We rely on the developmentalist economies of the Far East for our manufactured goods, on the Norwegians for our oil and gas-powered energy, on Europe for our food, Wall Street for our payments systems, Silicon Valley for our digital worlds, and on a diverse caste of cheap, subaltern labor to staff our care homes, serve us coffee, clean our offices, and deliver our meals. In light of the recent outbursts from a mercurial White House, British bank bosses have begun to plan for an alternative to the US’s Visa and Mastercard systems. And not a moment too soon: when the President threatened a Nato ally with annexation last month, all we could offer was bland platitudes, a humiliating prostration before hard power.

Even those few sectors in which we do excel — the consultancies, and the legal and financial services that we still export to the world — seem designed for a softer-edged era. Like Tony Blair himself, the “knowledge economy” was the future once, or so we were told. The real value was created through the immaterial labor practiced in the metropoles. Globalization was non-negotiable; “you might as well debate over whether autumn should follow summer”, in the words of its leading evangelist, and Britain would ride the wave, prospering at the cutting edge of international bullshit artistry. Once the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution has surrendered its economic autonomy to the whims of global finance capital, there’s nothing left to do but turn the art of corporate jargon and consultant-sophistry into its unique specialism — right before the glossy reports and PowerPoints are automated by AI.

But now the tide hasn’t so much gone out as receded past the horizon. Not only is automation coming for the white-collar service class, but the transatlantic alliance is more frayed than in its whole history. The “normal” of liberal-technocratic triumphalism looks like a one-time-only blip, a bubble punctured by the collapse of Lehman, its final illusions extinguished by Covid-19. A world of Great Power rivalry has returned — the Americans proving Lord Palmerston’s old maxim that there are “no eternal allies or perpetual enemies, only eternal interests”, and judging that it is not in Washington’s eternal interests to simultaneously confront the rising giant of Beijing while being locked into conflict with Russia on a declining continent that cannot defend its own peripheries.

And so, a political consensus is forming: we must reindustrialize. We must rebuild our national productive capacities. Without a solid manufacturing base, we are dangerously exposed in a hostile world of geopolitical contestation. In his first speech as the putative “shadow chancellor” this week, Robert Jenrick told us that Reform would “restore our proud industrial heritage and create good jobs for British workers once again”. “We do believe in industrial strategy”, he assured any listeners confused by his about-turn away from the party of the sovereign individual and free and open markets.

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In this, Jenrick is only echoing his leader Nigel Farage, a man who Maurice Glasman once described as “a saloon-bar Thatcherite”, but who has now taken to floating the idea of public ownership and equity stakes in British engineering firms, lamenting the loss of “shipbuilding, cement making, chemicals, steel”. “It’s all gone off to India and China”, he says, articulating all the cultural-political sovereigntist themes of post-industrial Britain — lost identity, lost purpose, lost control. Yet all those on-the-ground resentments are ultimately the result of conscious macroeconomic decisions on the part of the monetarists: a strong sterling is a boon for the City but blows a hole in the UK’s balance of trade that can only be filled by constant rounds of inward foreign investment; the unedifying and unending ritual of flogging the family silver, until every old family firm and former national champion is in the portfolio of a Gulf state.

Gone are those days, Farage and Jenrick promise. Instead, Reform will pursue something called the “politics of national preference”, at least according to one of the party’s ideological gurus, James Orr, the national-conservative theologian and disciple of the patrician, communitarian Toryism of Roger Scruton.

And if all of this sounds familiar, that might be because it echoes the lines of our current party of government. Chancellor Rachel Reeves promised to “make, sell and buy more in Britain”. Her economic philosophy would be rooted in “securonomics”: the doctrine of maximized efficiency would give way to the new watchword of resilience, and the local, national provenance of goods would be prioritized over their price. If Thatcher’s heirs have seen the writing on the wall, the second-generation of Blairism have too: a country that makes things, that has a trade surplus in goods, will fare better in an age of chaotic, global fragmentation.

Yet if we’re heavy on the diagnostics, we’re light on the prescription. Jenrick might position his vision as a “new political economy”, but nothing that’s so far been proposed will go any further towards “reindustrialization” than Reeves’ defunct “securonomics”. The latter was, more-or-less, dead on arrival, always to be sacrificed on the altar of the Labour leadership’s innate caution and overdue respect for established procedures. It is not in the nature of the apolitical, robotic meeting-chair-in-chief to challenge any of the orthodoxies repeated from the mouths of a recalcitrant, Treasury-brained senior civil servant, let alone the Confederation of British Industry.

To be fair, Jenrick’s “new political economy” differs from Labour’s take on industrial renaissance in one crucial respect. For Reform, the net-zero project is the primary blockage to the resuscitation of heavy manufacturing, particularly in high-carbon, energy-intensive sectors being crushed under the weight of subsidized renewables and grid costs. For Labour, the green transition is the exact opposite: the catalyst for the transformation of the British economy. In place of the dark Satanic mills of Victorian industry, and the monotowns of Fordist mass production, the new industrial revolution will restore England’s reputation as a green and pleasant land, a global leader in wind power with a sideline in batteries, solar cells and nuclear energy.

Both parties are peddling a fantasy. The seeds of deindustrialization were sown long before decarbonization became a uniparty dogma. The loss of much of Britain’s heavy industry took place even as we were net energy exporters. Besides, the Chinese economic miracle was built on more than cheap coal. The aggressive industrial policy contained in the Communist Party’s Made in China 2025  has transformed the country from the world’s sweatshop into a high-tech center of advanced manufacturing, with massive, state-directed investment into highly competitive, strategic and innovative sectors, complementing a long-term policy of strict capital controls, high tariff walls, and a central bank that militantly supports investment-led growth. That’s reflected in Chinese exports: no more the crowded production lines of cliche, with the PRC instead becoming a global leader in high-tech sectors, robotics and AI.

In response, the US first mobilized debt-financed subsidies to “reshore” jobs to the American Rust Belt. “Bidenomics”, as it was called, attempted to lure back manufacturers in high-tech sectors by handing them taxpayer bungs. The results were mixed. Hundreds of billions were spent, but restive voters rewarded the Democrats by electing Donald Trump. The irony, of course, is that Trump has continued with the same “decoupling” strategy pursued by his predecessor, along the way hiding American industry behind a new and belligerent protectionism. That has now been hampered by the strength of the US constitution’s separation of powers, and a Supreme Court ruling that the President’s Liberation Day and subsequent tariffs are unconstitutional. Nevertheless, the idea that the UK, in this international context, could start a new industrial revolution simply by abandoning net zero targets is risible. Another latter-day Reformer Suella Bravermen might want us to believe she has undergone a Damascene conversion to Reform’s apparent “socialism” with a Faragist face, but Jenrick’s desire to demonstrate subservience to the strictures of the OBR and its originator George Osborne precludes any radical rupture with decades of economic failure.

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Meanwhile, Labour’s positioning of net zero as a catalyst for industrial growth is equally a chimera — our expensive adoption of renewables is destroying the margins of what remains of heavy industry while propping up Scandinavian social democracy and Chinese developmentalism via the rapid import of Danish wind turbines and Chinese solar cells and electric vehicles. All of this while our reliance on Norwegian and US shale gas continues unabated. As with many of the thin promises of Starmerism, “securonomics” has never been translated from rhetoric to reality.

And so Britain remains buffeted by forces beyond its control, unwilling or unable to reassert itself. A genuine plan for national sovereignty would combine the dynamism of markets with the strategic direction that can only be provided by an agile, active state, one willing to do away with shibboleths that were built for a bygone world. In practice, yes, that means driving down energy costs as a matter of priority, but also supporting capital spending with unified fiscal and monetary policy. Primary budget surpluses would maintain market confidence while extra borrowing for long-term, pro-growth capital projects could be facilitated by a reformed Bank of England. The deep pools of capital in the nation’s pension pots could be re-domesticated and mobilized towards infrastructure and industrial investment.

This would be shadowed by other changes. For one thing, chancellors would set budgets that move us away from short-term cash transfers and, again, towards long-term investments. Welfare and pensions bills would be brought under control, moving from means-tested to contributory systems, while the tax revenue burden would shift away from work and patient, productive capital, and towards rent-seeking, unproductive assets, land, and real estate.

Core to this project would be an empowered executive, with a restoration of ministerial authority unencumbered by unaccountable bureaucracies, or an activist judiciary, and unafraid of disciplining and managing footloose capital to direct it towards strategic goals. The era of free movement of capital, labor, goods and services is giving way to one in which nations prosper with enforced capital controls, tariffs and an industrial policy that maintains a strictly national economy. Here, the success of the national payments system will be instructive. But resilience on other spheres should follow. The government last year intervened to rescue domestic steel-making capacity in Scunthorpe, and has since made noises about defense-industrial rejuvenation as a fulcrum for manufacturing revival. But signs that they can turn words and sentiment into concrete action are few; the future will belong to those states that act, that “just do things”, not those paralyzed by their own ideological quietism.

Nations, like Buffet’s investors, are truly tested when the tide goes out. It’s only now, in an age of tumult, that we discover that our embrace of hyper-globalization depended on geopolitical conditions that no longer exist. We bred over-dependency, and are now learning that true strategic autonomy is far harder to rebuild than it was to sell off to the highest bidder.

If sovereignty was the backbone of the mainstream campaign for Brexit, independence was the cry of its populist tribune. Acknowledging his triumph on the night of the vote, Nigel Farage declared that 23 June would go down in history as “our independence day”. The constitutionalism of Gove and Johnson recalled Dicey and Bagehot, while the then Ukip leader came closer to Tom Paine or John Wilkes — the 18th-century rabble-rouser and MP. More than a restoration, Brexit was something radical. The country was unshackled and free. 

