I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadn’t been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming. The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didn’t think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didn’t seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus ça change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didn’t believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the “death strip” from East to West would make you think again.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didn’t know what was coming next. But from today’s perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign “globalisation”, in which “free markets”, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have a positive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. “Populists” continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didn’t see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, it’s hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called “the free world”. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people don’t change, not really. I’m just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

This was the thesis of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two — communism and fascism — were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism — the elder brother — is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

What is crucial to understand — and this is what makes liberalism an ideology — is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In this “migration of the holy” our religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether in Jacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism — the system which G. K. Chesterton called the “monster that grows in deserts” — with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

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By Matthew Crawford

Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this way totalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalism’s Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalism’s very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of “public health”, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of today’s West — the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity — all of this is the manifestation not of liberalism’s failure but of its success. The “progressives” who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals. These woke radicals, they cry, are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to “classical liberalism”! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of “classical liberalism”, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

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Thank God for liberalism

By Tomiwa Owolade

This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both “Left” and “Right”. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its “diversity” becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesn’t have much to say.

But there’s more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that we’ve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use”. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again — whether we like it or not.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: “a future of self-limitation”, in which people choose to practice “self-governance in local communities”, or “a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression”.

I know which I’d prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent — especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself — is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent “the people”. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more “populist” (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both “Left” and “Right” and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians won’t roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted “liberal order”, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

Yet to see things in that way is to overlook the peculiar contribution of communism to the tyranny exerted in its name. It is also to ignore the abiding relevance of a political system whose charm in Left-wing circles, as we learn from the pronouncements of Jeremy Corbyn and Seumas Milne, has been barely diminished by its enormous legacy of human suffering.

Let us go back a little further than 1989, to 1977, the year when the seeds of what became known as the Velvet Revolution were sown in the former Czechoslovakia. A group of intellectuals, among them the playwright Václav Havel, were in the habit of meeting in private apartments in Prague, where the philosopher Jan Patočka would lecture on Plato, Aristotle, Husserl and Heidegger.

Patočka had been forcibly retired from the university after 1968, and his private seminars were conducted in secret. There was a real fear that, should word of them reach the ears of the secret police, arrests would follow. After all, what business did ordinary citizens have in discussing philosophy outside the official universities?

Confined within a secure lecture hall, supervised by scholars trained in Marxist dogma, philosophy had a legitimate place in the system. But, discussed in a private apartment into the early hours of the morning, by people spurred on by the spirit of free enquiry, it was evidently a threat to the state.

The suspicion was justified. In due course there emerged from these private discussions a charter of rights, asking the state to respect the elementary freedoms granted under the Helsinki Accords to the citizens of Czechoslovakia. Charter 77 was signed by those attending Jan Patočka’s seminar, and by a widening circle of brave friends and sympathisers. Patočka himself stepped forward as the Charter’s first spokesman, was arrested and brutally interrogated, with the result that he became ill. Taken to hospital, he continued to be interrogated until he collapsed and died.

In those times, when private education was criminalised, and the universities and colleges were devoted to Marxist-Leninist dogma, the older generation of professors, the best of whom had been expelled from their positions following the Soviet invasion in 1968, had no other way of passing on their knowledge than through such secret seminars. For most of them publication was impossible, and the important books were unavailable or banned.

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Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

The chain of intellectual inspiration had been broken, and they were owners and curators of its last severed link. They lived at the end of an educational tradition, and their attempts to nurture that tradition and to pass it on had to be conducted underground. Do not think that this was an accidental feature of communism: it was the real political meaning of the system. Knowledge means privilege, advantage, curiosity, free enquiry, all of which were threats to the proletarian revolution and to the Party that had taken charge of it.

The Prague of those days was the perfect setting for this drama. A full stop had been put to its spiritual life, but somehow the city stood, half decrepit, above the memory of its greatness. Its dilapidated palaces looked down on the routines of a frightened people, with police on every corner, and deserted churches and civic buildings reminding the citizen that communal life had stopped.

