had written three non-fiction books on India, each separated by roughly a decade. The titles of the books—An Area of Darkness (1962), India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)—are a good indication of Naipaul’s attitudes toward the country from which his grandfather had migrated in the late 19th century. Naipaul’s grandparents eventually settled in Trinidad, where they worked as indentured servants on sugar plantations.

Growing up in Trinidad, Naipaul experienced his ancestral homeland through his extended family and physical trinkets. Still, the real India was, for him, an “area of darkness.” In a letter written to his sister Kamla, who was then studying in university in India, a 17-year-old Naipaul foreshadowed the vitriol that he would spew on India later: “I am planning to write a book about these damned people [Indians] and the wretched country of theirs, exposing their detestable traits.”

When he did visit India for the first time in 1962, it overwhelmed him. In one of the more famous passages from An Area of Darkness, Naipaul wrote:

India is the poorest country in the world. . . . I had seen Indian villages, the narrow broken lanes with green slime in the gutters, the choked back-to-back mud houses, the jumble of filth and food and animals and people, the baby in the dust, swollen-bellied, black with flies, but wearing its good-luck amulet. I had seen the starved child defecating at the roadside while the mangy dog waited to eat the excrement. I had seen the physique of the people of Andhra [a province in southern India], which had suggested the possibility of an evolution downwards, wasted body to wasted body, Nature mocking herself, incapable of emission. Compassion and pity did not answer; they were refinements of hope. Fear was what I felt.

Naipaul’s loathing and even fear of India’s physical reality—the “real country” as opposed to an “area of imagination”—that shines through in this passage is a recurrent theme of An Area of Darkness. He is no different in that sense from many Western observers of India, aside from the fact that he wrote far more eloquently than most. His quest to connect with his Indian past was an utter failure, too. As he admitted: “In all the striking detail of India there was nothing which I could link with my own experience of India in a small town in Trinidad.”

Naipaul was similarly vexed by India’s civilizational decay, which he saw symbolized in Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi and India’s reverence for him. Naipaul conceded that Gandhi had correctly identified some of the problems afflicting India because he was “in part a colonial,” having spent twenty years in South Africa. However, Naipaul abhorred what he saw as the Hindu revivalist and spiritual elements of Gandhi. He wrote of Gandhi’s reception in India: “The mahatma has been absorbed into the formless spirituality and decayed pragmatism of India. The revolutionary became a god and his message was thereby lost.”

While Naipaul might have missed the radical potential of Gandhian thinking and action, the persistence of what he called “Gandhianism” obsessed him. The theme of Gandhi-induced decay, particularly with regard to Hindu society, would recur in India: A Wounded Civilization. He wrote with repugnance about the persistence of Gandhianism in India long after its use-by date: “Now of Gandhianism there remained only the emblems and energy; and the energy had turned malignant. India needed a new code, but it had none.” One of the main grouses that Naipaul had with Gandhi was what he saw as the glorification of poverty and the subsequent tendency to make it the “basis of all truth.” This was not a new charge. The Indian nationalist leader and poet, Sarojini Naidu, had once joked that it cost India a fortune to keep Gandhi in poverty.

What irked Naipaul about India was not just its obsession with Gandhi but its inability to regenerate and come up with original ideas. “India is old, and India continues,” he wrote. “But all the disciplines and skills that India now seeks to exercise are borrowed. Even the ideas Indians have of the achievements of their civilization are essentially ideas given by European scholars in the nineteenth century.”

If An Area of Darkness and India: A Wounded Civilization were scathing and negative portrayals of India, a marked change in tone had crept into Naipaul’s last book on the country. In India: A Million Mutinies Now, Naipaul pushed himself to the background and let the people he interviewed take center stage. Diverse voices, from an activist of the Shiv Sena (the nativist party from Maharashtra) to a former Bengali Naxalite (or Maoist) to a journalist working for a women’s magazine, all found space in the book. Indeed, Naipaul’s views on the Shiv Sena possibly presaged his later-in-life sympathy for the Hindu nationalists. As he wrote in Wounded Civilization: “The Shiv Sena, as it is today, is of India, independent India. . . .  It is a part of the reworking of the Hindu system. Men do not accept chaos; they ceaselessly seek to remake their world; they reach out for such ideas as are accessible and fit their need.” In contrast, he wrote of Naxalism that it was an “intellectual tragedy, a tragedy of idealism, ignorance, and mimicry.”