The allure of such lofty rhetoric is understandable, particularly for a country that had so recently turned much of the globe pink. And even as the empire crumbled, Britain was a serious player. In 1951, when the European Coal and Steel Treaty, the predecessor body to the EEC, was signed, Britain exported more cars than any other nation. If the country had done extraordinary things before submitting to the Continent, the thinking went, it could accomplish great things after. In contrast to such rarefied ambition, the Remain camp’s arguments felt insular and bloodless. In the 21st century, they intoned, sovereignty was pooled, furnishing the country with more, not less, agency to act in an unpredictable world. 

This may have been intellectually coherent, and potentially even right, but it had the drawback of sounding like a footnote in a legal textbook. As is so often the case, progressives brought a knife to a gun fight; facts to combat vision. Nor is any of this just history. Ten years after the referendum, these debates around sovereignty, independence and self-government feel more relevant than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Such matters are no longer the province of political theory, or electioneering, but integral to the life and death of nations. 

So what is sovereignty in our own time? Beyond a monopoly on the legitimate use of force at home, it includes the capacity to defend one’s borders against military threat. Syria is not, therefore, a properly sovereign state. Nor is Venezuela, Lebanon or Georgia. Qatar’s sovereignty is certainly in doubt given it was bombed by two countries that were previously bombing each other: Israel and Iran. Particularly noteworthy about the Qatari example is that Washington seemingly permitted a strike against a country under its suzerainty. Precisely what that counts for with the Trump presidency is less clear by the day, as Denmark is now discovering. Despite spilling blood in the “liberation” of Iraq, and recently spending treasure to purchase 41 F-35s (total cost: $4.5 billion), the White House is openly talking about acquiring Greenland from Copenhagen — by force if necessary. 

Given the increasingly ad hoc nature of the US umbrella, it feels like the basis of real sovereignty, in this new world, is nuclear weapons. When I spoke to Ukrainian historian, Serhei Plokhy, late last year, his sense was that nuclear proliferation was close to inevitable over the decades ahead. If the United States couldn’t guarantee the safety of Japan, for instance, or sought to depose a government in Brazil or Mexico, perhaps these countries might look to acquire the bomb. Two nations in particular underscore this point: Ukraine and North Korea. For a brief moment in the early Nineties, the former possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, something it renounced in exchange for security guarantees from Moscow. North Korea, meanwhile, developed an impressive nuclear and ballistic missile program, and is yet to receive the same treatment meted out on Syria, Iran, Libya, and now Venezuela. 

Besides nuclear weapons, there are other markers of sovereignty as we enter 2026. Technological autonomy is one. In 1994, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei told Jiang Zemin, then the CCP’s General Secretary, that “a country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army”. In other words, national independence was impossible without an advanced industrial base. Zhenfei’s reported words were oddly reminiscent of Charles De Gaulle, who wrote in his memoir that, “there is no independence without power, and no power without modern means”. Rather than being divided by ideology, then, perhaps we should look at both men as economic nationalists forged by struggle and misfortune. De Gaulle, after all, led a government in exile, while Zhengfei cut his teeth as an engineer building jets on the Vietnamese border to support the war effort in the Sixties.

If there is one great or middle power which has not acted according to such principles in recent decades — perhaps because it has been spared such calamities — it is Britain. Think, for one thing, about technology. Far from seeing high-tech autonomy as key to the country’s status, successive governments have claimed that greater globalization was the yardstick they wished to be judged by. “Globalization is not something you can hold back,” Tony Blair informed the Labour Party Conference back in 2000. “It is driven by technology and communications and it is the key to future prosperity.” 

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Five years later, as BT sought to spend £10 billion to refit the country’s digital networks, eight companies were selected for the job: and not a single one was British. “No other advanced country would allow such a strategic investment decision affecting its national infrastructure,” lamented Peter Skyte, an officer for the union Amicus. By the standards of Blair, and much of the country’s political and media class, those were the complaints of a throwback failing to keep up. Later that year Marconi, one of the British firms that had failed to win a contract, and whose history stretched right back to 1897, was snatched up by Ericsson. Today, Britain has no domestic companies capable of building 5G infrastructure. To paraphrase Zhengfei, how powerful is an army without the technology suppliers to match? Britain may have F35s, but it can’t make microprocessors. Meanwhile Algeria and Kazakhstan produce more steel, and Tajikistan and Bosnia more aluminum. When it comes to machine-tool production we lag behind Switzerland and the Czech Republic, let alone Germany. France, meanwhile, has a lead in cutting-edge fields from sovereign cloud to first stage rockets.

It’s a similar story with our nuclear deterrent. For De Gaulle, it was pivotal that his republic maintain its own capability. “France must possess the means to defend itself by itself,” he said in 1959. Britain, meanwhile, was moving in the other direction, signing up for the American Polaris system in 1963. Rather than admit a new-found dependence on Washington, Whitehall heralded the shift as a tribute to the “‘Special Relationship”. We no longer have the Polaris system — it was replaced by Trident in the Eighties — but this most critical of technologies remains “interdependent”: while Britain builds its nuclear submarines, and fabricates its own warheads, the missiles are leased from a “shared pool” held by the Americans. Let’s not forget those missiles can only be serviced on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,000 miles away in Georgia. 

Economically, too, Britain increasingly resembles a vassal state. Heritage brands such as Boots, Clarks Weetabix and Cadbury all have American owners. If you fancy a coffee you’ll likely plump for one of Costa, Starbucks or Cafe Nero. While it may not be obvious, all three have American ownership. Indeed, US corporations employ more people in Britain than in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Sweden combined. But it’s at the level of basic infrastructure that things become especially pernicious. Most Government departments, and even our security services, rely on Amazon Web Services for their internet servers. In extreme circumstances, there is no guarantee that US pressure — political or legal — won’t affect the access and oversight of London. Is that really “taking back control”?

As our Government struggled to respond to Trump’s attack on Venezuela, perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that political clarity came from a politician with whom I agree on very little: Marine Le Pen. “There is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States has just brought about in Venezuela”, she wrote on X the day of Maduro’s capture. “The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, their power, or their continent. It is inviolable and sacred.” Today it might be Venezuela, Le Pen pronounced, tomorrow it could be a little closer to home. Whatever else, she heralds from a political-historical tradition in French politics that extends beyond Left and Right, and which stands for domestic sovereignty. Compared with Britain’s “podcast Right”, which unthinkingly cheers on everything the White House does, this intellectual heritage at least has the advantage of being coherent. 

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With America’s potential withdrawal from Europe, and the collapse of NATO now possible, it is ever more apparent that France’s post-war approach was the pragmatic one and Britain’s which was driven by ideology. Rolling over for the global hegemon and presuming we’ll forever dine at the top table feels presumptuous, now more than ever. Ironically, some of the most vociferous champions of British sovereignty over the Brexit years suddenly appear indifferent on the matter — with “global Britain” backers, like Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, to name but two, seeming to aspire to little more than subordinate status to Washington. 

This is an attitude which, ironically, reflects the reasoning of many pro-Europeans before 2016. They wanted issues such as trade and migration to remain at Brussels, not because they necessarily believed in such a settlement, but because it made domestic politics far easier. After four decades, Westminster had lost the muscle memory to conduct trade deals — as we have since discovered. Returning such competences to Britain was always the difficult choice — which is why much of the establishment resisted it. The same is arguably true here. Surely it’s easier, as a patriotic Right-winger, to simply talk about Britain’s leading role in world affairs rather than trying to achieve its material reality.

Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organization that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security. 

Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments,

Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights. 

Now, though, the unipolar moment that began in 1989 is over. Yet what we see today is not fragmentation or chaos — but a return to normalcy. The international system is reverting to its natural condition: a post-hegemonic, multi-nodal, and regionalized world where sovereign, civilizational powers coexist and balance one another within their historical spheres of interest. Elsewhere, I have called this process the Great Transition, one which emphasizes the re-emergence of geopolitical plurality and cultural multiplicity after a brief, artificial experiment in universalism.

If there is any coherence to a Trump doctrine, it is in recognizing this reality. And in this context, the Pentagon’s new “National Defense Strategy” (NDS) offers a much-welcome shift. Accepting the return of history and geopolitics, the proposed draft affirms the need to adapt to the changing international environment. It prioritizes defending the homeland and the contested boundaries of “American Sphere” from extra-regional interference — over the global military containment of China or Russia. Yet many in Washington, and even some Trump appointees, will abhor this shift.

From the moment he came down that golden escalator, Trump declared war on the foreign policy blob — the bipartisan consensus that treated America as a sucker, paying for others’ security, underwriting institutions that constrained us, and intervening in conflicts that made us less secure. Whatever one thinks of his style or execution, his insistence on “America First” was a necessary corrective, a reminder that the first duty of American statecraft is to its own people.

Still, these welcome bouts of realism are not only bound to be interrupted by the expected fervors of moralism and tired shibboleths about US global leadership, but also by a deeper, more entrenched force: globalism. This globalism is less about free trade or international cooperation and more reflects a broad cognitive bias. It is not a coherent ideology but an ideational reflex so deeply institutionalized that it pervades our foreign policy establishment, our universities, and even some among the MAGA counter-establishment. It is not a cabal to be purged but a mentality that saturates the very air of Washington.

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This mindset itself manifests in two forms. The first is the liberal universalism of the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who sought to expand alliances, international institutions, human rights organizations, and liberal democracy: all at gunpoint and in pursuit of a cosmopolitan dream of global homogeneity. In the post-Trump era, however, its more enduring variant is the militarized globalism of figures like John Bolton. This latter group insists on permanent unipolarity and American unilateralism, achieved via the primacy of the US military.

The Boltonians — and their acolytes in Jerusalem — weaponize a cartoonish idea of “Western civilization” in a Manichaean struggle against a caricatured notion of global barbarism and international terrorism. The liberal internationalists Trump deposed championed the universalism of US values and yearned for the “woke imperium”; for the Boltonians and closeted Neocons who successfully infiltrated the MAGA-verse, the universalism of imperial force reigns supreme. Nevertheless, both groups are globalist, both are dogmatic defenders of US global hegemony, and both find common cause in mortgaging American sovereignty at the altar of ideology.

