By installing democratic government in Iraq, the neocons imagined, they would set off an America-friendly movement for democracy across the region. As the influential foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen wrote in September 2002: “it is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq.” He added that “Syria would follow in short order”. Of course, things did not quite turn out this way. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be drawn-out, bloody and humiliating disasters. 

This February, when the United States and Israel launched a new war in Iran, there was understandable speculation that the neocon agenda had been resurrected by its supposed nemesis, Donald Trump. It does appear that Trump was persuaded to take up unfinished business on behalf of Israel and hawks in the US foreign policy establishment. He may also have inferred from last year’s protests in Iran that destabilizing the government could spark a popular uprising. But despite Trump’s occasional claim to be seeking freedom for the Iranian people — one among many stated rationales for the war — it is impossible to believe that he, or perhaps anyone, shares the erstwhile neocon conviction that democracy could be spread across the globe. 

That conviction was an artifact of the unchallenged American hegemony of the Nineties and 2000s. Trump’s blundering sequel, in which the increasingly isolated president raves about blowing Iran off the face of the earth, even as the Iranians hold the global economy hostage via the Strait of Hormuz, only emphasizes how distant we are from that world of two decades ago. We can scarcely imagine the sublime vistas glimpsed by those who dreamed of bringing about the End of History, spurring on a worldwide convergence on liberal democratic institutions. Yet there it is, in black and white, in the 2002 US National Security Strategy. This document, also known as the Bush Doctrine, pledged to “actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world”.

Does this mean that the End of History was no more than a baseless, dangerous fantasy? A new book by Ian Shapiro, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, argues that it was not — though his vision of the End of History is more modest than that of the neocons. Shapiro, professor of political science at Yale, thinks that “different and vastly superior possibilities” were on offer after the fall of Communism in 1991, even if those possibilities did not include overthrowing authoritarian governments willy-nilly and spreading democracy to places where it had little chance of taking root. Rather, what emerged from the rubble of the Iron Curtain was “a real chance to extend and deepen the rules-based international order” through the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. According to Shapiro, this opportunity was squandered by the shortsighted and foolish decisions of Western leaders, and especially American ones, of which the War on Terror is a prime example. In pursuing their End of History fantasies, Bush and co. closed the routes that actually existed to a new and better world.

Suggested Reading

Why Iran is right to be paranoid

By Peter Frankopan

It was Bush’s father, President George H. W., who showed what that world might look like. During the first Gulf War of 1991, he carefully rallied 42 countries to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but stopped short of toppling the dictator so as to respect the parameters agreed by the UN Security Council. He thereby acknowledged the principle that, as Shapiro writes, “even great powers must negotiate with adversaries, and they often invest in norms and institutions to help manage their conflicts lest they become overextended”. The younger Bush demonstrated no such wisdom, and it was often lacking in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama too. 

An amnesia has set in during the Trump era, nurturing the impression that, for all its missteps, American power before 2016 was the largely benign lynchpin of a functioning rules-based order. In fact, as Shapiro details, America’s actions since the Nineties have amounted to a steady demolition of any possibility that such an order might take shape. Trump marks a new iteration of an existing pattern, not a break with it. 

The War on Terror anticipated Trump’s Iranian gambit not in its ideology but in its recklessness. Bush, like Trump, was elected on a platform of reducing foreign entanglements. He was a tax-cutting president who could not, or did not want to, cough up the resources necessary to finish the wars he started. The approach taken by both men (strategy is too generous a word) answer Shapiro’s description of “Ready! Fire! Aim!” In Afghanistan and Iraq, as in Iran today, the US started out by decapitating the leadership and decimating governing institutions; one of its first actions in Iraq was to fire 85,000 civil servants. 

Then there was the Bush administration’s dismissive attitude to international legitimacy. The 9/11 attacks brought condemnation from leaders across the Muslim world, and offers of solidarity and support from, among others, China and Russia. The Taliban government was willing to assist in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, as was the Pakistani leadership. But the US spurned such cooperation, sidelined the UN, and through its actions alienated much of the world. Its preference was for “coalitions of the willing” — alliances acting outside international legal frameworks — and for the uncompromising stance captured in Bush’s phrase “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. 

As with Trump’s misfiring tariff diplomacy, which has inadvertently revealed China’s ability to resist American pressure, the neocons demonstrated the limits of American power rather than its extent. It is little discussed today, but the 2006 election victory which preceded Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip came as a result of America’s desire to show progress in its democracy agenda. The Bush administration insisted that the elections be held, despite warnings from the governing Palestinian Authority, and was then outraged at the results. 