You could be compelled to take part in the joyless May Day parades, but anything like spontaneous social life had vanished long ago. Buildings were boarded up, their crumbling facades raining down on the wooden scaffolds that protected pedestrians from these falling fragments of Heaven. A strange silence prevailed, interrupted only by the squeal of trams, and the city still held onto fragments of its former life like a beautiful statue on a tomb.

Thanks in part to that extraordinary atmosphere, the underground became a moral idea, and around that idea there congregated all the hopes of an educated class deprived of recognition, and forbidden to teach. Through my own contacts with that class, I came to understand why those attending the underground seminars were treated so severely.

What disturbed the authorities was not the fact that these peculiar people were studying Plato. After all, Plato was studied in the official universities too. The problem was that they were studying Plato together, and without asking permission. They had created a club of their own, outside the vigilance of the state, and they had united in friendship to pursue that goal. They had created a fragment of civil society, and in doing so had brought meaning into their lives beyond anything delivered by the grim routines of the communist bureaucracy.

In the Czechoslovakia of those times there was a hunger for civil society. Older people remembered the clubs, troupes, parades, pilgrimages, dances, bands, teams and regiments that were the lost heart of their nation. Younger people looked enviously at those Western societies in which pop groups, dances, festivals and protests offered a life outside the system. And the more serious the desire for those things, the more determined was the Party to forbid them.

The underground meetings and seminars opened a path back to civil society. They promised a society shaped by the free decisions of its members, in which differences of opinion, outlook and purpose would be smoothed away by the sheer joy of cooperation, and in which there would be neither top-down dictatorship nor ideological conformity.

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How identity politics drove the world mad

By Roger Scruton

The war on civil society is the essence of the communist project. Appointed as home minister after the communist takeover of Hungary in 1948, Janos Kádar abolished 5,000 associations in the space of a year, from brass bands to knitting clubs, from scout troupes to shooting parties, from church charities to private schools. He made it a criminal offence to gather money for charitable purposes, and made all schools and youth organisations into the property of the state. Similar policies were undertaken in Czechoslovakia.

All free associations were seen by the communists as places of danger, where hierarchies, distinctions, privileges and deals could challenge the role of the Vanguard Party in its fight for equality and “social justice”. Reflecting on this, I came to see why freedom of association belongs with freedom of speech in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Those two freedoms are the foundation of civil society, and the necessary shield against the abuse of political power.

Take them away and all power ends up in the hands of the state. The result is what we know as “totalitarianism”.

Communism vanished from Europe 30 years ago — but the totalitarian impulse remains. Freedom of association has no sacrosanct status on the Left; in our country we see this in the matter of country sports which are, and will always be, the targets of leftist disapproval.

The Labour Party does not see certain laws forbidding free association as an assault on legitimate freedoms but as a moral duty of the state. After the ban on fox hunting, the Party has likewise set its sights on grouse shooting, not from any concern for the grouse, which are well cared for only because we shoot them, but out of hostility to the kind of people who congregate with guns on grouse moors.

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Cuba killed my communism

By James Bloodworth

But the associations that most need protecting, now in Britain as then in Central Europe, are not those devoted to the leisure of country people but those in which people associate for the sake of knowledge.

At the recent Labour Party conference Left-wing activists called for private education to be criminalised, as it was by the communists, and the funds of private schools to be confiscated and used for the “common good”. Meanwhile leftists in universities are mounting effective campaigns to prevent free discussion and to expel those professors whose views they dislike. Politicised subjects like Gender Studies, which forbid ideological disagreement and have doctrine and dogma as their goal, are driving free discussion from the curriculum.

It is not clear, yet, how far this will go. But the arguments given and the tactics adopted are exactly those of the communists in 1948. The state is seen as the guardian of public morality; it must therefore forbid the misuse of our freedoms.