Naipaul recalled in A Million Mutinies Now that when he first visited the country in 1962, the India of his “fantasy and heart was something lost and irrevocable.” But now he admitted that that there was in India “a national idea”:

The Indian Union was greater than the sum of its parts; and many of these movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the source of law and civility and reasonableness. . . . What the mutinies were also helping to define was the strength of the general intellectual life, and the wholeness and humanism of the values to which all Indians felt they could appeal.

Unsurprisingly, Naipaul’s early views did not make him popular in India, so An Area of Darkness was unofficially banned in India after its publication. In a long review of the book, titled “Naipaul’s India and Mine,” Nissim Ezekiel—the Jewish Indian poet, playwright, art critic, and editor—said that he greatly admired and enjoyed Naipaul’s novels, but took issue with Naipaul’s “excess” in describing India. Ezekiel concluded that Naipaul’s criticism of India was “heavily flawed in detail.” Many years later, as if in defense, Naipaul insisted he was only being true to the “visual facts.”

Criticism aside, there is little doubt that Naipaul influenced a host of prominent Indian writers. The novelist Amitav Ghosh—he of the wondrous Ibis trilogy—wrote after Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in 2001 that his first two books on India “created a sensation because of its tone of derision and outrage.” But he added that, on careful reading, “it is not hard to see that the target of Naipaul’s rage is none other than himself and his own past. His derision stems not from what he sees in India but rather from his disillusionment with the myths of his uprooted ancestors.”

If Naipaul’s books caused a stir, some of his statements after winning the Nobel caused an uproar. A decade after the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque in the north Indian city of Ayodhya—an attack orchestrated by Hindu militants—Naipaul reportedly said, “Ayodhya is a sort of passion. Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity.” Some saw this pronouncement as being of a piece with Naipaul’s anti-Islam views expressed in many of his works. In 2012, the Indian playwright and actor, Girish Karnad, spoke out against Naipual after he had been given a lifetime achievement award in India, charging that, while his books on India were “brilliantly written,” they were characterized by a “rabid antipathy towards Indian Muslims.”

Though Naipaul never fully got over his status as an “insider-outsider” in India, as his authorized biographer Patrick French put it, over time he became much more accepted and feted in his ancestral land.1 At the 2015 Jaipur literary festival, a wheelchair-bound Naipaul had a public reconciliation with his disciple-turned-critic Paul Theroux and broke down into tears in front of an admiring audience. At the twilight of his life, Naipaul and India had seemingly made peace with each other’s quirks, oddities, and extremes. Whether that peace can last will depend on India’s cultural and political trajectory—a trajectory no one can predict.

[1]Patrick French, The World Is What It Is (2008).

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Circling the Death Penalty

On August 2, Pope Francis announced a striking change to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, with new language that stated, “The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” The Pope vowed that the Church will “work with determination for its abolition worldwide”—building on a moral commitment his recent predecessors had already begun to craft. Commentary on the Pope’s announcement added that “ending the life of a criminal as punishment for a crime is inadmissible because it attacks . . . a dignity that is not lost even after having committed the most serious crimes.”

In June 2018, the Pew Research Center disclosed that American support for the death penalty had ticked up significantly for the first time in more than 20 years. In 2016 only 49 percent of all Americans had favored the death penalty for certain crimes (down from 78 percent in 1996), but now 54 percent signaled their support in some cases of murder (with 39 percent opposed). To be sure, a one-year reversal may prove to be a fluke (though it is interesting that not even the terrorist attack of 9/11 had disrupted the trend), but there are reasons to take it seriously.1

Putting these two developments together yields a striking disjuncture, with unprecedented moral disapproval from one major religious institution contrasted with apparent regression in a leading Western nation. The rough coincidence in time serves as a reminder of how fierce polarities over the death penalty can be, not just today but over the past 250 years. Both sides of the argument have a number of well-established themes in their arsenal, which are bound to be re-hashed in the current debate.

