The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

They were companion volumes: you could not develop your economy unless you were a democracy, or so we claimed. The two also shared an unapologetic ignorance of history, which meant they were seriously misleading. In reality, economies have often developed behind protectionist walls – that is what almost every Western country did in the nineteenth century. Had we forgotten that Alexander Hamilton’s ‘infant industry’ protections carried through into the twentieth century? Hamilton took this mercantilist approach directly from England’s Tudor monarchs, who used protections to shield English wool manufacturers from their Flemish competitors. Likewise, plenty of countries have industrialised under authoritarian conditions. Otto von Bismarck took Germany on the blood and iron road to prosperity in the late nineteenth century. Japan’s Meiji Restoration was a paragon of top-down development. What about China over the last generation – and today? But the West was on a proselytising mission. The big questions had been settled.