It is surely likely that the underground university that operated in Czechoslovakia in the Eighties will be needed before long in Britain. In preparing for that moment we should be looking back, not to 1989 but to 1977, when the battle which had been fought and lost in the post-war years began again in earnest. And it is our battle today. Once again we must fight for civil society against the state, and for free association against totalitarian control.

This, I think, best summed up my dad’s attitude to his native Germany and, to some extent, my own. Written by a now long-forgotten Right-wing German-Jewish thinker named Hans Joachim Schoeps, whom my father knew and idolised in his youth, it expresses a strange attachment to a certain idea of Germany; one which transcended even the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s.

For Jews with deep roots in that country, people like my father, the possibility of some ongoing connection even after the Holocaust was made easier if your own immediate family had mostly escaped in time, and if your own school days had been marked by protection: by a clutch of loyal friends, by an anti-Nazi Catholic headmaster and the temporary advantages which came of being the child of a frontline solider in the 1914-1918 war.

For me, with two German-born parents and thinking that getting old inevitably meant the acquisition of a German accent (when I was small, I knew nobody over seventy without one), Germany obviously loomed large in my childhood. My grandparents holidayed in Switzerland, where they could bathe in the German-speaking environment without having to confront Germany itself.

In an otherwise essentially English home, I learnt Hoppe, Hoppe Reiter at my mother’s knee, we ate Suppenfleisch and Aufschnitt and everyone got quite excited when Stollen became available in December. But aside from that, in the Britain of the 1960s and 70s, emphasising difference was not something one was encouraged to do.

The formative experiences of my parents were those of wartime — serving in the Army in my father’s case, living in provincial boarding houses wherever my grandfather was stationed and then dodging the Doodlebugs back in London in my mother’s. Penniless and living hand-to-mouth in rooms in other people’s homes, my grandparents felt obliged during the war not to speak the enemy tongue, which is why my mother forgot most of her German and I had to learn it from scratch.

My sister and I were thereafter drilled to appreciate Britain’s generosity in letting our family in, and in patriotically celebrating the inherent decency of the British people and the superiority of the country’s democratic institutions.

On the other hand, as a music fanatic from an early age, I could not fail to notice that all the best music was German. Steeped in Beethoven symphonies, Mozart concertos and Schubert Lieder, taken to concerts at the Royal Festival Hall by German grandmother (always Mutti, never Oma, the latter tag having been taken by the previous generation), I eventually came to Bruckner and more problematically Wagner.

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It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

It is hard really to understand Der Lindenbaum or Winterstuermen wichen dem Wonnemond without relating them directly to the attractions of a specifically German landscape and sensibility. Likewise, a growing interest in philosophy led me towards Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, although even in translation I found them more impenetrable than the Locke, Berkeley and Hume with which I had started.

This romanticised view of a Germany of high culture and refined thought was occasionally disturbed by encounters with grim historical reality and those who had experienced it. But yet another level of complexity was added when I encountered the actually existing Germany, that admirable and efficient but seemingly rather shallow land, which I visited first in an attempt to improve my German and later, at times on a weekly basis, when I travelled there for work.

There was so much to admire in the Federal Republic, both before the wall came down and even more so afterward when it generously if occasionally insensitively embraced the east. But in an effort to reinvent itself, it seemed to have cut itself off, perhaps inevitably, from the good as well as the bad in its past.

Early in the current decade, with Ukip rising in the polls, some kind of premonition of Brexit led me to apply for German citizenship, which I acquired with speed and ease in 2012, well ahead of a subsequent surge of applications from people with similar backgrounds to my own.

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This has added complexity to my attitude to what followed. Something of a Eurosceptic, the idea of actually leaving the European Union (for which, unlike Europe itself, I felt little enthusiasm) seemed far-fetched. I felt some sympathy nevertheless for the Leavers, but thought it would be highly hypocritical to vote to leave having secured my own rights as an EU citizen.