This is more than an abstract philosophy question, however. Rising American support for the death penalty raises, in the minds of some observers, the distinct possibility that we as a nation have somehow fallen away from civilized morality—not just by papal standards but in contrast to established practice in many European and Latin American societies as well. (We are one of only 51 nations worldwide that currently allow the penalty.) And while the recent shift in polling trends has not yet been accompanied by a major increase in the actual administration of capital punishment, 2017 did see a slight uptick compared to the previous year: 23 executions instead of 20, though still well below the recent peak of 98 two decades ago. That number includes some states that had seemed to be moving away from the death penalty. Nebraska recently carried out its first execution after voters overturned a decades-old ban on capital punishment in 2016. Tennessee, which had not executed a criminal since 2009, put a convicted murderer to death in August and planned two more executions before the end of the year. Commenting on the recent event, an op-ed in the New York Times noted serious doubts about the criminal’s mental competence and ongoing concern over the pain caused by the drugs administered in the execution: “We are not a civilized nation. We are not even close.”

U.S. Death Penalty Rates2

Year
Annual average


1930s
167


1940s
128


1950s
71.5


1960-76 (banned outright nationally 1972-76)
12


1977-99
26.5


2000-2009
50


2010-2017
39

It’s an opportune moment both to review the issues in the longstanding controversy and explore its current status in the United States. Does the death penalty indeed provide a good measure of civilization, and are Americans in fact failing to measure up? Are we, that is, facing yet another moral crisis?

Debate over the death penalty effectively began in the 18th century, thanks to the reevaluation of the individual promoted by the Enlightenment and the new willingness to subject established social traditions to critical review. To be sure, a first blow had been struck by Pennsylvania Quakers, whose Great Law of 1682 restricted capital punishment to a mere handful of crimes—an innovation quickly set aside by the British overlords. But it was Enlightenment intellectuals who developed an absolutist overall case against the death penalty, winning surprisingly rapid, if somewhat limited, public response.

Cesare Beccaria set the ball in motion in 1764 with a quickly translated essay on crime and punishment.3 Beccaria railed against the death penalty on two now-classic grounds: First, it was an affront to innate human dignity and a blot on the conscience of any society that supported it; and second, it was a practical failure, more likely to encourage crime than to suppress it. While Beccaria did not emphasize the third common argument, this was quickly introduced by contemporaries like Jeremy Bentham: Of all possible punishments, death was the only one that could not be reversed if a victim was discovered to be innocent.

Discussion of the death penalty as part of an unprecedented effort to define “cruel and unusual punishments” was further bolstered in the late 18th century by growing confidence that enlightened societies had a far better alternative in confronting major crime: the modern prison, where rehabilitation might occur. American reformers became particularly proud of their prison innovations, just as they took a lead in warning against (unspecified) excessive punishments in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. (And, though disillusioned, we still like prisons a lot.)

The humanitarian attacks on the death penalty had several concrete results, stretching into the 19th century across the Western world, including both Americas.4 First, they encouraged an impressive effort to reduce the number of crimes subject to capital punishment. Britain cut its list of death penalty crimes to 230 by 1825, and to a mere four by 1861. Religious crimes, including heresy and witchcraft, fell off the list. So did thefts and forgeries. Ultimately, only certain types of murders and treason were believed to require such an extreme response.5

A second result was that Western societies increasingly decided that, when it was administered, the death penalty should be imposed away from public view. Traditionally, public executions had been encouraged for their deterrent effect. Now, reformers worried that public displays would coarsen, not instruct, the crowd, and in any event were too barbaric for respectable viewers.6

Third: Increased efforts were made to reduce the suffering involved in the administration of death itself. The French famously adopted the guillotine in hopes of ensuring a less painful end. Later, Americans waxed enthusiastic over the electric chair for precisely the same reasons, and ultimately would turn toward chemical cocktails. Firing squads, traditional beheadings, and even hanging fell victim to the new sensibilities.

Finally, the execution of children was reconsidered, albeit hesitantly. In Britain, for example, a series of laws from 1908 onward progressively ended the death penalty for any crime committed when the perpetrator was under 18.