The War on Terror was not the only instance where the US thumbed its nose at the world. Shapiro is no less scathing about the humiliation of post-Soviet Russia during the Nineties and 2000s, when Russian leaders went to extraordinary lengths to show goodwill towards the United States, and were repaid with the expansion of Nato up to their borders. Whether a less antagonistic course would have avoided the Russian military aggression we see today is impossible to say, but many prominent voices at the time warned of just that outcome. Another excoriating chapter deals with the response to the eruption of civil war in Libya in 2011. In this case the UN approved a limited intervention to secure a ceasefire, only for France, Britain and the United States to flout this conditional support by aggressively pursuing regime change. This enraged countries around the world, and threw the region into anarchy, creating a breeding ground for terrorist groups and a pathway for gangs to smuggle migrants to Europe.

Trump, then, is not the aberration we make him out to be. He has extended to America’s traditional allies the imperious attitude that it has long shown towards other parts of the world (often with those same allies clinging to its skirts), and he has enlarged the scope of his predecessors’ bullying tactics to include trade. Who can miss the Trumpian overtones of Hillary Clinton’s remark at the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, “we came, we saw, he died”?

Yet Shapiro’s chronicle of foreign policy failure is so damning that his explanation for it — bad decision making and bad ideas — feels inadequate. Nor does it lend much credence to his counter-factual scenario, which asks us to imagine the US binding its own hands for the sake of international harmony and cooperation. As a political scientist, albeit one who has been admirably critical of his own discipline in the past, Shapiro is keen to demonstrate that an informed reading of history, empirical studies and behavioral science would have steered politicians towards better decisions. To show that he is not just indulging in hindsight, he reminds us constantly that there were people on the scene who warned against the mistakes that were made and saw the paths not taken. But this still raises the question of why the leaders in question kept listening to the wrong people, and kept misjudging their situation so badly. And here Shapiro answers more clearly than he seems to realize. 

The underlying theme of After the Fall is that Western leaders were undone by short-sightedness, arrogance, imprudence, a sense of invulnerability, delusions of grandeur, and above all, by hubris. These are defects of character; not in the sense of personality, but of the habits of thought and judgment which mark the actions of individual leaders and the governing classes to which they belong. To think in this way does not fit comfortably with the analytical models and policy wonkery of contemporary political science. Though populist politicians such as Trump are routinely analyzed in terms of character, we tend to treat this as a special measure demanded by the peculiar nature of populism itself. 

Yet character was central to a classical understanding of political action which was still alive in the 20th century, and which stemmed ultimately from ancient Greece and Rome. One part of this understanding is simply to acknowledge the tragic nature of human fallibility. Leaders make bad decisions because they are people with vices as well as virtues. But historians and dramatists in the classical tradition also recognized that character is shaped by historical circumstance. Civilizations rise and fall because they produce people, and leaders, with particular strengths and weaknesses according to the challenges and opportunities that history presents them with. Voltaire expressed one version of this theory with his remark that “history is filled with the sound of silken slippers descending the stairs and wooden shoes coming up”. Wealth and power do not always cultivate the virtues needed to sustain them.

Suggested Reading

Against the Mad King

By Sohrab Ahmari

If we scrape away the surface of Shapiro’s narrative, where a series of politicians succumb to erroneous beliefs and stumble into one disaster after another, what we find is a familiar morality tale of imperial apogee, overreach and decline. More particularly, we find leaders demonstrating a catalog of character flaws which were set in motion by the temptations of enormous power. Ideas matter, of course. During the War on Terror, for instance, a mistaken image of reality informed by neocon ideology had disastrous consequences. But such utopian conceits do not gain traction at random; in this case, they appealed to an American political elite which believed itself capable of reshaping the world. 

Even Shapiro’s later chapters, which deal with the corrosive effects of neoliberal economic orthodoxy in the End of History period, show the same thread of wishful thinking, complacency and irresponsibility. Free trade and globalization were held to be inevitable in much the same way as the spread of liberal democracy; politicians treated disaffected voters with a similar disregard as they did their international counterparts; and financial and business interests recognized no more restraints on their freedom than presidents and their advisors did. 