My children eventually followed me. My wife has followed a far more arduous route of becoming a Spanish citizen through her own Sephardic origins. And now I find myself in the camp of those erstwhile Remainers who believe in the importance of respecting the vote that took place.

Layers of complex and contradictory feelings about Germany were added to when my daughter decided to study German (with Russian) at University. Her interest in the language had, I think, little to do with her origins but much to do with perversity of the case system (although, I understand, it is as nothing compared to other languages such as Czech and Hungarian).

We took advantage of our daughter’s year in Germany to visit her in the small Hessian city of Fulda, where she found a welcome from the tiny local Jewish community, mainly made up of elderly Ukrainians, and then weekends in Hamburg and Munich, visiting the local art galleries as well as the local synagogues. Thus she found herself as a Cambridge undergraduate on a year abroad in Germany, but at the same time as a German citizen.

All of which brings us to today and the General Election. There is no doubt that a dread of a Labour victory is a fairly common sentiment among British Jews. This seems not unreasonable when the Leader of the Opposition has invited to Parliament and described as “friends” people who claim that Jews drink the blood of gentile babies and whose organisation calls for the murder of all Jews anywhere in the world.

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The Left is deceiving itself over antisemitism

By Douglas Murray

This would-be Labour prime minister has written a glowing introduction to an Edwardian-era book which argues that the Jews were responsible for the evils of the British Empire, and lauded a mural whose own creator has explicitly declared that it depicts Jewish bankers (but also some gentile ones) playing monopoly on the backs of the exploited of the world. None of which, as far as I can see, has anything to do with the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Looking across the continent we see Jews more comfortable wearing explicit symbols of their faith walking the streets of Warsaw or Budapest than down those of so-called multi-racial Paris or Berlin, while those quickest to defend Corbyn as merely “anti-Zionist” denounce as anti-Semitic people who criticise George Soros (as if his merely being Jewish places him above criticism) or denounce the very use of the term “cultural Marxism” as racist.

As for Germany, it continues to be seen as a model of a modern democracy by most Jews of my generation, a country which has done much to atone for its past. Yet recently a German court ruled that an attempt to burn down a synagogue in Wuppertal was not anti-Semitic but merely “anti-Zionist”; the last time the synagogue was burnt was in 1938. And only last month two people were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Halle.

Both some recent migrants and some of their bitterest opponents in the AfD and on the far-Right blame the Jews for whatever it is they do not like, but alas this is something not limited to Germany alone.

Ja, nein und trotzdem; nothing is simple in the relationship between Germans and Jews and the past, it seems, is never really over.

Gorbachev is widely reviled in today’s Russia for, as many see it, destroying the Soviet Union and their country’s status as a great power. It may take another generation before Russians regard him, if they ever do, through a more charitable lens, as the heroic figure who facilitated the end of communism and accelerated the demise of the Soviet bloc in such a way that these momentous transformations took place largely without bloodshed.

So much for the nostalgia. What about the unexpected timewarp? The surprise was less at how Gorbachev has aged — it is 30 years, after all; the early death of his beloved Raisa (in 1999) hit him hard, he is diabetic, and he has had spells in hospital with heart problems. It was more that, when Gorbachev voiced his fears for today, his apprehensions seemed framed by quite a different world, the world of then rather than now. Asked about contemporary dangers to world peace, he replied: “As long as weapons of mass destruction exist, primarily nuclear weapons, it’s a colossal danger.” Repeating a theme from his earliest summits with Reagan, he declared: “All nuclear weapons should be destroyed, to save ourselves and the planet.”

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By James Hawes

His prism remains that of East-West relations, the bipolar world that ended with the Soviet collapse, and the premise of Mutual Assured Destruction that underlay the string of arms control treaties concluded by the United States and the Soviet Union. Then, these treaties were hailed as guarantees of security for both countries and the European states in between. Now, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (1972), renounced by the United States in 2002, the Intermediate-range Nuclear forces Treaty (1987), which the US withdrew from after citing violations by Russia, and the latest Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (2010), which expires early in 2021, are passing successively into abeyance without being either renewed or replaced.