Consider Ukraine. Nato expansion — promoted as the defense of liberal order — has in fact destabilized Europe and entangled America in an attritional war with no clear endgame. By offering promises America was neither willing nor able to fulfill, Washington walked Ukraine down a primrose path that left it devastated, Russia emboldened, and Europe vassalized. Instead of securing stability, then, Nato expansion has deepened insecurity and forced America into another open-ended commitment very far from its vital interests.

Or take the Middle East, where the Boltonians have hoisted their flag most strongly. Just weeks ago, the United States found itself dragged into the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran. Despite the IDF’s heavy bombardment of Iranian military targets and nuclear enrichment facilities, shadowed by America’s own strikes, the war demonstrated once again that force cannot destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, technological know-how, or its will to rebuild. Iran emerged bloodied but resilient, its nationalism hardened. Yet Washington reflexively positioned itself as a co-belligerent — risking escalation, draining munitions, and distracting from higher priorities.

Besides the fact that both Europe and the Middle East are peripheral to America’s main strategic interests in the Western Hemisphere, as noted in the NDS, perhaps the highest priority for the savvy American strategist is ensuring US competitiveness in the 21st century through a project of national renewal. To remain a great power, Washington must urgently upgrade its infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, while creating regionally integrated supply chains for essential items like semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and microchips.

Instead, by remaining enmeshed in endless conflicts abroad, America has accumulated $37.5 trillion in debt, devastating communities and harming the middle class. For most Americans, bombing the Houthis — whom they have never even met in real life — to protect maritime trade to Europe could never justify the costs. Additionally, rampant US intervention has serious military consequences, compounding their societal and economic impacts. In June, over less than two weeks, the US spent billions to defend Israel, depleting its global stockpiles of advanced missile interceptors like THAAD, even as it exposed serious vulnerabilities in its munitions procurement and overall military readiness. All this, it goes without saying, makes America less secure.

In any case, these examples reveal the deeper truth. Universalism in all its forms — whether liberal or militarized — erodes sovereignty, global cultural pluralism, and the righteous spirit that undergirds anti-hegemonic movements like America First. It collapses the diversity of civilizations into a single template, one to be imposed by force and maintained by empire. It multiplies and extends permanent commitments that serve the imperium and its managerial class, along the way betraying the republic’s founding principles.

Even strands of neorealism, such as John Mearsheimer’s brand of offensive realism, fall prey to this globalist bias: by globalizing great-power competition and advocating for China’s military containment, they portray international relations as nothing more than a mechanistic, Hobbesian race for hegemony, everywhere and forever. But this, too, is not realism; it is rationalized universalism. And it has led Washington, like Athens in Thucydides’ history, towards imperial overstretch and decay.

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Ultimately, a state can be a conservative commonwealth serving its people, or an empire enriching its special interests, war oligarchs, and security-rentier class. But it cannot be both. Yet for decades, America, corrupted by its globalist reflex, has chosen empire. In fact, our “bipartisan” foreign policy consensus has corrupted and redefined the “national interest” itself, turning it into a justification for permanent war.

The danger today is that the globalist bias — be it liberal or realist, Neocon or Boltonian — will keep us chained to the illusions of unipolarity, luring us with enchanting calls to hegemony like the sirens of Greek mythology. Fixating our gaze on the 20th century, and the postwar status quo, they reduce the world to a zero-sum battlespace between perpetual black and white blocs — encouraging endless military intervention while resurrecting old dogmas to justify them. In short, the globalist cognitive bias prevents us from conceiving a cohesive grand strategy for the post-hegemonic era that has now arrived, keeping us vulnerable and hastening our decline.

What the country needs now, instead, is something I’d call sovereign realism: a radical foreign policy unburdened by ideology, freed from the conceits of universalism, and grounded in the conservation of American strength. That means privileging sovereignty over universalist crusades, regional balances of power over global policing, selective protection over blanket primacy, and renewal at home as the foundation of strength abroad. It means diplomacy without illusions: talking to adversaries and allies alike based on reciprocity and strategic empathy, not sanctimony or moralism.

Above all, it means adopting a new approach that shapes itself to the polycentric world at hand, rather than resisting it with futile bids for unipolarity. The Great Transition is not a threat to be conquered, then, but a reality to be navigated. For, in the end, the postwar “international community” was little more than a projection, international law a polite fiction, and globalization artificial and contrived. What lies ahead is not disorder but the world as it truly is — a concert of civilizational powers insisting, as America itself does, on their own sovereignty and resisting a managerial empire: whether run from Washington or Beijing.

Like many post-Soviet states, upon becoming independent in 1991, Ukraine faced a serious challenge of nation-building. Ukraine is a multinational, multireligious and multilingual country with little historical experience of independent statehood. Its major ethno-linguistic groups include Ukrainians in the west and Russians in the east. Many speak both languages and their histories and cultural practices are deeply intertwined.

An atavistic nationalism that bases political authority on supposed ancient traditions of ethnic-Ukrainians alone is neither consistent with reality, nor capable of uniting the whole Ukrainian people. The challenge of post-Soviet nation-building was, therefore, to craft a civic nationalism, based around a shared commitment to democratic self-government.

Sadly, Ukrainian elites failed in this task. Indeed, as Yuliya Yurchenko documents in her compelling but depressing book, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital, they were too busy plundering the remnants of the Soviet economy, with officials and their criminal-business networks transforming themselves into powerful, predatory oligarchs while the rest of their society fell into penury.

From 1990 to 2000, Ukraine’s GDP fell from $81.4bn to just $31.2bn. Hyperinflation, peaking at 10,155% in 1993, destroyed people’s living standards, creating long-term unemployment, especially among the young. The oligarchs had little to offer citizens, relying increasingly on fraud, corruption and intimidation to stay in power.

In this context, reformers — who took power after the 2004 “orange revolution” — looked to EU and Nato membership as a way to transform their society. This attempt to move “from Brezhnev to Brussels” occurred widely in post-communist Eastern Europe. In Ukraine, reformers hoped that EU rules would discipline or destroy the oligarchs and root out corruption by imposing free-market reforms.

But this was a very dangerous strategy. As Yurchenko observes, the EU-Ukraine Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) signed in 2008 would, if fully implemented, devastate small businesses and workers by exposing them to continental competition. Meanwhile, many oligarchs have found ways to exploit the opening of markets and limit measures that would damage their interests.

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Other oligarchs resisted liberalisation by rallying the people of eastern Ukraine into thinking that pro-Western elites were not heeding their interests. Donetsk, where many oligarchic businesses are based, has deeper economic, linguistic and cultural ties to Russia, and people there have often complained of being neglected and sneered at by the West, despite constituting a substantial share of Ukraine’s GDP and population.

The oligarchs began harnessing this resentment, fostering a growing east/west split in Ukrainian politics. The “East” — led by Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions — retook national power following the 2010 presidential election. Yanukovych’s subsequent persecution of his opponents drew the ire of Washington and Brussels, but this only reinforced his preference for stronger ties with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), reflecting the economic needs of his eastern base.

This growing internationalisation of Ukraine’s domestic struggles was perilous, given the geopolitical context. Russia had stridently opposed Nato’s eastward expansion since the Nineties. Gorbachev had asked Washington to disband Nato in exchange for the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, while Yeltsin had asked for a new, inclusive security architecture that incorporated Russia into Europe, only to be rebuffed. The latter later warned the West that a Cold War was giving way to a cold peace, with Nato expansion entailing “nothing but humiliation for Russia”.

When the West proceeded anyway, Yeltsin’s successor, Vladimir Putin, made it clear that Moscow saw Nato expansion as directed at Russia. In April 2008, a Nato summit welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration to join the alliance. Putin invaded Georgia a few months later, rather than see it join this anti-Russian bloc. Many analysts, from the Cold Warrior George Kennan to the realist professor John Mearsheimer, predicted disaster if Nato continued to expand towards Russia’s borders.

The same, to a lesser extent, applied to EU expansion. Putin described the DCFTA as a “big threat” to Russia, as it would allow EU exports to enter tariff-free, via Ukraine, and “choke” the Russian economy. EU officials insisted their cooperation with Ukraine was merely technical, refusing to recognise the geopolitical implications.

The 2014 “Euromaidan” crisis saw the culmination of this toxic fracturing of the Ukrainian nation. In 2013, President Yanukovych rejected the DCFTA, opting for closer ties with the EEU. This prompted widespread protests, which were egged on by senior EU and American politicians, despite the growing involvement of far-Right nationalists. Eventually, amid escalating unrest and violence, Yanukovych fled to Russia. But while his opponents in western Ukraine celebrated, his eastern supporters perceived a “fascist” coup against their democratically-elected president. The Ukrainian state’s authority collapsed in the east, allowing opportunistic pro-Russian separatists to seize power in many areas, while Russia reacted by invading Crimea.

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Instead of moving to reassure their fellow citizens and build an inclusive national project, Ukraine’s pro-Western faction instead doubled down. Under the new president, the oligarch Petro Poroshenko, the Government purged eastern politicians and officials from the state, sending many fleeing into exile, and banned Yanukovych’s Party of the Regions, intensifying the crisis of representation in the east. It also launched military offensives against the separatists, triggering further Russian intervention, producing heavy casualties and a grinding stalemate.

Neither Poroshenko, nor his successor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have implemented the Minsk accords agreed with Russia in 2014-15, which proposed to settle the conflict by granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk. Instead, the new government loudly sought full membership of Nato and the EU — measures that could only undermine Ukraine’s national sovereignty. Yet the EU has not — and will not — actually admit Ukraine, as it is still reeling from the divisions induced by the last round of enlargement into post-communist Eastern Europe and does not want to take responsibility for a war-torn country. But it was happy to pretend otherwise, flattering Ukrainian elites while pushing neoliberal reforms on them.

