The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea

by Bill Emmott

This can be achieved only if both aspects of the formula are attended to: openness and equality. These are the lodestars of the Western idea. Without openness, the West cannot thrive, for countries need the ideas, the competition, the new elites, the wide opportunities that openness brings if they are to keep on evolving. But without equality, the West cannot last, for it is in the inclusive nature of citizenship and a sense of the broad public interest that the secret of Western sustainability has lain, by offering hope of mobility and improvement to all social groups, and means to resolve divisions and conflict fairly peaceably.

This is one of those times. Openness, an openness enhanced by globalisation and by the liberal reforms pioneered and promoted by Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and others, has had huge success, all over the world. But it has also eroded and undermined equality of political rights and thus social trust in many countries by producing concentrations of wealth and power that have proved capable of subverting democracy and manipulating public policy, as well as making free markets less free by establishing new monopolies to replace old ones.

What is needed is new thinking about how openness and equality can be made to live happily together, a “neo-neoliberalism” that restores a more classical understanding of what is meant by, and required from, equality. This is the sort of understanding that was held two centuries ago by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, both thinkers who were sensitive to the moral requirements for societies to function well and the need to deal with the trade-offs and other consequences of untrammelled liberty.

To achieve revival, liberalising policies and movements are always necessary. Obstacles to innovation, enterprise and ideas have to be removed; barriers and privileges that reward and enrich some groups at the expense of the wider public interest have to be dismantled. There is no other way to treat the scleroses and rigidities that are sapping the energies of Western societies, that are fulfilling the predictions of Mancur Olson in his book The Rise and Decline of Nations. For they are the natural yet also debilitating consequences of democracy and liberty themselves. But liberalisation alone is not sufficient. It needs to be done in harmony with equality, in ways that preserve a sense of fairness, a belief in the equality of voice and rights that makes citizens feel they belong, that they are indeed citizens and not subjects or victims.

Liberalisation must be aimed at equalisation of rights and opportunities, not at shifting privileges from one set of hands to another in the belief that the new unfairness will be more productive than the old.

1 Openness is all, but not everything has to be open, all the time It has been by opening the doors and windows to bracing draughts of fresh air that democracies have prospered, exchanging people, culture, ideas, goods, services and capital, letting “ideas have sex”, as Matt Ridley memorably put it in his paean to the Western formula for progress, The Rational Optimist.

we can note that after the East Asian financial crisis, for example, the returning flow of capital, often hunting bargains, helped accelerate the recovery. On the 20th anniversary of this crisis, what will be highlighted is that virtually all the countries of East and South-East Asia have done well in the ensuing years, and that the main casualty of the crisis was the dictatorship of Suharto in Indonesia.

Migrants are a welcome and necessary injection of youth and fresh ideas and energies to any society. But the case for some controls on the speed and volume with which they can arrive in a particular society is also strong. With hindsight, the transitional periods during which new, poorer members of the EU in 2004 had to wait before their citizens could enjoy freedom of movement to other EU countries should have been longer than the seven years that was then agreed. A longer, perhaps phased introduction of free movement would be wiser for future EU members. At the same time, more public resources need to be devoted to facilitating integration of all kinds of immigrants and to supporting areas that may feel especially sensitive about the economic and cultural impact of migration.

2 Equality is all, but it isn’t all about money

The ability to become rich is generally accepted as a part of our liberty and an advantage of openness. But when wealth comes to harm our sense of shared citizenship, when it erects barriers rather than defining opportunities, and when it becomes expressed in differential rights in such matters as access to work or to education, then the glue that holds our societies together starts to fail. This is what we have been seeing in many Western societies.

It is not, in other words, a matter of the state acting as Robin Hood, redistributing money from the rich to the poor, though some countries may opt for that. Direct state intervention in labour markets through higher statutory minimum wages is another method likely to be helpful in current conditions. Mostly, however, it should be a matter of the state acting as the flag-bearer for equal citizenship and as the guardian against the unfair entrenchment of advantage or hindrance of choice and mobility.

In the US, pressure on the Supreme Court to revise its definition of money as a form of free speech will be one way in which this battle can be fought. Others will include reinforcement of antitrust laws and practices, the breaking up of mega-banks and the public privileges they hold, and international co-operation to deter tax evasion.

3 Education, at all levels and ages, is the single most vital support for equality as well as being a country’s most vital economic and social resource The greatest contributions to equality and a spreading sense of citizenship in Western countries in the post-1945 era have come from two sources: the restoration of full employment or something close it, following the poverty of the interwar years; and the spread of access to public education, first in schools and then in colleges and universities.

Every successful aspirant to modernisation and economic development, from Japan to South Korea, China to Chile, has got there with a big emphasis on education. And yet in the West public funding for higher education is frequently allowed to decline, student debts pile up, and educational institutions of all levels are sacrificed at times of budgetary stringency.

Increasingly, however, there are also debates to be had about how best to provide education and retraining to people later in life, and at whose expense, so that they can adapt to changing technologies, think in new ways and adapt to extended working lives.

Equality between the young and the old is as important as between social classes or ethnic groups

Welfare states are under severe financial pressure, whether in Europe, the US or Japan, in part because of recession or slow growth but largely because of the rising costs of public pensions and health care for the elderly. The young are generally too polite to blame the cuts in their education or the inequity in their labour rights on their grandparents, but it is true nevertheless.

Working lives, and the distinction between work and retirement, have to be wholly rethought. Retirement ages – or, more importantly, ages of eligibility for public pensions – need to be raised to 70 as soon as possible.

The one thing that is definitely known about the world in 2050 is that many more people alive then, in both the West and the rest, will be well over the age of 65. This is the era of the 100-year life, at least from the point of view of those being born today, and our sense of equality and the rights it brings will have to adjust accordingly.

5 The rule of law is a non-negotiable guarantor of equality and source of confidence among citizens and between nations

It is often forgotten or overlooked that the rule of law is the fount of equality: the right to equal treatment before the law for everyone whether high or low, government or citizen, is what guarantees our freedoms, protects our property and underwrites our citizenship.

The rule of law is challenged by inequalities of income and wealth because of the unequal access to costly justice that wealth can provide, and by the ability of huge corporations to bully and manipulate the law in their own interests. It is challenged on each and every occasion by corruption at any level, and by shoulder-shrugging tolerance of corruption by judicial, police, media or political systems. Corruption seeps further into our societies than we often realise, since it is not only a case of bribes but also of the favouritism that arises when public officials and private interests become entangled. The rule of law is challenged, above all, by populists like President Trump who demand the right to stand above it.