Is the world a more dangerous place because of that? Some would say it is, and blame Donald Trump for trifling with global security and abandoning the responsibilities of the United States as world policeman. Could it be, though, that the apparent lack of urgency to negotiate updated agreements is less a reflection of the US President’s brand of isolationism than evidence of how the world, and the perception of major threats, have changed since those years? Is codified arms control, including nuclear arms control, simply less significant than it was,  at least in the bilateral form it then took?

The tentative answer to this has to be yes — and it is one reason why Gorbachev’s anniversary observations marking the fall of the Berlin Wall sound so dated. The concerns of today, which may themselves be hopelessly obsolete in far less than 30 years’ time, are very different from those that derived from the East-West divide then.

How different became apparent when I took part in a discussion at the annual debating festival, the Battle of Ideas last weekend, entitled “Can we stop World War III?”.  Our panel put forward a range of views, but almost entirely absent — either from the presentations or from questions — were the following: any suggestion that World War Three would be waged between East and West in the old Cold War sense; arms control treaties, including nuclear weapons treaties; and even — strange though it might seem in the light of Washington’s recent preoccupations — Russia.

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By Peter Franklin

The biggest difference between then and now is the focus on China, and the prospect of an eventual conflict with the United States, as the one power rises and the other — perhaps — declines. Thirty years ago, China was nowhere as a global player. It was isolated after after its leaders had crushed the democracy movement at Tiananmen Square; it was not projecting its power any further afield. Even now, it is reasonable to question how sure and steady China’s continued rise will be. It faces economic and demographic difficulties, the Communist Party has not relinquished — or been forced to relinquish — power. Internal turmoil cannot be excluded.

But the US and its neighbours are already uneasy about possible plans Beijing may have to control the South China Sea, and there is a fresh interest in maritime power. Perhaps those two British aircraft carriers some dismissed as a vanity project are not such an irrelevance after all. There is also much about China, from mass surveillance to the treatment of its non-Han ethnic groups, to the way it acquires other people’s technology, that could spell dangers, even confrontation, ahead. Hong Kong today has become a front-line of sorts, where one system is confronting another, but the imbalance in power between the two sides suggest that, if it escalates further, it will be settled only one way.

Then again, the whole nature of warfare is changing. There is no sign that regional conflicts will cease but whether they could escalate into a world war, however, is another matter. If you consider the existing or likely flashpoints of today — the greater Middle East, Kashmir, the Korean Peninsula — only Syria has come near to becoming a proxy conflict on the Cold War model and it is winding down. US self-sufficiency in energy has radically altered its calculation of risk when considering military engagement, even of a relatively limited kind.

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By Helen Thompson

Will the next world war — if there is one — even be about territory at all, or control? Will it entail physical combat? It is not necessary to make prophecies about Artificial Intelligence to conceive of conflicts conducted remotedly, wars waged by cyber threats to critical infrastructure and weapon systems that require no human intervention.

This is why Mikhail Gorbachev sounds as though he lives in another world when he calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons worldwide as his prescription for world peace. Nuclear weapons still pose an existential threat, but the nuclear threat is now one among others, and deterrence may no longer be the only answer. If the US has the capability to sabotage other countries’ nuclear research and perhaps even their tests, that “smart” technological approach might achieve the same effect as developing your own nuclear weapon at vastly less cost.

International arms control treaties might not have completely outlived their usefulness. After all, they were never just about counting missiles and warheads. They were about establishing a framework of trust — which is one reason why they were seen as a useful start to trying to improve US-Russia relations whenever those relations soured. But the age of bilateral arms control has to be over. New arms negotiations might just foster a US-Russia rapprochement (though this looks unlikely before the next US election), but — as both the US and Russia quietly acknowledge, any serious arms control in future must include China.

