The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Do we ever learn from history? If so, the parallels between the world today and the world in 1914 should strike us forcefully. Then, as now, the world’s big economies were deeply intertwined. The decades preceding the First World War marked a peak of globalisation that the world economy only regained in the 1990s. Like today, people believed ever-deepening ties of commerce rendered the idea of war irrational. It was thus unthinkable. People had grown complacent after decades of peace. Of course, there was always the crackle of distant gunfire, such as Britain’s Boer War, in South Africa, and periodic colonial skirmishes on almost every continent. But the last real clash between the ‘civilised powers’ had been more than forty years before, in the 1870–1 Franco-German War. Even then, it was strictly bilateral. Europe’s last big war had wrapped up almost a century before, with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Much like my own generation, someone of Keynes’s age was unlikely to have direct experience of conflict – or any real fears they would be touched directly by war. Like the Boer War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 took place in another time zone and was fought by a primarily lower-class volunteer army. The rest of us carried on shopping, as George W. Bush had urged us to do. More to the point, there was plenty of appetite to shop. Just as we exult in our Apple products and artisanal coffee, so Keynes’s generation revelled in their Darjeeling tea and the internal combustion en...