The Poroshenko government enacted the EU DCFTA, rapidly introducing structural reforms to comply with EU rules. Facing rising debt amid economic decline, the Ukrainian state became economically dependent on the EU and IMF. Foreigners were brought in to run three ministries and IMF advisors were embedded with the central bank, entailing further losses of sovereignty. Austerity, neoliberalism and further privatisation benefited well-positioned oligarchs but did nothing to alleviate mounting poverty.

Far from reaching out to Ukraine’s ethnic Russians, Kyiv has actively promoted a narrowly Ukrainian, anti-Russian form of nationalism, reflected in language policy, “de-communisation”, and the secession of the Ukrainian Orthodox church from its Russian “mother” church. As Yurchenko observes, instead of reconsolidating Ukraine, these measures only “further divided the broken nation”.

This failure of Ukrainian politicians to represent the whole nation has led both sides to turn to foreigners to bolster their domestic position. The pro-Russian faction appears backwards and corrupt, offering little to inspire and unite the country, and ultimately relies on Russian intervention to prevent Ukraine slipping from its grasp. But nor can the pro-Western faction command the consent of the whole nation. It was prepared to overthrow a democratically-elected president to get its own way, and has persistently sought to lock in its preferences against internal opposition by sacrificing Ukrainian national sovereignty to supranational organisations.

Russia’s role in this disaster is obvious. It is hardly surprising that Ukrainian nationalism has taken a sharply anti-Russian turn given the annexation of Crimea, Russian support for separatist fighters, and Putin’s open contempt for Ukrainian independence and sovereignty — let alone the recent invasion.

Suggested reading

Could Russian mercenaries conquer the world?

By John Lewis-Stempel

But the West has also been reckless and irresponsible. Russia has made perfectly clear that it will not tolerate the expansion of the Western sphere of influence up to its borders. It wants at least a neutral buffer zone between itself and Nato, and ideally a friendly sphere of influence among its post-Soviet neighbours. We might wish this were not so, but it is a geopolitical fact. Russia’s willingness to use force to achieve its goals — at great reputational and economic cost — has been beyond doubt since 2008. To put this into perspective, we can imagine how the US might react if Canada sought to join a Russian-led military alliance — or merely recall Washington’s reaction when Cuba did so.

The West had two strategic options. Either it could acknowledge and accommodate Russian interests, or it could defy them, ushering Ukraine into Nato and deploying overwhelming military power to deter Russia from using force. Instead, it did neither. It allowed its Ukrainian allies falsely to believe that they could rely on the EU and Nato, yet did not nearly enough to deter Putin militarily. This has encouraged the Ukrainian government to prioritise integration with Russia’s enemies over rapprochement with its own citizens, while fanning Russian anxieties. Had Nato been clearer, Ukrainian elites might have come to their senses and pursued a less reckless course of action.

The only solution to this crisis, aside from war and devastation, is for Ukraine to become a neutral state, as Finland was during the Cold War. The sovereignty of the Ukrainian people — their capacity to work out their differences and collectively determine their life together in a peaceful and democratic manner — can only be enhanced if all sides renounce their external ties, and foreign powers cease meddling in Ukrainian politics.

To be truly sovereign, the Ukrainian state must be seen to represent the whole national population. The push towards Nato and EU membership — only intensified by Russia’s aggressive reaction — has fragmented the Ukrainian nation. It is hard to see how it can be reunited if this continues; bloody partition seems more likely.

Sovereignty does not imply total control over the state’s internal or external environment; it only entails self-rule, and this requires political realism. This was a source of some confusion in the Brexit debate. Many Thatcherite Eurosceptics foolishly believed that the UK could restore its sovereignty — its capacity to make laws and adopt policies inconsistent with EU rules — while retaining full access to the EU’s single market. The EU had no interest in agreeing such attractive terms; on the contrary, its interest lay in making Brexit as painful as possible.

Today, the Ukrainians clearly have no more “sovereign right” to join the EU or Nato than Brexit Britain had a “sovereign right” to full access to EU markets. Reflecting their own interests, these organisations will not admit Ukraine. This is the geopolitical reality that any truly sovereign Ukrainian government must reckon with.

Of course, Russia must withdraw from Ukraine. But the only way for the Ukrainian people to achieve national sovereignty is for all sides within Ukraine to cease internationalising their political conflict, and for foreign powers to cease their meddling. Neutrality offers the only context in which Ukraine can restore its territorial integrity and secure peace. It also provides the only context in which pro-Western forces will be forced to reckon with their pro-Russian counterparts, and find a more consensual way to exist.

Rather, my rethink concerns the British constitution – and why, I’ve finally come to the conclusion, we need a written one. 

Further reading

The EU's soul-destroying rhetoric

By Giles Fraser

Technically, that’s what we’ve got already – our various bits of constitutional law are written down in various documents. However, it isn’t codified – i.e. drawn together into a single overarching document.

I’ve never thought we were less of a democracy for not having one of those. After all, history is littered with constitutions bearing the boot-prints of dictators. Like it or not, de facto power can squash de jure legitimacy. On that basis, one could argue that an all-over-the-place body of constitutional law is less vulnerable to tyrannical subversion than an easily amendable – or suspendable – codified constitution.

However, the events of the Boris Johnson premiership have convinced me that the make-it-up-as-we-go-along approach isn’t sustainable. I offer no comment on whether the Government was right to prorogue Parliament at this particular time; to me the real problem is that there should be any confusion as to the legality of the move.

It ought to be crystal clear what the rules are. Yes, there will be occasions when unforeseen developments – like America’s infamous hanging chads – present themselves, requiring a novel interpretation of the rules. But on something as basic as when parliament is or isn’t in session there’s no excuse for not knowing exactly where we stand.

There’s also no excuse for blatantly stupid provisions like the Fixed Term Parliament Act (FTPA) – which allows a government with no majority to be trapped in office by an opposition too frit to agree to an election.

The FTPA is an example of the way our existing constitutional arrangements have struggled to cope with this strange new era of hung parliaments, coalition governments, national referendums, asymmetric devolution, supranational institutions, and the botched reform of the House of Lords.

In short, it’s a mess, it’s getting worse and it’s time to sort it out.

*

Unfortunately, it’s often in the process of correction that one makes a fatal mistake. So, let me acknowledge the number one risk involved in codifying the constitution – which is that the enterprise would be hijacked by those keenest on the idea.

Further reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

Advocates of a written constitution tend to be of a certain type – the we-know-best establishment liberal. Of course, liberalism is as legitimate a point of view as any other, but not one that should be privileged in a constitution to the extent of constraining democracy for decades to come. And, make no mistake, if the establishment take the lead on constitutional reform they will use it to entrench their power. To misquote George Orwell: “if you want to know what the future will be like, imagine Dominic Grieve and Harriet Harman stamping on the will of the people for ever.”

Now, you may be quite fond of Mr. Grieve and/or Ms. Harman. You may think the ‘will of the people’ a bogus concept. Fair enough. But, just like everyone else, you should have to fight for your beliefs at each and every election, not have them embedded in the body politic like an inoperable piece of shrapnel.

So if we’re to have a codified constitution for the whole country, we need some guiding principles. Here are five:

I. Continuity

From the outset it needs to be made plain that this new constitution is not a founding charter for the People’s Republic of Islington. The purpose of codification must be to organise and clarify the fundamental features of our existing constitutional arrangements – those tested by time and for which there is widespread popular support. So national sovereignty, constitutional monarchy, parliamentary democracy and so on and so forth. I’ll come on to a glaring exception below, but the general principle is this: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

That said, codification shouldn’t mean fossilisation. Democracy is fundamental, of course – but if at some future point the voters wanted to, say, abolish the monarchy, they should be free to do so. Therefore we need a procedure for changing the constitution. In our current system, all that is usually required is a parliamentary majority. A codified constitution could replicate that, but, if it did, one would have ask why we’d bothered with codification at all.

Further reading

Look what happens when you ignore Parliament

By Diane Purkiss

Changing a constitution should require a higher hurdle – for instance a national referendum. Yes, the political establishment would hate that (which in itself recommends the idea). Referenda are also expensive, time-consuming and divisive. But that’s good too, because changing the constitution shouldn’t be cost free. In contrast to the Fixed Term Parliament Act, which was passed in a fit of absence of mind, the prospect of all future ‘reform’ must be sufficiently wince-inducing as to provoke forethought.

II: Rules not rights

If we want a ‘sticky constitution’ – i.e. one that can be changed, but not easily – then the fewer provisions it contains, the better. It’s therefore essential that codification doesn’t become overloaded with rights legislation – because you know what would happen: every single lobby group in the country would try to justify its existence by getting their trojan hobby horses into the final document.

Furthermore, this is how they’d make their demands – “if you don’t agree to X that we say is the only way of securing the rights of Y, then that shows you don’t care about Y – in fact, you’re probably Y-phobic, you bigot.”

Suggested reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

So, let’s not get bogged down in that. Codification must concentrate on rules not rights – settling the key questions about who governs in which circumstances as opposed to predetermining the government programme.

Of course, I’m aware that the 1998 Human Rights Act incorporates the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law. I’m not suggesting that a post-Brexit codification should reverse that, but it shouldn’t take Britain any further away from its homegrown legal tradition – which includes a long and impressive record of defending liberty.

III: Via negativa

Via negativa means ‘the negative way’. It isn’t a legal term, but refers to the old theological method of describing God by making statements about what God is not. More recently, Nassim Taleb has used the term to describe a method of approaching life generally – for instance, seeking to improve health not through unproven treatments of dubious worth, but by cutting out potential harms.

Further reading

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

We need a constitutional via negativa. Instead of relying on complicated innovations that may have unintended consequences – like the Fixed Term Parliament Act – we should first seek to make improvements by removing what we don’t need. In fact, repealing the FTPA would be an excellent place to start.

Admittedly, in deciding to codify the constitution we would have violated this principle, but it can still guide us. Instead of codifying to achieve positive outcomes that have so far not been attained (which, by definition, requires innovation) we should seek to avoid negative outcomes – relying on established precedent.