In 30 years the world of international security has changed beyond all compare: geographically with the rise of China and the emergence of India and Pakistan as nuclear weapons states; technologically with the advent of cyber warfare, and philosophically with the evisceration of Soviet communism and threat from climate change. None of this was on the horizon when the Berlin Wall fell. A hero of his time, Mikhail Gorbachev’s anniversary call for the destruction of all nuclear weapons offers a salutary reminder of how far and fast the world has moved on.

It’s still asking itself the same questions. Or it has swept them under the carpet while the ‘hobbyist Left’ — which has captured the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn — preoccupies itself with language-policing and virtue-signalling, rather than purpose.

That, at least, is the contention of A Left for Itself, the new book by historian David Swift. Swift argues — persuasively — that contemporary Left-wing politics “is better understood as less of a political movement and more as a form of identity or enjoyable past time”. It has become more a “consumption activity” than a way to improve people’s lives, as the political scientist Eitan Hersh has noted.

Many of us have been sounding the alarm about identity politics for a while, not least because it is too often class blind; as Swift writes, it “places the poorest and most vulnerable of white men as fundamentally more exalted than the richest and most privileged women or people of colour”.

But it is also inherently a movement of anti-intellectualism, which prioritises lived experience over objective truth. Lived experience is clearly important, but it is not everything — as most middle-class Lefties are apt to remember when they encounter a white British person who doesn’t like immigration because of the social effects it has had on their hometown. That experience is treated with such reverence is why politics today is less about what you think and what talents you possess, than about what you are, how you feel and how you can successfully turn that into a performative online brand.

As the historian Thomas Frank has argued, Left-wing politics has become “a matter of shallow appearances, or fatuous self-righteousness… a politics in which the beautiful and wellborn tell the unwashed and the beaten-down and the funny-looking how they ought to behave”.

Identity politics divides the world into compartmentalised interest groups and can be shockingly myopic. The Canadian feminist academic K.E. Noss, for example, has argued that initiatives to tackle female circumcision are an example of “neo-colonial violence”.

From the same author

Red alert: the childish fad for socialism

By James Bloodworth

In 2017, the pop singer Lily Allen wrote on Twitter that “Islamists don’t hate women more or less than anyone else”. Meanwhile, feminists are currently under attack from many on the Left, as Swift notes, for their refusal to recognise that trans women are women in the same sense as biological women.

These divisive conflicts are facilitated and fuelled by social media, which Peter Pomerantsev describes as a “major-narcissism engine that can never quite be satisfied, leading us to take up more radical positions to get more attention”. Denouncing one’s opponents on social media is easy and costs nothing. Yet it serves to drive political discourse further to the extremes.

As Swift writes: “when conservatives say that ‘feminism/anti-racism/LGBT rights have gone too far’ they clearly aren’t talking about the end of gender pay gaps, racist violence or LGBT teen suicides. What they are talking about is the language of online activists and the attention-seeking schemes of identity leftists.”

The closed-off world of Twitter lends itself to this performative culture of ‘calling out’ and posturing. Activists say extreme things for the thrill of it — and to stand out on a crowded platform. This, in turn, generates a backlash, with alt-Right pundits whipping up fears about “political correctness gone mad” based on the play-acting of a small number of noisy online hobbyists.

Swift’s book focuses more on this — on the current state of politics — rather than assessing how we got here. As it happens, I think we’re here because politics has become a surrogate religion for so many people. Oscar Wilde said the problem with socialism was that it took up too many evenings, yet for many of socialism’s contemporary adherents, that appears to be part of the appeal. Jeremy Corbyn has given those with otherwise empty lives a reason to get up in the morning.

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What if Corbyn ditched Nato?

By James Kirkup

That isn’t meant to sound entirely contemptuous. There is a renewed thirst for meaning in the West, and many of socialism’s adherents are motivated, as Swift puts it, “by a desire for an enjoyable pastime, and a search for identity”. Corbyn serves as a useful blank canvas onto which all of one’s fantasies of traducing Blairites, Zionists, transphobes and white supremacists can be projected.