These were serious and sweeping changes in the ways that death was accepted as an appropriate response to crime. But of course they could also be considered a glass half empty, in the sense that they made the residual administration of capital punishment seem more acceptable and less barbaric—a situation that will sound familiar to many Americans today. Indeed, few societies took the anti-capital punishment argument to its logical conclusion, carving out exemptions and special cases that were clearly inconsistent with Beccarian orthodoxy. Michigan led the Western world by abolishing the penalty in 1847 (except for treason), though other states hesitated.  Portugal did the same in 1867, and reformers delight in noting that Portugal’s per capita murder rate now stands at a mere 25 percent of American levels.7 The Netherlands joined the small parade in 1870. But sweeping prohibition was rare even in the Scandinavian countries, which only began to move toward abolition during the interwar years.  

Far more common was a willingness to combine reform with continued administration of the death penalty against particularly serious crimes; or, as in countries like Austria, to abolish capital punishment only to reinstate it. Several American states moved against capital punishment amid the wave of Progressive reform in the early 20th century but soon relapsed amid the political and economic stresses of the interwar period. Then as today, support for the death penalty fluctuated, never quite achieving a stable consensus.

This suggests it is inherently difficult to abandon traditional responses to serious crimes, and not just in the United States or the Western orbit. Japan, for example, clings to the penalty despite a strikingly low crime rate, in the belief that it is an essential safeguard. Revenge, that oldest of human motivations to violence, continues to guide responses to some of the most unspeakable crimes (most obviously, treason and particularly gruesome murders). So does a deep belief—against a great deal of objective evidence—that without the death penalty murder rates would soar; it’s hard to shake off some reliance on an ultimate deterrence when major crime persists. This is why, even after more than two centuries of earnest argument and despite, or because of, some really significant reforms, the death penalty hangs on.

The United States, of course, has participated both in the basic debate and in most of the major reform moves as a full part of Western society—often, indeed, in a leadership role. From the 18th century onward, Americans have produced some of the most persuasive arguments in favor of abolition. Individual states, like Pennsylvania or Michigan, have often beat European counterparts to the punch, at least for a time. The most obvious distinctions in levels of civilization between the United States and other parts of the West—if the death penalty is a measure—did not clearly emerge before the last half century. Our sins, if sins they are, may be more recent than we imagine.

But even here, a couple cautions are in order. Inevitably, the first involves race. Americans have clearly been particularly willing to subject certain groups to capital punishment when they violate racial norms. Thus African Americans accused of violence against whites remain particularly likely to be put to death either judicially or, until the 1950s, extrajudicially. The second caution may be even more revealing. While American legislation on capital punishment from the late 19th to 20th century looks fairly conventional with respect to other Western nations, the rates of execution were often massively higher. During the 1940s, for example, over a thousand criminals were legally put to death in the United States; in contrast, during the whole period 1900-59, only 632 people were executed in all of England and Wales. Similar gaps, on a per capita basis, separate the United States and France in the first half of the 20th century. Levels of reliance on the death penalty as a response to crimes or fears of crime in the United States almost certainly diverged from the norm well before our own time, and this raises a disquieting possibility: Perhaps we have been less civilized all along.8

The most blatant divides between the United States and the rest of the West with regard to capital punishment opened up in the decades after World War II. But, as with so many aspects of the death penalty, some distinctions prove more apparent than real. American reforms, though sometimes more in deed than word, have often been significant, whereas European enlightenment has more than once proved to be skin deep. Maybe we are (slightly) more civilized than we imagine.

The deaths associated with World War II and the Holocaust clearly shocked Europeans and jolted certain groups into renewed action, in ways that simply did not apply to the United States. West Germany, for example, abolished the death penalty in 1947, in response to its own troubled past. More and more European states began to follow a similar pattern, reflecting the extent to which old arguments against the death penalty—its barbarity and ineffectiveness—were gaining new resonance in light of recent experience. This trend would ultimately culminate in the uniform abolition of the death penalty throughout the European Union and beyond, leaving Belarus as the only European country where capital punishment remains legal. Even Russia has joined the parade, at least officially.9

In contrast, the United States remained strongly wedded to the death penalty into the 1990s, except for a brief period in the 1970s when a Supreme Court ruling suspended all executions. To be sure, the same sentiments that moved Europe after World War II had some resonance in America, as the use of the death penalty steadily declined from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. But from 1977-99 a kind of American exceptionalism took hold, with annual rates of execution rising steadily.10 After 2000, however, both public opinion and the actions of many individual states turned against capital punishment yet again, bringing American policies and beliefs more in line with other Western nations, albeit belatedly and less completely.