This doesn’t mean that government shouldn’t take risks or pursue progressive aims, just that it shouldn’t do so through the constitution – whose purpose is to serve as an anchor not a motor.

IV: Decentralisation

In any case, progress is best made from the bottom-up – through lots of local experiments. That way the successes can be copied and adapted for use elsewhere, while the failures are contained and learned from. This is what Taleb calls ‘optionality’.

However, optionality requires diversity and diversity requires decentralisation. One of the great failures of the British constitution in the modern age is that it did so little to hold back the over-centralisation of power. We should be proud of our long-established liberties – but their key weakness is that they go back to a time before the modern state, and thus provide scant defence against the top-down control made possible by the bureaucratic age.

More from this author

What's the point of central government?

By Peter Franklin

Codification would be an opportunity to put that right. Since 1997, we’ve seen power devolved to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London. Since 2010 there’s also been devolution to English cities and regions (though not to England as a whole). However, this is power given away by Westminster at its discretion, which it can choke-off or even take back altogether.

In his Confessions interview with Giles Fraser, the political philosopher Larry Siedentop makes the case that, post-Brexit, the United Kingdom must have a federal constitution. This means one in which all the power does not reside in one place (Westminster). Instead, a significant part of it would belong, inalienably, elsewhere: with national governments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast – and with a new English national government (in York) too. Within each home nation, there’d be further ‘deep devolution’, to cities and counties, and ultimately down to each community.

Don't let the liberals write our constitution

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V: Sovereignty

Brexit is ultimately about sovereignty. The will of the people – and I’m confident this includes many more than 52% of them – is that the United Kingdom of should remain an independent country.

One day that could change. Generations hence, we may wish to join a European superstate, a one world government, a federation of planets. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, we wish to govern ourselves. This is the most basic constitutional principle of them all and the foundation of our democracy. It is what a codified, written constitution must begin and end with.

At a time when they are under threat, the essentials of national sovereignty should be spelled out – if not exhaustively, then at least in terms of the most obvious and tangible components. Control of our borders, our currency, our armed forces: let these be written down – the pillars of an acquis Britannique.

If any or all are to be given away, let it be by one means and one means only – a direct vote of the British people.

“I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and political cohesion. I accept that I have failed. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret, therefore, that I can no longer sit for this party.”

To advocates of a ‘hard’ Brexit or indeed no Brexit, any compromise on the issue (including the Prime Ministers deal) would leave Britain ‘half-in and half-out’ of the European Union. Technically, they’re wrong – a country is either a member of the European Union or it isn’t; but leaving that aside, would being half-in, half-out be such a terrible thing?

History is full of compromises, some of them permanent, some which collapse, and others which can be seen, in retrospect, as a staging post to something else. Here are 10 of the most interesting examples.

Further reading

Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

1. The Crown Dependencies

There are three ‘Crown Dependencies’ – the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (which together form the Channel Islands) and the Isle of Man.

Though the three territories are included within the British isles and their inhabitants are British citizens, they are not part of Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland and Wales) nor are they part of the United Kingdom (i.e. Great Britain and Northern Ireland). The UK is responsible for their defence and foreign policy, but otherwise they are direct dependencies of the Crown, with their own legislatures and legal systems – in fact the Bailiwick of Guernsey has three legislatures (one for Guernsey itself, one for Alderney and one for Sark). So, I hope that’s all perfectly clear.

The Crown Dependencies inhabit a half-way house between sovereignty and non-sovereignty. It obviously suits them well. They also inhabit another half-way house – Jersey, Guernsey and Man are not part of the EU but are part of the Customs Union. Looks like the UK might be joining them.

Further reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

2. The Irish Free State

Next up is the most commonly cited ‘precedent’ for a compromise Brexit. It’s not an especially happy one, at least not in its early stages.

After years of struggle, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 granted independence to Ireland. Or did it? The Treaty was full of compromises – not least the fact that Northern Ireland was granted the power to opt out and remain in union with Great Britain, which of course it did. Furthermore, the Free State was still part of the British Commonwealth. George V remained king in Ireland and Irish legislators were required to swear fidelity to him as part of the deeply divisive Oath of Allegiance.

Even Irish supporters of the Treaty called it “the freedom to achieve freedom”. For opponents of the Treaty this was not enough and Civil War broke out in 1922. The pro-treaty side (which became Fine Gael) won the war, but the largest part of the anti-treaty side won the peace – emerging as Fianna Fail (Ireland’s dominant party from 1932 to 2011).

Ironically, it was the party’s founder Eamon de Valera who used “the freedom to achieve freedom” – leading Ireland to full independence in 1937.

Further reading

Brexit will accelerate the inevitable in Ireland

By Giles Fraser

3. The Dominions

Independence came to America in 1776; but what if the American revolution had never happened? What if the American subjects of King George Ill had been granted representation in return for their taxation? Would we have the Honourable Members for Boston Central and Manhattan Upper Westside sitting in the House of Commons? Unlikely. Rather self-governance would have evolved as it did in America’s northern neighbour. In 1867, Canada was granted Dominion status – though quite what that meant took decades to work out.

By 1907 Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Newfoundland – were all recognised as Dominions i.e. self-governing states within the British Empire. The date for full Canadian independence is usually given as 1931, but some powers were not transferred from Westminster until 1982! It was a similar story with slightly different dates in Australia and New Zealand too. The outlier was Newfoundland, which had its own Dominion status separate to that of Canada. In the 1930s, however, its government ran out of money – and self-governance collapsed. The British stepped in for a while until 1949, when Newfoundland became the tenth Canadian province.

So, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, independence was evolutionary not revolutionary. I’ll leave you to decide whether America would have been better off following the same path.

Further reading

How Cambridge flunked the Peterson test

By Douglas Murray

4. Françafrique

Ok, enough about les Anglos for now. Let’s look at the decolonisation of another European empire – the French one in Africa. Whereas the British disengaged from sub-Saharan Africa with barely a backward glance, the French had trouble letting go.

Despite the formal independence of the successor nations, Paris remained deeply involved in their internal affairs – for instance, there were 19 military interventions between 1962 and 1995. The term Françafrique was originally a positive one, but became a byword for an uncomfortably close and murky web of political and business relationships. A notable episode was the so-called ‘Diamonds Affair’ when the French President, Valery Giscard d’ Estaing was accused of having received a gift of diamonds from the Bokassa I, the self-styled Emperor of Central Africa (in reality, a brutal and deranged dictator). Giscard vigorously insisted he’d done nothing wrong, but the allegations contributed to his electoral defeat in 1981. It didn’t help that little diamond stickers kept appearing over his eyes on election posters across the country.

It’s not that France is alone in having behaved badly in the developing world. But in the post-war period, there’s been nothing else quite like Françafrique, which encompassed over 20 African countries. What was the point of this postcolonial empire? Francois Mitterrand, who defeated Giscard in 1981 had this to say in 1957: “without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”.

Complete rubbish, of course – and, now that we are in the 21st century, it’s obvious Françafrique is not the force it used to be, for either France or its former colonies. That’s for the best, but let’s hope that the unhealthy neo-colonial relationship isn’t replaced by an even worse one with China.

Further reading

How Africa is converting China

By Christopher Rhodes

5. Finland

Finland knows all about half-way houses. In 1917, it escaped the Russian Empire only to be repeatedly invaded by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. The Russians kept attacking because the heroic Finns kept fighting back. By the end of the War, Stalin had imposed his rule over half of Europe and some nations were absorbed into the USSR. Finland was unique among Russia’s neighbours in remaining free. There was a price, however: territorial losses, reparations and a position of enforced neutrality.

Though postwar Finland wasn’t on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it wasn’t really on the western side either. Political scientists coined the word ‘Finlandisation‘ to describe the process by which a large country strongly influences a smaller neighbour while leaving it formally independent. That’s somewhat unfair on Finland, which did what it had to do to maximise its room for manoeuvre. In time, Finland learned how to benefit from its obligatory cooperation with the Soviets – developing close economic ties while remaining sufficiently capitalist to profit from them.

Before the war, the Estonians were richer than their Finnish cousins across the Baltic Sea. But Estonia was one of the nations annexed by the USSR. By the end of the Cold War, when the Estonians regained their independence, it was clear that they’d fallen a long way behind their once poor relations.

Whatever the sacrifices and compromises, the freedom to be yourself is usually worth it.

Further reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

6. Taiwan

In one way, Taiwan’s situation resembles post-war Finland: it’s a small capitalist democracy next to a giant communist neighbour. Of course, the parallels are not exact. Most importantly, Taiwan is fundamentally Chinese. Indeed, the official name of the Taiwanese state is the Republic of China (RoC)

Up until 1971, it was the RoC government in Taipei (the Taiwanese capital) that controlled China’s seat in the United Nations, not the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing. While both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China – mainland and islands – the rest of the world had to recognise the reality that it was the communist PRC that controlled almost all the land and people.

The Republic of China therefore languishes in diplomatic isolation, unrecognised by most countries despite the obvious existence of the Taiwanese state. It’s a deeply strange situation and yet this non-nation nation has prospered. It transitioned to democracy in the 1980s and has a per capita GDP of about $25,000 – that of the PRC is around the $10,000 mark, despite the years of rapid growth.

Though the PRC continues to regard Taiwan as a rebel province, and responds to the pro-independence movement with threats of invasion, it has also moved to deepen trading relationships and other forms of cooperation. Even more than Hong Kong, Taiwan provides a living model of what a democratic, free market China would look like. It would take the most blinkered Beijing ideologue not to see the interest in that.

It would be nice if the EU saw the benefit of an island neighbour free to do things differently.

Further reading

To save democracy, we must disrupt it

By Carl Miller

7. Singapore

The British view of Singapore’s history is full of gaps. We recall the colonial past; commemorate the wartime occupation; and admire the hyper-modernity of the present. However, that leaves out a lot – not least the tumult of the post-war years.