By contrast, technocratic machine politics — the politics of compromise, bureaucracy and incremental change — fails to adequately perform that task and fill that void. It produces little of the romantic glamour of performative revolutionary politics and boasts too few unblemished heroes. There is too much shabby ambiguity and no final, irreversible — a sinister term favoured by some in the current Labour Party — victory over those who think differently.

But politics as religion invariably comes with a cost. There is, naturally, a constant hunt for heretics. Public denunciations followed by ‘cancellations’ are de rigueur. Rigid adherence to doctrine is celebrated, while those who err are pompously told that they are on the “wrong side of history”. Political spats focus on the moral character of a person rather than the content of their arguments. Public arguments in which, as Swift phrases it, “identity leftists spend a great deal of time expending venom… at fellow leftists with whom they have some minor disagreements” are ubiquitous on Twitter and other social media.

All of this takes the Left further into the echo chamber, away from the people it is supposed to represent. Attitudes which are held by the vast majority of Britons — that there should be some upper limit on immigration, that sex differences exist, that gender isn’t entirely a social construct — are enough to get a person ‘cancelled’ by today’s hobbyist Left. Moreover, the slippery equation of words — or even thoughts — with violence creates a censorious climate where activists feel justified in hounding people from public life completely.

From the same author

The dark side of 'socialism'

By James Bloodworth

The Left needs to move beyond these childish moral binaries if it is to bring the majority along with it, and carrying the latter is a pre-requisite for improving the lives of the British working class. It may be morally satisfying to parade around in a “Never Kissed a Tory” t-shirt. But better, perhaps, to ask instead why someone is a Tory in the first place. As Swift correctly notes, “there is no binary division in society between good and bad, no easy dichotomy between rich, white Tory men on the one hand and women, gays, ethnic minorities and the working class on the other”.

But a pluralistic approach requires confidence in one’s own beliefs. After all, to engage with a political opponent on equal terms — especially if that political opponent has a decent grasp of the arguments — opens the door to fresh doubts. And doubts lead to heresy, which, when politics seems to mean so much to some people, leads in turn to a loss of friendships and a collapse in one’s identity. The personal is political and the political is, apparently, deeply personal.

Which brings us back to my point about the Left needing a better grasp of what it stands for in the 21st century. Until it works that out, we’ll be hearing a lot more from loud-mouthed hobbyists who, as Swift puts it, are “not motivated by anything as prosaic and tedious as affecting real political change”. And those who need the Left to stand up for them are left out in in the cold.

The conventional part was growing up in a textbook, nuclear family of mum, dad and two kids, in a detached house in a commuter village in Fife, Scotland. We weren’t rich, but my parents — who both grew up on Glasgow council estates and left school at 15 and 16 with few qualifications — had worked hard to afford a home of their own and the ability to take a family holiday abroad each year.

We weren’t a political house, but we were a dutiful one. No protest marches or party memberships growing up, but a distinct sense of civic duty — voting, paying taxes and supporting the monarchy. A Daily Express through the week and a Sunday Times on the Sabbath, plus Sue Lawley and Nicholas Witchell on the BBC at Six o’clock, in the background while Mum made tea. Even if I hadn’t turned out to be a Conservative with a big ‘C’, I was raised in a household that was conservative with a small one.

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We need to talk about death

By Ruth Davidson

The unusual part was that my family were rocked by the sort of private cataclysm that utterly unpins every comforting routine parents hope to build for their children. When I was five, I was hit by a truck and severely injured. I broke my leg, smashed my pelvis, crushed my femoral artery, severed the main nerve down the front of my right leg and suffered so much internal damage my mum was told I might grow up unable to have children.