The mounting disparities created abundant opportunities for Europeans (including several popes) to berate American backwardness, pleading, usually in vain, for clemency in individual cases. And in one important instance—subjecting adolescent criminals to the death penalty—the United States defied virtually the whole world, becoming literally the only country not to sign onto the charter of children’s rights which included a prohibition on capital punishment (though the Supreme Court did outlaw the juvenile death penalty in a 2005 ruling).  There is no question that, overall, the United States increasingly stood apart from an otherwise Western-wide commitment to not just limit the death penalty but abolish it outright.

That commitment was not always democratic, however. The European surge against the death penalty reflected not only revulsion against past excess, but an interesting gap between elites and public opinion. In virtually every new case of abolition, the first move occurred against the wishes of the majority, and for some time thereafter polls reflected a preference for restoration. In 1949, for example, 55 percent of West Germans supported a return to capital punishment. A majority of the French held similar views as recently as 1990. European governments, including the notoriously remote regime of the European Union, were able to bypass majority resistance in ways that many American leaders could not or would not. Cultural tolerance for the death penalty, in other words, did not vary as much as the policies suggested.11

Except that, in one final twist, once European countries did abolish the death penalty, public opinion almost always evolved toward fuller acceptance. Pride in this accomplishment, coupled with the recognition that crime rates did not soar in the absence of capital punishment, further distinguished Europe from the United States. By 2000, for example, only 25 percent of all West Germans (and 39 percent of those of East German background) now hoped that the death penalty might be restored. But because Americans had no experience with a criminal justice system devoid of capital punishment, they continued to see the death penalty as a vital corrective, which meant abolition efforts in the United States stalled.   

So what about the recent uptick in American support for capital punishment? What does it suggest about the fragility of our civilization?

It’s not hard to be gloomy, particularly because the uptick coincides with other trends that understandably worry many. Divisions over capital punishment correlate with many other dimensions of polarization—and while most of this is not really new, it will take on new meaning should the death penalty reemerge as a subject of national debate.

Republicans overwhelmingly support the death penalty; Democrats do not. Not all blue states are among the 19 that outlaw capital punishment, but most are. Evangelicals fiercely defend capital punishment, and Protestants generally offer majority support. Catholics waver a bit, depending on how the question is posed; sometimes, a small majority are in favor for particularly horrible crimes. African Americans, Hispanics and other minorities are opposed. College educated Americans differ from those with less education (though the biggest difference isolates those with a postgraduate degree—56 percent are opposed). Women are almost evenly divided, whereas a majority of men are in favor; young people are slightly less supportive than old.  The whole jigsaw eerily recalls the larger divisions over Trumpism.

And surely the 2018 uptick reflects the emotional pitch of our time as well, though with one puzzling and possibly even more troubling twist. Those who are roused by fears of crime and attacks may be doubling down on the death penalty, even as those with other priorities register their opposition. We have a long national history of turning toward the death penalty when stirred by real or imagined signs of growing crime rates; this was a major factor in the differences between American and European attitudes toward capital punishment by the 1980s.12 And support for the death penalty has a long and sordid connection with racial views as well. In the current climate, then, the growing polarization around capital punishment is hardly surprising. The one unexpected factor has been the striking increase of support for the death penalty on the part of independents (an 8 percent increase, to 52 percent). Is a move toward capital punishment among non-conservatives a sign that America as a whole is becoming more receptive to crime and immigration alarmism?