Today, Singapore may be the very image of an orderly society, but in the 1950s and early 60s, Singapore was teetering between multiple opposing forces: between the British Empire and the independence movement; communism and capitalism; and, most significantly, between union and disunion with Malaya/Malaysia.

Look at Singapore on a map. See how small and vulnerable it looks – a tiny island, barely separate from the Malay Peninsula. It’s easy to understand why Singapore’s leaders chose semi-autonomy within the Malaysian federation as a path to independence (achieved in 1963). However, the ethnic, religious and political divides between Singapore and rest of Malaysia proved unbridgeable. Feeling threatened by Singapore’s economic power, Malaysia’s leaders moved to expel the island from the federation. And thus in 1965, Singapore found itself independent and alone – a city state without a hinterland.

One half-way house having collapsed, Singapore built another one – a system of government somewhere between a liberal democracy and a benign(ish) autocracy. That’s true of both the political and economic system, because contrary to what you might have heard, Singapore is not a capitalist free-for-all. A small state and low taxes is balanced against strict government control of the land supply and massive state-led investment programmes.

There’s no such thing as a ‘Singapore model’ for other countries to follow. The city state’s singular history and geography means that it is a model for nowhere else but itself. However, what Singapore’s story does show is that a hard-working nation, with a strong sense of identity and a competent government can overcome isolation, division and hostility to succeed in a competitive world.

Further reading

Singapore shows there’s more than one way of doing capitalism

By Peter Franklin

8. The mixed economy

The Crown Territories, Ireland, the Dominions, Françafrique, Finland, Taiwan and Singapore: seven case studies in the complex relationship between sovereignty and reality. There are many others, but I’m going to conclude with three non-territorial examples of a historic compromise. First of all, in economics.

The 20th century was a fierce and often violent contest of ideas, not least between the free market and the centrally-planned, state-led economy. But in nation after nation, the eventual outcome was a half-way house between capitalism and socialism.

The social democracies of Scandinavia were once said to have pioneered the ‘mixed economy’, but the truth is that all industrial democracies are mixed economies. The precise division of the cake between the state and the market varies between nations and historical eras, but there is no example of either the public or private sector being reduced to insignificance.

The same is increasingly true of the developed and developing non-democracies. The only places left on the planet with an economically all-powerful state are pitiously poor – something they have in common with the only places on the planet where the state is powerless.

Ideological purity has its limits.

Further reading

Has a Davos backlash begun?

By Nomi Prins

9. The Church of England

If the 20th Century was a contest between economic ideas, the 16th and 17th century was all about religion – in particular the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism.

In different parts of Europe there were different outcomes – and one of the most interesting was in England. Rather than choose between the rival forms of Christianity, the English created a mash-up of the two and called it the Church of England.

That, of course, is a huge over-simplification and overlooks the persecution of Catholics and dissenting Protestants – not to mention the long years of conflict, war and atrocity in England, Scotland and Ireland. And yet the middle way of Anglicanism came to provide a model of co-existence: a roof under which High Church and Low Church, conservatives and liberals, worked out a way to live with one another.

That this became true of the most important spiritual institution in what would become the world’s most powerful nation, is surely not without wider significance.

Further reading

We've got Pascal all wrong

By Graham Tomlin

10. Theoretical physics

From religion, to science – and, specifically, the foundational theories of modern physics.

On the one hand we have General Relativity, which describes the fundamental forces of reality at the scale of planets, stars, galaxies and ultimately the whole universe. On the other, there is Quantum field theory, which does the same, but at the opposite end of the scale – atoms, subatomic particles and the general weirdness of the very small. Both theories are theories in the proper scientific sense, i.e. they’re not just hypothetical, they have real predictive power confirmed by experimental observation.

However, despite the evidence that backs both of them up, there’s a fundamental problem: they contradict one another. The mathematics by which we can explain the very big and the very small cannot be combined into a single theoretical framework. We’ve proved them both and yet they disprove one another. Awkward.

Many of the most brilliant minds of the age have devoted their careers to finding a Theory of Everything that can reconcile Relativity with the quantum stuff. So far, they’ve failed. One might reasonably wonder whether they’ll ever succeed; or whether they even need to. As long as they stay in their lane, the apparently irreconcilable theories both work – surely, the ultimate in agreeing to disagree.

Perhaps we just need to accept that there’s a fundamental contradiction woven into the fabric of creation. If nothing else, it puts our disagreements over Brexit into perspective.

Further reading

Have our scientists run out of steam?

By Peter Franklin

“I have for many years thought the problem of the incommensurability, and still more the incompatibility, of some values to be central to all ethical, social, political and aesthetic issues.” Isaiah Berlin.

One of the more interesting features of the Brexit debate is the way it raises a question of how human beings argue about incommensurable values. By this, I mean values that are not comparable on some common scale – values that are so intrinsically different that they do not lend themselves to any sort of direct comparison or ranking.

You might say, for instance, that those who think the Brexit question fundamentally revolves around issues of sovereignty, and those who think it is all about prosperity, are appealing to values are so different in kind that they can only ever talk past one another. Could it be that much of the anger generated in the exchange between these positions comes from a frustration at managing debate between incommensurable values?

Those, like the great Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who believe that there are incommensurable values in human life are known as ethical pluralists. Those who believe that human values can ultimately be reduced to one super-value – often something like utility, or happiness – are known as ethical monists.

Suggested reading

How bigoted is Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

The dominance of economics over the way we talk publically about the things we esteem in human life, and the way this has played into so-called ‘evidence based policy’, has meant that public discourse is often, de facto, a form of ethical monism. The attraction of monism to the tidy-minded is that it promises to make comparisons between apparently different things easier, assigning each some common and comparable value.

In other words, the monist argues that apparently different values, once properly understood – that is, translated in term of the super-value – can be plotted on the same scale, and thus easily compared, assigning each some sort of numerical value. Value A has X units of super-value Alpha, value B has Y units of super-value Alpha. Therefore, in deciding between the two, one has only to compare X and Y to see which is the greater. Moral decision-making is that straightforward.

But, unfortunately, the monist achieves this simplicity at the expense of a proper estimation of why certain things are valuable. The debate over the importance of the arts in education, for instance, is often hampered by the dominance of monist assumptions, with the arts being required to justify themselves in terms of their utility, something that STEM subjects, for instance, find it much easier to do.

The problem here, of course, is that music and engineering are valuable for totally different reasons, and cannot be compared by reference to some common scale of values. In terms of value, they are not just different, they are irreducibly different. In moral terms, the life of a nun and the life of a mother can both be seen as valuable, but in entirely different terms. Likewise, justice cannot be plotted on the same scale as mercy. Or creativity and security. Or equality and liberty. Or prosperity and democracy.

Suggested reading

Globalisation's mistaken rule

By Giles Fraser

A few months ago, I wrote a slightly tongue in cheek piece for UnHerd expressing qualms about the global dominance of the metric system. “I’d love to return to pre-metric diversity,” I wrote, “If only to fight back against that politically dangerous mythology that there is only one way of doing things, and we must all submit to a common standard.”

I could have written another piece, arguing for the reintroduction of £sd. The deeper point here, semi-seriously intended, grows out of a desire to disrupt the growth of monism. Because life is more complicated and messier than the instruments that we have chosen to measure it by. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made,” said Kant – a quote Berlin loved and often repeated.

So to the presenting problem: the nature of the antagonism that exists in the current debate over Brexit. And I suspect our culture of default monism has something to answer for here. Because monism promises that moral decision-making is a relatively straightforward calculation between comparable goods, the monist has to reach for some alternative explanation if people keep on permanently disagreeing. And that alternative explanation is typically to question the ability or the good faith of one side. If the monist is right, and all moral disputes are simply disguised disputes between the same super-value – say utility – then one side is either too thick to make the right calculation or has ulterior motives for backing it. And that is precisely what Remainers and Leavers accuse each other of doing.

Monism, with its promise of decision-making without conflict, is a noble aim. But misconstrued. Because if values are genuinely incommensurate then the contest between them is inherently agonistic. There is no right answer. That is why rationality can never act as some white knight Deus ex Machina that will rush on stage to sort out these sort of feverish disputes. And so for some, the argument will consist of trying to find the most captivating voice in which to articulate one’s own position (that, I suspect, was the essential genius of Dominic Cummings as brought out by James Graham’s Channel 4 film, Brexit: the Uncivil War). For others, unfortunately, it will mean screaming insults at those with whom they disagree.

Suggested reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

Isaiah Berlin credited an obscure Victorian judge, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, with the first articulation of value pluralism. And I quote the following passage in full because it seems to sum up so precisely the situation we find ourselves in with Brexit:

“There are innumerable differences which obviously add to the interest of life, and without which it would be unendurably dull. Again, there are differences which can neither be left unsettled nor be settled without a struggle, and a real one, but in regard to which the struggle is rather between inconsistent forms of good than between good and evil. In cases of this sort no one need see an occasion for anything more than a good-tempered trial of strength and skill, except those narrow-minded fanatics whose minds are incapable of taking in more than one idea at a time, or of having a taste for more things than one, which one thing is generally a trifle. There is no surer mark of a poor, contemptible, cowardly character than the inability to conduct disputes of this sort with fairness, temper, humanity, goodwill to antagonists, and a determination to accept a fair defeat in good part and to make the best of it.”[1.  Stephen, James Fitzjames (1874), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.]

Berlin and Fitzjames Stephen lived long before argument was coarsened and weaponised by social media. But reading Sir James’s distinction between worthy and poisonous argument, you can almost imagine he was looking down on us from above as he wrote it, watching the yellow-jacketed thugs screaming “Nazi!” at Anna Soubry, watching the sneering superiority of those who think the other side to be ignorant fools, watching so many of us descend into a pit of pettiness and rancour.

