Second paragraph of third chapter:
In the previous two chapters, we have examined the culprits co-responsible for the strange death of what we used to call the liberal international order.² We have analysed the resentments, aspirations and chicanery of both the Central European populists and Vladimir Putin. But they plainly did not act alone. Indeed, no Poirot-style sleuthing is required to discover that the current President of the United States has been their willing accomplice.³ His motives for turning his back on America’s allies, disavowing multilateral treaties, and trying to wreck the international institutions created by the US after the Second World War are a matter of controversy. But whatever his motives, he has been an eminent confederate in the gang-slaying of the ‘liberal hegemony’ that characterized international politics for three decades after 1989.
² Graham Allison, “The Myth of the Liberal Order, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2018)
³ David Leonhardt, “Trump Tries to Destroy the West”, The New York Times (Io June 2018); Robert Kagan, “Trump Marks the End of America as World’s “Indispensable Nation”, Financial Times (19 November 2016).
I am conscious that my last couple of books reviews here have been less than positive, so I’m very glad to turn that around and give a glowing recommendation to this short explanation of how western liberal democracy got into its current mess. There are three chapters, one on Viktor Orbán and the other Eastern European populists, one on Vladimir Putin and Russia, and one on Donald trump, with an afterword on China.
The key argument is that “the future was better yesterday”; western liberals failed to grasp the nature of the task of building and preserving democracy and decent societies in the former Socialist world, and indeed at home in the USA, and that populist politicians, by operating smartly within and outside the new rules, were able to capture the imagination of their own publics and gain and consolidate power. Even now that Orbán and PiS are out, and Trump appears to be struggling, the arguments remain valid.
Indeed, I am sure that the authors would agree that the missing part of the book in retrospect is Western Europe, where we actually have a populist (though relatively well behaved) government in Italy, Nigel Farage seems very likely to win the next British election, the Rassemblement National is not quite as close but close enough to worry about in France, and the AfD is on the rise in Germany.
Their conclusion is that in the end, populism does not present long term stable solutions in the way that liberal democracy does; but that liberals remained complacent for too long, and did not pay attention to the internal threats to the democratic system. They speculate – hope, perhaps – that the rise of China, a a more durable alternative system but one which is not very interested in exporting its societal model, may prove a stimulus to liberals to become more creative.
Nine years on, a lot of this remains just as valid, with the second Trump term proving worse than the first. We have a long way to go.
You can get The Light That Failed here.
This bubbled to the top of three of my lists simultaneously- the top unread book acquired in 2022, the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and the shortest book acquired in 2022 on the unread shelf. Next on the first two of those piles is The Damnable Question, by George Dangerfield; next on the third is Kosovo: The Path To Contested Statehood in the Balkans, by James Ker-Lindsay.