We may not need to sound the alarm bells too loudly. Levels of support for capital punishment remain far lower than they were two decades ago—even among Republicans. The use of capital punishment has declined massively in the United States over the past 60-plus years, and noticeably over the past two decades. There are few signs, as yet, that any of the abolitionist states are seeking to change course. While most Americans still accept capital punishment as morally valid, a considerable majority also recognizes that it does not clearly deter crime and may well harm innocent victims. And the increasing interest in sentencing reform complicates the current picture as well. America does not yet seem hell-bent on a return to the bad old days, though the situation certainly bears watching.

Comparative data always provides a mixture of anxiety and solace. To the extent that populist winds include some renewed support for the death penalty, the United States may not be alone. Among supporters of Brexit in the United Kingdom, for example, 53 percent want restoration of capital punishment, slightly more than advocate a return of corporal punishment in the schools. Similar currents may affect opinion in other European countries as well. But of course the overall public opinion figures remain quite different—Brexiters alone match American figures, which means the full UK patterns are still far more opposed. Whether this all adds up to a decisive challenge to America’s moral aspirations (if such aspirations persist) is not an easy call.

One can only respect those deeply committed to a continued fight against the death penalty, and the moral anguish that American ambivalence must cause. We remain less merciful, less civilized than our European cousins across the Atlantic, despite the fact that their enlightenment is more recent and complicated than we sometimes imagine. Current trends are not encouraging, though we need a few more years to judge with greater certainty.

Yet complexity should not stifle concern. We have, after all, a fairly recent national experience with a period of death penalty reduction followed by a resurgence. The increased support for and implementation of capital punishment from the late 1970s involved, among other things: a response to a real increase in serious crime; fears of crime that ultimately went well beyond reality (particularly by the 1990s); manipulation by campaigning politicians, eager to exaggerate the threat of crime; and particular urgency by some states, most obviously in the South, to resist any move toward a national ban.13 Some of these pathologies seem to have resurfaced today, most acutely in the form of Donald Trump, who has gone out of his way to exaggerate what remains a relatively minor spike in violent crime. Understanding the history of the death penalty and the real strides that have been made throughout the West should of course temper our moral scaremongering. There is much to celebrate in this history, even if it is imperfect and incomplete. But there are also new reasons to be alert.

[1]With 18 already by mid-August, 2018 levels will almost surely rise yet again.

[2]Michael Kronenwetter, Capital Punishment: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2001). See also the excellent statistical and policy collections from the Death Penalty Information Center, including “Facts about the Death Penalty,” August 14, 2018.

[3]Cesare Beccaria with Aaron Thomas, ed., On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings (University of Toronto Press, 2008).

[4]Frank Hartun, “Trends in the Use of Capital Punishment,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (November 1952). Pieter Spierenberg, The Spectacle of Suffering; Executions and the Evolution of Repression(Cambridge University Press, 1984). Juergen Martshukat, “Nineteenth-Century Executions as Performances of Law, Death, and Civilization,” in Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger, eds., The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment (Stanford University Press, 2005). Steven Wilf, “Anatomy and Punishment in late Eighteenth-Century New York,” Journal of Social History (Spring 1989).

[5]V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford University Press, 1994).

[6]Peter N. Stearns, Revolutions in Sorrow: The American Experience of Death in Global Perspective (Paradigm Publishers, 2007), pp. 69-74.

[7]Correlations between death penalty abolition and murder rates are complex. But it is broadly true that ending the death penalty normally correlates to relatively low murder rates (though cause and effect relations are difficult to establish): This is true for most of contemporary European history but also the rates, both historically and currently, in the 19 abolitionist American states.

[8]Hugo Adam Beday, ed., The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies (Oxford University Press, 1998); Robert M. Bohm, DeathQuest: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Capital Punishment in the United States (Routledge, 2017).

[9]Tanja Kleinsorge and Barbara Zatlokal, eds., The Death Penalty: Abolition in Europe(Council of Europe Publishing, 1999); EU Memorandum at the 54th United Nations General Assembly; David Jacobs and Jason T. Carmichael, “The Political Sociology of the Death Penalty,” American Sociological Review (February 2002); Francisco Panizza, “Human Rights: Global Culture and Social Fragmentation,” Bulletin of Latin American Research (May 1993).

[10]Kronenwetter, Capital Punishment.