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“The unexpected always happens; the inevitable never,” wrote Keynes. Yet for Europe, inevitability had characterised the first 14 years of this millennium. Between 2014 and 2020, however, that began to stall, and by 2025 the ‘inevitable’ liberal consensus has been replaced by the unexpected in the form of de Gaulle’s “Europe des Patries”, with big national government’s leading the way, and Thatcher’s Anglosphere. The neutral term for these developments is the Return of History – critics would say ‘catastrophe’.

Even the catastrophists, however, concede that this progress from inevitable to unexpected is traceable to the over-reaching of the Europeanists in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin in the period 2000 to 2014: The introduction of the Euro without the fiscal and monetary structures needed to sustain it; the adoption of Schengen’s internal “open borders” without first securing Europe’s external ones; Mrs. Merkel’s invitation to Syrian refugees to Europe, supported as it was by the European Commission, without first establishing efficient procedures for either vetting or deporting them; the stealthy moves towards independent European defense structures separate from NATO; and overall the gradual encroaching of European institutions on the national democratic prerogatives of the EU’s member-states.

Each one of these over-ambitious initiatives produced its own crisis from the (now perennial) Greek crisis to the migrant one. Taken together, however, they also fostered an overall crisis of legitimacy in European democracy as voters found that they couldn’t change policies they disliked by voting in national elections, since even politicians who had campaigned for change would explain afterwards that these issues were determined ‘at the European level.’ Policies at that level were determined on the inevitabalist basis of “ever closer union.” And unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any way of throwing the European rascals out.

When insurgent parties then arose demanding that more be done about controlling immigration, or imposing anti-terrorist border controls, or changing endless ‘austerity’ policies required by the Bundesbank, the European Central Bank, and Mrs. Merkel, the early response of both political and media elites was to denounce them as “populists,” or “nationalists” or simply “extremists” who were threatening, democracy, international order and even world peace. That argument worked well enough at Davos or Aspen but lacked electoral magic. Electorates began voting for extremists in such significant numbers that it seemed silly to dismiss them as outside the mainstream. And at the same time, the ‘mainstream’ Left visibly collapsed in half of Europe.

As the crises became sharper after 2014 – with the Brits voting for Brexit and the Italians electing a majority populist government – the voters were increasingly joined by intellectuals dissenting from the elite consensus. Dutch left-wing political scientist, Cas Mudde, has pointed out that populism was a democratic response by the voters to the fact that elites had removed entire issues – like the Euro or migration policy – from political debate. In effect they had silently imposed their own priorities.

Suggested reading

Welcome to the populist decade

By Henry Olsen

British social critic, David Goodhart, pointed out that most government policies reflected the interests and values of the mobile, highly educated 25% of people he called “Anywheres” over the rooted 50% he dubbed “Somewheres.” Brexit was inter alia a protest against that. Pierre Manent was one of several distinguished French intellectuals to see European politics as developing into a competition between an unrespectable national-populism and an arrogant cosmopolitan centrism – or, in his words, between populist demagogy and the fanaticism of the Centre. For him, the fanaticism of the Centre was the greater threat.

The bare bones of this evolution were evident in the European parliament where the mainstream parties of Left and Right had formed a coalition against the ‘extremes’ (that is, all the other parties.) Also evident was the determination of the Brussels Eurocrats to prevent the Brits leaving the EU—which they succeeded in postponing several years beyond the original departure date.

All the ingredients for serious political conflicts within and between European nations were present and combustible as 2019 came into view. One observer, Iain Kearns, entitled his dystopian analysis of Europe’s future: Collapse. What was needed was a strategy to draw the populists into conventional politics and government responsibility before they broke into them by electoral force.

It was the voters who ensured that no catastrophe occurred. They did so in the first instance by giving the mainstream centrist parties of Left and Right a smaller combined share of the total vote in May 2019 than in any previous European election. They barely cleared the 50% mark between them, and the ranks of the centre-right European People’s Party included a large delegation from Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party, which dissented from the centrist ideology of ever-closer union and centralising power in Brussels, while being firmly committed to Hungary’s EU membership. There would be no more pressing for further European integration or, in the jargon, ‘More Europe’.

The second instance was the German election of Fall 2019 when the voters similarly reduced their support for the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats and gave a larger share of their votes to the populist AFD, the Bavarian CSU, and especially the once-centrist Free Democrats (who had adopted a more populist tone in the campaign), in a parliament that shifted overall to the Right. Chancellor Merkel was unable to form a new coalition with her past allies, the Social Democrats and Greens, and resigned.

Her successor, Wolfgang Schauble, gave up the Bundestag speakership to become CDU leader and Chancellor. He presented himself as a “caretaker Chancellor” but proved to be a very active one indeed. He set out to divide the AFD, tempting ambitious individual MPs to leave their “untouchable” party and become respectable by joining any of the parties in his new coalition, which was comprised of the CDU, the CSU, the FDP, and a faction of the Greens. In this way he brought moderate populists into government and constructed a durable conservative majority rooted in compromise between social traditionalists, free market (or corporate) business interests, moderate environmentalists, and a patriotic citizenry.

Suggested reading

Europe 2025: the beginning of the end

By James Bloodworth

Schauble, a long-standing supporter of Euro-integration, was expected to re-affirm Germany’s attachment to the Euro. For a while he seemed to do so. Then, to people’s surprise, Schauble announced on a Sunday evening in February 2020 that at midnight Germany would revert to the D-Mark at a fixed exchange rate for one week, after which it would be allowed to float. Outside Germany only the head of the European Central Bank and the French president were informed in advance.

This was unexpected, but in retrospect seemed inevitable. Economists on all sides had long agreed that the Euro was the Shirt of Nessus: it was painful to keep it on and painful to take it off. But it eventually dawned on them that the pain of staying in was indefinite, that of leaving was transitional.

Realising this in 2014, Schauble had proposed helping Greece to leave the single currency with a parting gift of billions to get the Greeks over the transition. Merkel had vetoed this. Now Schauble followed his own judgment and saw an independent D-Mark establish itself at a higher exchange rate while the smaller Euro fell and made the countries of southern Europe much more competitive. Schauble called a conference with Eurozone members a week later which agreed on additional changes: some northern EU-members later joined the D-Mark bloc, while Macron’s France sensibly decided to choose the Euro and prosperity over the D-Mark and gloire.

After brief market turbulence, Europe settled down into being a two-currency trading bloc with more balanced overall economic relations. German industry lost the super-advantage of an undervalued exchange rate, but this was compensated for by the gradual recoveries of markets in Greece, Spain, and Italy.

In this new economic environment Europe was no longer moving in a centralising direction: integration would be achieved on lines that were both more national and more liberal. That left President Macron of France, who was reliant on German generosity for his program of reviving the European project, without a policy to his name. He pursued one of domestic economic reform, but that lost as many votes as it won. He is now an unemployed Man of Destiny short of a great cause.

This presented an opportunity for the Gaullist wing of the conservatives, however, which had lacked influence in recent governments. Not only did it allow them to revive the General’s concept of Europe des Patries in favourable circumstances, but it also opened up the possibility of winning votes from the populist Rassemblement National (formerly the National Front.) Under their new leader, Laurent Wauquiez, The Republicans set about enticing the populist Right’s more attractive celebrities – notably, Marine Le Pen’s telegenic niece, Marion Marechal-Le Pen – over to their side for a campaign of respectable nationalism in the 2022 election. They won hands down. By 2022 the continental EU had populist or semi-populist governments in its three largest member-states.

Together with the new environment of economic optimism, this upsurge of qualified populism had a wider impact. Some countries like Italy decided to imitate EU member-states like Sweden, Hungary and Denmark that had opted to retain their own currencies. Stricter border controls had already been restored in response to rising threats of terrorism and illegal migration. EU Commission proposals for tax harmonisation were placed on the back burner, and harmonisation of regulation was increasingly rejected in favour of the principle of “mutual recognition” of national rules (ironically, a rock on which the Brexit negotiations had foundered earlier). Europe’s courts were increasingly inclined to respect national laws that reflected strong popular sentiment, and powers taken earlier by Brussels were returned to national parliaments. ‘More Europe’ was replaced by ‘Europe a la carte’ as a general principle of Euro-governance.

Contrary to much pessimism in the establishment, these transfers of legal and economic power did not result in a less dynamic European economy. Instead, over time they transformed the EU from a cartel of governments into a market of governments (as Margaret Thatcher had called for in a 1991 speech in the Hague.) In order to attract and keep businesses and talented people in their jurisdictions, individual EU governments had to craft tax-and-regulation packages at least as good as their competitive neighbours. Forcing governments to compete in this way proved to produce better economic results than dictating a level playing field from a single city in Belgium.

Still more unexpectedly, these power transfers also promoted both more vigorous and inclusive democratic politics, and a more heightened sense of national identity and community throughout Europe. Populists of Right and Left, some in coalition, some in majority parties, some in opposition, proposed, opposed, debated, and amended legislation. They became part of ‘the System’ and they expanded it. They just don’t seem very threatening any more.

Nations, regions, and localities have the freedom to bring in laws and regulations that reflect a national or local consensus, rather than a European elite orthodoxy. Neither Swedish urban secularists nor rural Croatian conservatives get exactly the moral and religious laws—for instance on abortion—that they want across Europe. But there is no persecution, residual but shrinking discrimination, real debate on contested issues, and a pan-European spirit of ‘live and let live’ that tolerates local option on many questions while gradually changing minds in both directions.

It turns out that what alienated people in our societies wanted was less to impose their own opinions than to have them treated with respect as part of legitimate debate. They took the ‘free’ in ‘free society’ literally and seriously.

One change in particular has been crucial: a powerful social taboo has been removed. Until the mid-teens of this century, it was politically risky and socially dangerous for people to say that they liked their country as it was, together with its customs and traditions, and that they would oppose policies, such as mass migration and multiculturalism, likely to change its character markedly. This had long been the opinion of most ordinary citizens, yet, as Ed West in The Diversity Illusion and Douglas Murray in The Strange Death of Europe had pointed out, they were routinely stigmatised as “racist” by parts of the media and cultural leaders.