The simple truth in all of this slips out belatedly in the concluding remarks of After the Fall: “they did it because they could get away with it.” Western leaders were drunk on power; they were powerful enough, in other words, to be careless of the limits of their power, a condition which invariably leads to it being exhausted in self-destructive follies. Shapiro contrasts the last 35 years of foreign policy with the more enlightened decisions of American leaders after the Second World War, who supported international institutions and helped to rebuild their vanquished enemies into allies and trading partners. The crucial difference, of course, is that those leaders did not enjoy the illusion of untrammeled power and historical inevitability; they had the threat of the Soviet Union to sharpen their minds.

The question now is whether the challenge of Chinese power will change the character of US leadership, resulting in greater prudence and restraint, as rivalry with the Soviet Union once did. The fact that Trump has blundered into another Middle Eastern quagmire, creating a fresh distraction from the long-promised pivot to Asia, is not a promising sign. Perhaps America’s prestigious universities and think-tanks should devote less attention to political science, and more to the study of character in decision making. 

The bright colours, narrative non-sequiturs and plinky-plonk music typical of preschool TV are perfect for that state of neural short-circuit. And the ultimate choice back in the day was Teletubbies.

Launched on 31 March 1997, Teletubbies celebrates its 25^th anniversary this week. I’ve now had the dubious privilege of meeting the show twice: first as a raver in the late Nineties, and more recently as the mother of a toddler. And it was wildly successful from the moment it landed, both with the chemically insomniac as well as its official target audience of preschool children. It’s one of the most lucrative shows in BBC history, with merchandising sales raking in billions, and by 2015 had aired in over 120 countries with translation into more than 45 languages.

But if the show has been a roaring success, it has also spurred a subculture of perverse readings, including that the Sun Baby is a demon and the  occult connection between the show and Harry Potter. Elsewhere, Teletubbyland has been interpreted as a post-apocalyptic scenario set in a bomb shelter.

And this secondary success is also richly deserved. For among many other things, it’s a brutally frank sketch of a hypermodern era that began gathering speed around the time the show launched, and has now consumed us all. And these humanoid-but-infantile Teletubby cyborgs, media devices painlessly grafted into their flesh, are fitting avatars for a uniquely modern conflation of technology and nurturing that’s on its way to collapsing the boundaries between childhood and adult life.

There were plenty of surreal children’s TV shows prior to Teletubbies. Gen Xers will remember Oliver Postgate’s Bagpuss (1974), which blended music by folk luminaries Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner with dreamy, animated storylines. Ten years later, geriatric millennials of roughly my vintage may recall the creepy claymation Trapdoor (1984) in which worms, monsters and a talking skull squirm about and sometimes eat one another in the pit under a castle.

Bagpuss captures the dreamy nostalgia and make-do-and-mend aesthetic of a Seventies era materially on its uppers and in many corners still stubbornly resistant to “modernisation”. Trapdoor is a vivid metaphor for the pitiless eat-anything-smaller-than-you morality of Thatcher’s Big Bang age. Teletubbies, though, brought the winds of change with it: no more nostalgia, and certainly no more competition. Instead, ahead of the millennium, it offered a powerfully 21^st-century vision, launched in the febrile final weeks of the election campaign that ended nearly two decades of Tory hegemony.

More from this author

Stop calling yourself a dog parent

By Mary Harrington

The timing was immaculate. For Teletubbyland is a perfect fit for the bright, modern optimism of Blair’s New Labour: a clean, modern, aspirational world of universal abundance, where there is no longer any need for conflict or unhappiness because technology will deliver for all.

It’s pure Third Way. Teletubbyland is tidy, hygienic and futuristic, but not cold or forbidding. Bunnies roam around nibbling the lush grass and flowers, while the Teletubbies themselves live in a structure worthy of Grand Designs (launched two years after Teletubbies): a grass-roofed eco-home built into the hillside, filled with smart gadgets that cater to their every need.

Like good citizens of the End of History, the Teletubbies potter about this bright vision of what Aaron Bastani called “fully automated luxury communism” on short, directionless adventures. Their basic needs are met by automation, including a robot that cleans, another that makes food, and speakerphones that provide structure to their lives by emerging from the ground to announce what the Teletubbies will do next.

When they aren’t pursuing these mini-quests, they interact playfully with one another or consume short videos from human world, broadcast to them via a windmill-like aerial. This is picked up by the antennae that appear to be organic parts of their bodies, causing them to writhe in delight, and the images appear on screens embedded into their abdomens.

More from this author

Why Western men gave up on war

By Mary Harrington

Everything in this aimless, media-loving, robot-tended cyborg existence is overseen by the most benign imaginable surveillance device: a baby’s face, smiling and gurgling inside the warm, life-giving sun. It’s a vivid picture of a population contained within a heavily controlled environment structured around meeting their needs, where activity is mostly consumption-oriented and pre-programmed by third parties.