[11]Amnesty International, “Facts and Figures on the Death Penalty” (September 1997); Death Penalty Information Center, “Gradual Decline in Support for the Death Penalty in Europe;” Death penalty around the world spreadsheet.

[12]Drew Desilver, “America’s death row population is shrinking,” Pew Research Center, April 22, 2015. Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, and So Much More (Basic Books, 2010). Glassner’s analysis shows that American fears on crime recurrently outstrip reality, particularly through the 1990s, but still true among some groups today.

[13]Add this to the renewed confidence some states are showing for the poisons now available—just as adjustments by 1977 had encouraged courts to decide that the death penalty could be administered in ways that were not “cruel and unusual.”

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Identity and the End of History

Since this point has already come up in some of the social media commentary on my new book Identity, I should address from the outset the relationship of this work to what I had written on the end of history. As someone said on social media, “Hard to believe that someone who proclaimed the end of history 25 years ago now gets to publish on identity as a driving factor in politics.”

The fact of the matter is that I had been writing about identity consistently over the years, beginning with my 1992 book. The title of that work was The End of History and the Last Man. My superficial critics did not bother to read the book, and in particular ignored the concluding chapters on the “last man”. The latter, of course, was a reference to Nietzsche’s “men without chests,” that is, the docile, passionless individuals who emerged at the end of history. They had no chests because they had no pride, and that very passionlessness was what would drive a revolt against the modern world.

The fundamental defect of our modern, prosperous democratic world, I said in 1992, was its failure to address the problem of thymos. Thymos is a Greek word usually translated into English as “spiritedness,” which Socrates discusses in Book IV of the Republic. It is the part of the human personality that demands recognition of one’s inner dignity, and the seat of the emotions of pride, anger, and of shame. Thymos, I argued (following G. W. F. Hegel) has been the primary driver of the entire human historical process.

In my 1992 book I distinguished between two manifestations of thymos which I labeled isothymia and megalothymia. The former is the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people, and is the emotion underlying much of modern identity politics. Identity politics began to take off in the 1960s following the major social movements that emerged then, built around the marginalization of different groups in society: racial minorities, women, gays and lesbians, the disabled, and so on. Their central demand was equal recognition of their dignity, together with a substantive redress of their social condition.

Megalothymia, by contrast, was the demand of certain individuals to be recognized as superior to others. Liberal democracies were designed in part to contain megalothymia: The American Founding Fathers devised a complex constitutional system of checks and balances to prevent a would-be Caesar from centralizing power, as the historical Caesar had done at the end of the Roman Republic. As James Madison said, ambition was needed to counter ambition. I actually mentioned Donald Trump back in my 1992 book, presenting him as an example of a hugely ambitious individual whose energies had been (it seemed at the time) safely diverted into entrepreneurship. Little did I know back then that this wouldn’t be enough for him.

I stated in The End of History and the Last Man that neither nationalism nor religion were about to disappear as powerful forces in the modern world. As I explain in my new book, both can be seen as thymotic demands for recognition. The stability of modern liberal democracy is threatened by the fact that it does not fully solve the problem of thymos. Modern liberal democracy promised universal and recognition of the dignity of its citizens, but frequently failed to deliver on these promises. Moreover, not everyone is satisfied with universal recognition: People want recognition of their particular identities and the groups to which they feel bound, particularly if they have suffered a history of marginalization. That is what is driving Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements today.  Demands for particularlistic recognition can also take the form of nationalists or Islamists defending the dignity of their communities, or of ambitious demagogues like Donald Trump.

For the record, I have obviously modified many of the views I expressed back in 1989-1992. The End of History was written at the mid-point of what Samuel Huntington labeled the Third Wave of democratization, and for the past decade we have clearly been in what my colleague Larry Diamond labels a “democratic recession.” I still believe that history is directional and progressive, and that the modernization process points to liberal democracy as its fullest embodiment. But getting there is harder than I believed back in 1992, and the possibility of institutional decay is ever-present. My two volumes The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay should be seen an effort to rewrite The End of History and the Last Man based on what I now understand about global politics. I will provide a fuller account of this rethinking in a subsequent post.

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