I spent weeks in a specialist children’s hospital in Edinburgh, first in traction and later in a full body cast — plaster of Paris starting under my armpits and reaching my toes on one side and my knee on the other. When it was finally removed, with me screaming in fear at the circular saw, I was put on the long road back to recovery. The surgeons had saved my life and my right leg (initially it hadn’t been clear if they could rescue either) but if I were ever going to walk again, it would be only after painful months of physio, hydrotherapy and analgesics.

It is not much fun being the only child at primary school with a zimmer frame. I hated it. I hated not being able to run as fast or for as long as my classmates. I hated being told to sit out some parts of PE. I hated not being able to bend or do gymnastics or put my ankle up to my ear as most children can with the flexibility of youth. Some kids might have retreated inside themselves, become bookish or engrossed in daily newspapers, or otherwise divorced themselves from the rough and tumble they could no longer be part of.

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My social mobility shame

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

Not me. I have a competitive streak a mile wide; I am dogged and cussed and contrary. If I couldn’t do something, then I’d just keep trying until I could. So my early childhood wasn’t about learning or engaging with the world around me — it was spent blocking out everything that didn’t immediately help me climb trees, play football, build dams down the beach, climb out my bedroom window onto the flat roof of the conservatory below or partake in a hundred other physical labours — just to show that I could. And that I could keep up, too

The world was for other people to worry about. I wanted to play with my friends, pretend I was Roberto Baggio on the football field and teach my poor dog to jump through a raised hula hoop for treats.

The thing that made me think that — maybe — the world was worth paying attention to wasn’t a speech in the House of Commons or a public debate on the state of Britain. It wasn’t Live Aid or Band Aid or a Blue Peter appeal. It wasn’t Princess Diana holding the hand of a patient with AIDS or the Lockerbie Bombing. It was something that happened a thousand miles away in a country I’d never visited.

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My manifesto for post-Brexit Britain

By Ruth Davidson

On 9 November, 1989 — the night before my eleventh birthday — the communist government of East Germany announced they were opening the border and that future democratic elections would be held in the country. The people of East and West Berlin, watched by border guards, started dismantling the wall with picks, sledgehammers and even their bare hands. The pictures of crying, hugging and dancing on the hated barrier that had divided families, countries and a German-speaking people was immensely powerful.

I hadn’t paid any attention to similar unrest that had occurred previously in Poland or Hungary, but I somehow knew that Germany was different. That this — if not an end in itself — signified that an end was coming. I don’t know if I thought that the Berlin Wall was the iron curtain that kept ‘us’ from ‘them’ but it was clear in my head that ‘we’ — as in, the West — had won. The forces of freedom, democracy, property, individuality and fairness under the law had triumphed over a nameless, faceless communism designed to suppress the individual, impoverish the citizen and crush the human spirit.

I also knew it must be momentous because I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch the specially extended Nine o’clock news.

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Can Europe learn from communism?

By Roger Scruton

Not long after the wall came down, I found myself dragged along to a debating competition my sister had entered through school. While the judges went off to deliberate, the floor debate took place, with the chairman inviting contributions from the audience. I’d sat next to my sister’s friends so my mum didn’t have a clue my hand had snaked up, until she heard me reedily give my first public speech, off the cuff and without notes. I’ve no idea what I said, or even what the motion had been, but in my battered black chords and a hand-me-down paisley pattern shirt, I had to correct the chairman who called me “the young gentleman” before launching into my argument.

The English teacher who ran the debating society made a mental note to look out for me when I followed my sister to secondary school the next year. My newfound interest in current affairs meant there was something other than sport I could be competitive at. And I was — all through my school and university career. Debating took me to countries I would never otherwise have seen and introduced me to people I would never otherwise have met.

While I might have gone on to play tennis for my club, football for my school and squash for my university, it was debating which saw me all the way to the world championships, into my first career as a journalist and into the job I have now.

And I would never have been confident enough to stand up and make that first floor speech at 11-years old, if the fall of the Berlin Wall hadn’t ignited my interest in world events. The fall of communism liberated more than just those under its yoke.