In this sense, it’s perhaps no wonder small children responded enthusiastically to it. The years between Trapdoor and Teletubbies reboot also saw an immense growth in infants attending nursery. In 1981, only 24% of women went back to work a year after having a baby; but by 2001, 67% did so. And Teletubbies is an accurate depiction of the nursery environments that growing numbers of infants experienced under Blair, spurred by a raft of New Labour pro-childcare policies.

In such settings, everything is carefully controlled and focused on amusement for the children. In most cases, children aren’t involved in the work of ordinary life, such as food preparation or cleaning, unless it’s a designated activity. And while care is not exactly automated, there’s more than a nod to industrial-era efficiency and economies of scale. After all, the purpose of nursery is to free up the maximum number of caregiving adults, to do things the wider world deems more “productive” than minding a toddler.

But if Teletubbies offered an upbeat picture for toddlers of the infant childcare experience, the world inculcated by this industrialised infancy has now spread well beyond the nursery setting. And this has arguably been at the expense of our ability to engage in what the generation who watched Teletubbies as toddlers would now call “adulting”.

We’re increasingly enthusiastic about innovations, such as Deliveroo, that give the impression of magically meeting our basic needs at the touch of a button, like the Tubby Custard machine. Five years after Teletubbies, the world gained a Noo-Noo in the form of the now wildly successful Roomba. And the Teletubbies’ cyborg fusion with mass communication increasingly reflects our own relationship to technology.

Suggested reading

Adam Kay's dangerous misogyny

By Tanya Gold

A decade before the launch of the first smartphone, preschoolers all around the world were offered a vision of friendly, child-like entities laughing and playing, with what appear to be organic antenna emerging from the heads and screens embedded in their bellies. Now, 25 years after their launch, millennials check their phones on average 150 times a day and rarely go more than a few hours without a glance at the feed. Meanwhile, “wearables” such as health trackers and (if you’re a certain kind of Silicon Valley dork) augmented-reality glasses have proliferated.

And the drive for ever more intimate integration between “smart” devices and our flesh is ongoing. Elon Musk is lining up human trials of the Neuralink brain implant technology, while a majority of Americans would find implanted brain chips acceptable provided it was possible to deactivate them.

But it’s the automation of nurture combined with cyborg body enhancements that reveals Teletubbies’ most prophetic vision: a world that’s traded love in for technology – and, increasingly, even seeks to reframe technology as love.

For there are no adult Teletubbies. Whenever the Teletubbies go to bed, under their space blankets, there’s no one to tuck them in or read them a bedtime story. And today, if you wish to, you can raise your human child in a similar way: the Luka owl robot reads bedtime stories to children. The $1000 ‘Moxie’ robot even promises to help your child with “social-emotional learning” if you’re too busy to do so yourself.

Do the Teletubbies ever long for a hug from an adult? Perhaps not; they delight instead in  media broadcasts from the human world to their cyborg stomach-screens. And in the absence of adult care, they turn to one another for comfort: each show ends with a Big Hug, and the narrator’s declaration that “The Teletubbies love each other very much”.

Children aren’t Teletubbies, though. The first generation of children to be sent en masse as infants to a human version of Teletubbyland are now in their mid- to late twenties. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that full-time nursery care has no impact on academic performance, and may even improve outcomes in some cases. But other infant experiences are harder to quantify.

I wonder, sometimes, whether there is any connection between the proliferation of “self-care” content online, and the sharp increase circa Teletubbies in young adults who spent their infancy in a setting maximally geared to their safety and entertainment, but less well-resourced in terms of loving, attuned care. This is sensitive territory, as most parents are acutely torn on how to do the best for their families while making ends meet. But I still wonder.

If there is a link, perhaps it’s not so much that Teletubbies was created for ravers, as that it offers comfort of sorts to those in that delicate post-rave condition of self-inflicted chemical imbalance.

This condition can leave one both desperate for a hug and strangely unable to ask for one. And here was a show that said: don’t worry, be more Teletubby. You don’t really need an adult to care for you, any more than you did as a toddler. But nor do you need to be one – because the machines will take care of us. We’ll get Deliveroo, give each other a hug, and leave the adulting till tomorrow. Look – bunnies and Tubby Toast. Eh-oh!

Some people are seeing this war as further evidence of the demise of the liberal world order; you seem to see in it an opportunity?

Vladimir Putin is at the centre of a global anti-liberal campaign waged by authoritarian great powers like Russia and China, but also by a number of populists that have arisen in democratic countries, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or our Donald Trump. Putin said very explicitly that he thought liberalism was an obsolete doctrine. And a lot of conservatives in the United States have actually (they’re backing away from it now) said they like Putin; they like the idea of a strongman that could cut through all the liberal nonsense they saw going on in their societies. With this invasion of another democratic country, Putin has created a certain amount of moral clarity. The biggest advantage of a liberal state is the fact that it’s not authoritarian. It’s not a dictatorship; it doesn’t kill people; it doesn’t invade neighbours. Putin’s demonstrated what the alternative to liberalism is.

So you see in this war the possibility of “a new birth of freedom”. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think that our liberal democracies have gotten very complacent over the last 30 years. After the fall of the former Soviet Union, we had this extended period of peace and prosperity. And I think that especially younger people who grew up in that world, where they didn’t experience either the violent conflict of the twentieth century, or the dictatorship of a communist regime, began to take liberal democracy for granted. They assumed that this was simply the way the world was, and nobody could threaten that. And as a result, they weren’t willing to actively defend democracy where it was under threat. And I think that’s one of the reasons that Putin thought that he could get away with this invasion: because he thought that the United States is internally very divided, that Europe really doesn’t believe in much of anything anymore. One of the nice things that has happened is the unity that’s been expressed within the Nato alliance, especially in Germany, where they basically revised 40 years of Ostpolitik.

But the reality is that it’s a nationalist battle, isn’t it? 

I don’t think you can be in favour of liberal democracy unless it’s embedded in a nation. I don’t think there’s an abstraction called “liberal democracy” that people fight on behalf of; they fight for liberal institutions in their country, and they fight as a result of national pride, and because they like the institutions. I remember distinctly — I’ve been to Ukraine many times since 2013 — walking around Maidan Square: you feel like you’re in a free society because people can come and go as they wish, they can criticise the government, they can vote for opposition parties. There was a freedom that you could experience in Ukraine prior to this invasion that you couldn’t experience in Russia. That’s really what made Ukrainian nationhood different from Russian nationhood: Russians had to live with this centralised dictatorship and Ukrainians could live with a very similar culture, but in a free society.

Is there an outcome where, while the West becomes more assertive, it continues on the road of becoming essentially less liberal — because it’s more effective to assert your competitive advantage in a more Chinese or East Asian-style society?

No, I think that the real alternative is to correct some of — what I would regard as — the excesses of liberalism that have driven some of the opposition to liberalism itself, and I think that exists both on the Right and the Left. It has nothing to do with accommodating a more Chinese type of regime. But really the important choices are within what we’ve understood to be the liberal tradition, and I think that’s true on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, you had a kind of economic liberalism that evolved into what’s now called neoliberalism, which was a kind of worship of the market and a denigration of the state, which led to a kind of globalisation that put economic efficiency above all other social goods and led to a big increase in inequality. Globally, it led to a deterioration of a lot of public services; everything was just seen to be an expression of private interest. That needs to be walked back. On the Right, you had a vast expansion of the idea of personal autonomy. One of the good things about a liberal society is that it protects personal autonomy, but our autonomy is not unlimited. We are creatures that want community: we want to share values with other people. When you have a liberalism that is like an acid that destroys any prior sense of community: that’s something people don’t really like. When it undermines a sense of nation, and the ability to feel patriotic: that’s a problem liberal societies have had.

One example of this is the debate around free speech, which you observe has become more problematic in the past few years. Do you now see that being able to be reversed?

Some of the biggest threats to free speech are not actually those that are being done by governments, particularly governments in the democratic world. The real problem is a private one. Big internet platforms like Google and Facebook have been amplifying material that is toxic — often conspiracy theories — because what they’re primarily interested in is not the broader democratic community. They care about their bottom lines. A big concentration of private power has contributed to the toxicity of a lot of the discourse in modern democracies. And it leads to these real conundra, because there’s then a call for the government to regulate their activity. So in Germany, they have the NetzdG law that criminalises publishing false or fake news. And that’s where you get into real danger, because it’s not clear that the government is the right regulator of that kind of activity. But it’s not clear either that these large platforms should simply be allowed to make these determinations on their own. Right now, for people on the Left, the leaders of Google and Facebook are sympathetic to their agenda. But imagine if a Rupert Murdoch takes over Facebook, or some equivalent character on the Right, and has that kind of power to amplify certain messages and suppress others.

One of the deeper themes in your work that stretches right back to the End of History — you talk about the Greek word thymos in that book — is that there’s something about polite, liberal democracy in its perfected sense that doesn’t answer some deep questions in the human soul. Do you now think we are predisposed to prefer war to peace in some way?

Not under all circumstances. But there is something that drives us in that direction. Thymos is usually translated into English as spiritedness. You could call it pride, or the demand for respect or recognition. And I think that a great deal of politics is really not about contest over material goods, it’s really a contest over respect. So you think about something like gay marriage or the Me Too movement, these are fundamentally dignity issues where gays and lesbians want to have their unions celebrated as having equal status to heterosexual unions, or women want to be treated with the same respect as men. And this is not really governed by economic calculations. It’s governed by a different kind of desire that oftentimes works at cross-purposes. If you think about what’s going on in populist politics: this kind of demand for respect was very much driving the whole upwelling of voters that voted for Brexit and voted for Donald Trump. It’s really the more educated, more cosmopolitan people living in big cities like London, or New York, or San Francisco, that tended to vote for progressive parties, and then people living in smaller communities in the countryside with more traditional values that voted for populists. There’s an economic division there. But there’s also a respect division, because those more educated people tended to look down on the others that didn’t share their particular kind of cosmopolitan worldview. And a politician like Donald Trump was quite brilliant in understanding how much resentment there was, and could play on those resentments. That’s defined a lot of our politics in recent years.

You don’t actually differ that dramatically from some of the more populist thinkers — only while they felt these impulses were virtues or important things that needed to be accommodated, you seem to think they are dangers. Is that fair?

No, I don’t think that’s right. I think that any human striving depends on this sense of pride. This is true at an individual level. If you didn’t want to be recognised as a great pianist, or a great writer, or baseball player, or football player, or whatever, you probably wouldn’t strive for excellence. All of us want the attention and the respect that comes with great human achievement. But the greatest criminals in the world are driven by that desire to stand out. Donald Trump realised that he could be noticed by everybody for saying completely outrageous things that didn’t make any sense in a more narrowly rational way, but they excited people and it got him attention. This desire for respect and recognition is the basis of good behaviour and it’s the basis of bad behaviour. But it doesn’t fall within the economic calculus associated with classical liberalism.

What about the instinct to want to belong to a culture that you recognise as your own, and that you feel at home in. Is that something that the liberal world needs to accommodate better?

It really depends on what that community is based on. In today’s world, if you simply base it on race, or ethnicity, or on a single religion, it isn’t going to work — because our societies today are too diverse, really, to have a single point of reference. But people have a very deep social instinct: they want to have something in common, they want to conform to social norms, they believe in their national identity. And I think the key trick is to make that national identity compatible with liberal values. So it should be based on things that can be accepted by people regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity. That kind of community is going to be thinner than one that’s based on a single, let’s say, religious belief. But I think that it can still be built. The classic one was the Republican community coming out of the French Revolution: it was based on the French language, literary tradition, even a culinary tradition. Someone like Léopold Senghor, the great Senegalese poet, could be taken into the Académie Française because, despite the fact that he’s a black man, he writes beautiful French. That’s my understanding of what a liberal national identity is. You need that identity, but it also needs to be an open and accessible one that accommodates the actual diversity that exists in your society.

So you’re arguing for a pushing back of some of the excesses of liberalism: less ultra-individualism, more of a sense of community, a sense of virtue. In a European context, you’re sounding like a conservative.

If to be a European conservative means that you still believe in the importance of nations, then I would probably categorise myself that way. You need nations, for very pragmatic reasons. The nation is the repository of legitimate violence, basically. This is the old Max Weber understanding of what a state is: a legitimate monopoly of force. And right now, there isn’t an alternative to the nation as a locus of power that is, at the same time, controlled by institutions like the rule of law, and democratic accountability. Therefore, you’re going to have to deal with a world of nations. The European Union sought to get beyond that. In theory, you could have created a federated Europe that behaved more like an actual nation, but what you ended up with was something that wasn’t really that. And when push came to shove, like during the Euro crisis, it fell apart it. There wasn’t that sense of European solidarity between, let’s say, Greeks and Germans.

In this latest book you discuss the preconditions for a confident liberal democracy — its institutions, its rule of law. Are you worried that confidence has now gone in Western countries?

I worry about that more in the United States than in most parts of Europe, because our polarisation has become really intense, to the point where a lot of people on the Republican Right are willing to actually abandon some really important aspects of institutionalised democracy: a pretty strong majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, based simply on a manufactured lie by one person. That’s a really big threat. Liberalism does not accommodate all forms of diversity. If you have a particular party or force or political movement within your society that rejects some of the foundational principles of liberalism, you can’t deal with that. And I think we do face that kind of threat in the United States. It’s ironic, because the United States was always seen as the ur-liberal country. But actually, it’s safer in most parts of Europe, where there’s a greater degree of political consensus.

So does that mean you’re less optimistic about the future for the US?

There are scenarios for the 2024 election that could be very, very nasty, and involve actual violence. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I think it’s a real danger that, as an American citizen, I’m quite worried about.

Your phrase, “the end of history” is constantly quoted back at you, but it quite accurately describes a period of history. What are we to call the next period that’s coming?

I don’t know what it’s going to look like. A lot of it will depend on the outcome of this war in Ukraine. Because if Putin, who has been so central to the anti-liberal world order, succeeds, then that period is going to look much more authoritarian. On the other hand, if he’s humiliated, forced to back down, then it’s going to look much better for liberal societies around the world. But even if the latter materialises, and he is forced to back down, there are plenty of other illiberal forces out there in the world. There’s China, which is a bigger challenge in a sense, because they’re a more powerful country, and more successful in many ways than Russia has been. There’s all the Venezuelas and Irans and Syrias — these would-be authoritarian or actually authoritarian countries that have ambitions. There’s going to be plenty of struggle left, even if we win this one in Ukraine in the short run.

And your bet, for the record, is that we are going to win that one in some form?

The only reason I think liberalism is going to survive all of this the history of the last 300 years. Liberalism arose after the European Wars of Religion because people realised that fighting over which sect of Christianity you followed was not worth it, and therefore we should have religious toleration. It then got challenged by the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And after those two bloody world wars, people again said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting over which nation is dominant, maybe we should come up with a more tolerant system.” And we’ve now gone through another cycle where we have taken liberal principles for granted. And now people are striving for more. So maybe we have to go through another cycle of witnessing the alternatives to liberalism, before we come back to saying, “Oh, well, maybe, tolerating diversity is not such a bad thing after all.” It’s not as bad a cycle as the previous ones. Maybe we might get a little bit inoculated by what Putin has done in Europe.

It’s like a necessary war of some kind?

I hate to say that any war is necessary. But that’s the way it’s worked out in prior centuries of human history.

As in personal life, so too in business and civil society. Each year hundreds of thousands of businesses cease trading. In 2019, even before the pandemic, there were 336,000 business “deaths” — 11% of all British businesses. Factories and workshops close, while industries decline and sometimes vanish completely. Once-vibrant clubs and churches gradually dwindle.

Even at the level of states and governments, nothing lasts forever. Countries and languages and whole peoples disappear with tragic regularity. Over lockdown, I read Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms, a series of elegies for various European states, or statelets, that are no more. Some are widely known, like the Soviet Union or the Byzantine Empire. Others are much less celebrated, even among history buffs. Davies includes a chapter dealing with the Visigothic state that existed in eastern France in the century after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. It lasted less than a century before being subsumed into the Kingdom of the Franks. But perhaps his most obscure case study is the Republic of Rusyn, a short-lived attempt by Carpatho-Ukrainians to carve out an independent nation from the ruins of Czechoslovakia, as it was being dismembered by Nazi Germany, Hungary and Poland in March 1939.

More from this series

Lessons in lockdown from a psychiatric ward

By Frances Wilson

As I read about these statelets struggling to survive, Covid-19 was causing human suffering and misery on a massive scale — not simply deaths, but strain on medical staff, family separations and ongoing disruption to normal life and health system operation. The Government and the health service were making serious and repeated mistakes. Vital organs of the state were hesitant and sclerotic, highly susceptible to groupthink. It was easy to think: this is how a nation collapses.

Indeed, there has been a widespread sense that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining event, that the world has changed irrevocably, that we must re-examine our assumptions about numerous aspects of modern life. The giant consulting firm McKinsey produced a report called “The future of work after Covid-19”, while its rival EY issued one focusing on the changes to globalised supply chains. The Economics Observatory asked “What is the future of commuting?” The Centre For Cities think tank investigated whether cities themselves have a future anymore.

But Vanished Kingdoms — I hesitate to use the dread phrase “putting in perspective”, because that sounds glib — made me reflect on what it takes, really, to destroy a way of life. Not to trivialise people’s grim experiences, but when you read about, say, the Russian invasion of East Prussia in the last year of the Second World War — invasion is almost too antiseptic a word; destruction would meet the case — it does inevitably offer a new baseline for the consideration of terrible events.

More from this author

The great artist of Deep England

By Niall Gooch

Obviously, its’s little or no comfort to someone who has lost a family member to Covid — or a job or a home — that it could be worse: they could be living in a chaotic post-Roman kingdom menaced by enemies on all sides. But when we come to reflect on the specific political-historical-civilisational questions raised by the pandemic — the future of work, of the health service, of global trade — it’s important to have some kind of benchmark. Particularly because, in the modern West, there is a prevailing sense that we have little to learn from history, because we are so advanced. My generation grew up during the 1990s “holiday from history”, when the power of liberal democracy was unchallenged and its future seemingly secure. No wonder Covid-19 feels like the end of the world.

But one very obvious lesson of history is that we are fortunate, even during a plague, to live in Europe in the early twenty-first century. We are lucky to have strong nation-states, able and willing to look after their people, and well-established norms of diplomacy and international co-operation. However badly her Majesty’s Government has failed in its responsibilities, the nation has not yet been annexed by neighbouring powers, as happened to the venerable Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the late eighteenth century, weakened by infighting and loss of trust in government.

That said, it is worth noting that Davies, writing in 2011, does argue that the United Kingdom in its current form is not long for this world — mainly because of the loss of confidence in the shared beliefs and institutions that held its four nations together: Crown, Empire, and Protestant Christianity.

Covid, by itself, is not going to bring an end to the largely orderly and peaceable Europe of 2021, in the way that — for example — the World Wars were catastrophic for so many of the peoples of central and eastern Europe featured in Vanished Kingdoms. The disease remains a serious problem, but most continental nations have now reached high levels of double vaccination — and cut their death rates accordingly. Seven European nations were added to the British government green list over the weekend, meaning that travellers from them do not need to quarantine. The suggestion by UnHerd’s Ed West, at the very start of the pandemic, that the long-term consequences might not be very severe, now seems very prescient.

Suggested reading

Will coronavirus change the world?

By Ed West

Possibly, of course, I am too optimistic. One of Davies’ subjects is the Byzantine Empire, which endured for more than a thousand years, but whose long-term fortunes were seriously affected by recurring outbreaks of plague from the sixth to the eighth centuries. Those plagues, of course, were much deadlier than Covid-19, and spread through populations without access to modern medicine; but perhaps the pessimists are right that we can expect more globalised outbreaks of serious disease. It is entirely possible that not all such diseases will be as treatable and relatively non-deadly as our current foe.

And optimism can be dangerous if it tips into arrogance. Vanished Kingdoms carries a dedication to i’r anghofiedig, a Welsh phrase which Davies translates loosely as “those whom historians tend to forget”. He explicitly frames the book as dealing with our collective tendency to absent-mindedness, our complacency in looking back on our ancestors.

It has been argued that some of the misjudgements made by the British public health establishment in the early weeks and months of the pandemic stemmed from a kind of instinctive resistance among highly educated, high-status people to solutions that were redolent of historical responses to disease outbreaks. Why did it take so long to impose any kind of meaningful border restrictions? Why did it take the best part of a year for masking and good ventilation, rather than mostly pointless hand-washing and surface cleaning, to be strongly prioritised in advice to the public and to hospitals, schools and shops?

Suggested reading

Britain's absurd quarantine failures

By Stuart Ritchie

The answer to these questions, perhaps, is that closing the borders and emphasising the importance of fresh, clean air sounded too simple to be true. It’s what people did in the age of the plague — when our allegedly simple-minded forebears still believed in dirty foreigners, miasma theory and bodily humours — so it must be rejected by sophisticated moderns. As the great Theodore Dalrymple has noted, intellectuals are incentivised to avoid obvious conclusions, because their status depends on the elucidation of non-obvious truths. And liberal modernity encourages us to throw out the baby with the bathwater: to reject the wisdom of past ages, as well as the unscientific mistakes and prejudices.

Davies would, I fancy, dislike such disdain, even if held unconsciously or instinctively. He is a humane writer, concerned not with ideology, but with truth and historical drama — and with helping us know what the past was really like. At a time when the public square is full of rancour and misinformation, inflamed by people’s understandable fears and concerns about the spread of disease and the undoubted, if unavoidable, downsides of our chosen anti-Covid strategies, his proposal is tempting. We must focus on the lessons of history, and so prioritise truth and fact — and proportion.