The surprisingly deep elite prejudice against nationalism and the nation-state changed in part because of the intellectual challenges mounted by writers like Manent, Goodhart, Mudde, West, and Murray, and in part because the establishment’s anti-nationalism so overreached, arguing national borders were incompatible with human rights, that it discredited itself with most people.

More visibly, however, it was halted in politics by the fact that Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, won electoral landslides while declaring that Hungary was a nation with a Christian tradition and a specifically Hungarian culture. Like other nations, it should be treasured and protected from abrupt cultural, demographic, and national transformation—especially one imposed from outside. Other parties, not only in Central Europe, followed his example. He was accordingly credited with the rise of a new conservative cultural politics (usually called ‘illiberalism’ by him and his critics, misleadingly in my view) that led to the victories of populist parties in elections across Europe.

Suggested reading

The far right's plans to capture Europe

By Ian Birrell

As 2025 approaches, Orban is the moral leader of the dominant conservative populist wing of European politics, but his practical influence is limited by the fact that he is the prime minister of a small country. There is talk of his helping to create a new Carpathian Federation that would increase the influence of Central Europe within the EU.

What were the Brits doing while these events were unfolding? After the 2017 election Prime Minister Theresa May had been persuaded by Remainer Cabinet Ministers and officials to adopt policies for Brexit that brought her into conflict with the large majority of her own party. That produced a weak paralysed government, divided against itself, several failed initiatives starting with the so called Chequers Fiasco, and a policy stalemate that might have lasted indefinitely if a military scandal had not erupted to change public opinion on the Brexit debate.

Anxious to make Brexit as ‘soft’ as possible and thus more acceptable to the EU, officials in the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence had committed the UK to far deeper participation in the EU’s independent defence structures than the Cabinet or Tory MPs knew or would have approved. Ominously the new EU defence establishment felt they needed a success – especially since Russia had been making threatening noises towards Montenegro and Macedonia. Accordingly, Brussels decided to handle the Russian threats outside of NATO. British troops were actually in the air to join an EU deterrent force on the Greek-Macedonian border when the scandal broke. The government fell.

Suggested reading

Liberal smugness will destroy the Left

By Giles Fraser

A new government with a distinctively Brexiteer cast of mind and characters was appointed in an atmosphere of acute Euro-skepticism and public anger. Looking around desperately for policy options, ministers discovered a free trade and migration deal with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that had apparently fallen behind a filing cabinet in the Treasury. Polls had always shown this so-called CANZUK Option was popular with the voters in all four countries.

Ministers also realised that it could be a clever preliminary and/or roundabout way of striking a trade deal with the US, without looking like Britain becoming the 51^st state option. Both trade deals were acted on fairly quickly, and after a period of serious but temporary disruption (which the public in its new mood accepted without too much complaint), they began to stabilise the UK economy on different lines. More important, the new government moved the UK into the first lane of economic and technological development by gradually moving its supply-lines from the relatively quiescent ones in Europe to the far more dynamic ones in the wider US and Anglospheric worlds.

And what happened to the EU? Well, it didn’t collapse. Indeed it prospered. But the EU Commission did less well. As Marshall Foch once said of the graduates of the St. Cyr military academy, it could be said of the Brussels mandarins: “They know everything. Unfortunately, they don’t know anything else.” So as the Commission and other centralised EU institutions saw their power diminish in the new Europe des Patries, its leading figures gradually resigned or retired to become professors of European politics at Ivy League universities and centre-Left think tanks in the US.

From there they tell us how to arrange the world rather than merely Europe. The world rolls on. It is an arrangement that seems to suit everyone.

One of the best known examples is the globalisation trilemma that was first proposed by the Harvard economist, Dani Rodrik. This is how Krysztof Pelc describes Rodrik’s idea in an essay for the Literary Review of Canada:

“Like all great ideas, it is at once intuitive and unsettling. Rodrik argues you can have any two of the following three things: fuller economic integration, democratic representation, and the nation-state — but not all three at once.”

If you choose items 1 and 2 (globalisation plus democracy) then you have to accept that some or all the big decisions will be made at a supranational level – thus weakening national sovereignty:

“The democratic process would remain, but it would increasingly be transposed onto a global scale. Labour, environmental, and public health activists would continue to check the interests of exporters and multinational corporations, but all these groups would agree that they were best served by a common set of supranational rules, rather than conflicting sovereign ones.”

The European Union is the prime example of a 1 + 2 arrangement (at least, in theory).

A combination of items 1 and 3 (globalisation plus the nation-state) means downgrading democracy or doing without it altogether. For instance, countries such as Qatar are so globalised in respect to their workforce that foreigners make up most of their populations. Yet native elites remain in undisputed control because, in an absolute monarchy, the question of who governs is not up for debate. China is another example of a country that has combined participation in the global economy with national sovereignty. The terms of China’s global engagement are tightly controlled by the Communist Government – with the Chinese people not allowed to interfere.

Finally, we come to the combination of items 2 and 3 – democracy plus the nation-state. In theory, a national electorate could provide a mandate for the free movement of people, goods and capital across borders. But, as we’ve seen over and over again, globalisation tends to produce winners and losers – both within and between countries. This creates the possibility that a national electorate will vote to “take back control” – and therefore disrupting the international agreements on which regional or global integration depends. The deeper the integration; the greater the likelihood that this will happen.

Sustaining an ambitious programme of globalisation (or regionalisation) therefore means depriving national electorates of their veto – either by doing without democracy altogether (the 1+3 combo) or only allowing significant changes to be decided internationally (1+2).

As an internationalist and a democrat, Rodrik was an influential supporter of the 1+2 combination – globalised, supranational governance:

“At the time, Rodrik put his money on that last outcome. Over the next century, he speculated, global integration would continue apace, and the nation-state would lose its formal relevance.”

However, Pelc suggests that Rodrik has changed his mind:

“…in Rodrik’s most recent book, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy, global federalism gets no mention. Instead, we’re told about the ‘false promise’ of global governance—the term more commonly used today—and that ‘the best way in which nations can serve the global good…is by putting their own economic houses in order.’”

In truth, 1+2 always was a chimera. Democracy requires a demos – a ‘people’ – and peoples do not form around supranational bureaucracies.

When decisions become difficult, such structures pitch the representatives of one demos against another – as in the case of Germany versus Greece during the Eurozone crisis. Unless there is a permanent stalemate, the stronger side will come to dominate the weaker, which, for the latter, means that 1+2 becomes 1 only – i.e. globalisation without sovereignty or democracy.

In such circumstances 2+3 – i.e. taking back control – will always appear to be the better option.

The answer is six – Norway (1905), Finland (1917), Ireland (1922), Iceland (1944), Austria (1955) and Malta (1964). Scotland might have become the seventh, but its people decided against independence in 2014.

Now Catalonia demands the same right of self-determination. The question is whether it is entitled to it. Last weekend, the Spanish authorities delivered their answer via the medium of violence. But what should those of us who prefer reasoned argument think?

Writing for Project Syndicate, Richard N Haass argues that the best approach is conditional not absolute:

“…there is not and should not be any automatic right of self-determination. It was one thing for people in colonies ruled by governments thousands of miles away and deprived of many of their rights to opt for independence in the wake of World War II. It is something else altogether for a region to secede from an existing independent country. A world of frequent secession would be in even greater disarray than the world we already have.”

Rather, the right to self-determination should depend on meeting certain criteria:

“There is no universally accepted set of standards, but let me suggest some that should be applied:

• A history that indicates a clear collective identity for the people in question.
• A compelling rationale, in the sense that the population must be able to demonstrate that the status quo is imposing a large political, physical, and economic price.
• The population makes clear that it strongly favors a new and separate political status.
• The new state is viable (the last thing the world needs are more failed states).
• Secession does not jeopardize the viability of the rump state or the security of neighboring states.”

In his article, Haass applies this framework to the Kurdish question, but it is just as applicable to the case of Catalonia. So do the Catalans meet the five tests?

On the first test, the answer is a clear ‘yes’. Linguistically, Catalan is as distinct from (Castilian) Spanish as Norwegian is from Swedish. Catalonia’s history may be bound up with that of Spain, but the same could be said of Britain and Ireland or England and Scotland. Cultural distinctiveness can survive centuries of political entanglement.

The second test can only really be answered by the Catalan people themselves, but the pro-independence case focuses on the opportunity cost of having your laws and finances controlled by others when you’re demonstrably capable of controlling them yourself. Norway, Finland, Ireland, Iceland, Austria and Malta, have all prospered as independent states. And even when they’ve been governed unwisely, they’ve at least had the dignity of making their own mistakes.

As for the crucial third test, that of popular support for independence, Catalans regularly vote for pro-independence parties, they have a pro-independence regional government and have rallied for independence in their millions. Does that mean that a majority favour independence? Well, there’s only one way to find out…

The fourth test – of viability – is easily answered. The Catalan economy is substantial, bigger than that of Portugal, for instance; and bigger than that of every single eastern European country apart from Russia and Poland. In terms of per capita wealth, it is richer than the rest of Spain and is centred on one of the great European cities – Barcelona. The only thing that could compromise that Catalonia’s viability is a concerted campaign of trade blackmail by its neighbours.

That brings us to the fifth and final test – would Catalan independence destabilise its neighbours? The answer is not unless they chose to destabilise themselves. The rest of Spain is several times the size of Catalonia, it would remain a great nation without it.

It may be that in a properly organised, above-board referendum (you know, one without armed police ripping ballot boxes out of the hands of screaming civilians), the people of Catalonia would decide that they had more to gain from staying in than getting out – as did the Scots.

To allow a people to make that decision calmly and respectfully is not a sign of weakness, but of strength.

One of the smartest arguments to this end  is made  by Jacob T Levy in an essay for the Niskanen Centre:

“No state can legislate away the existence of changes in relative prices. Neither can a state just decide to have technological innovations or productivity increases, to say nothing of whether there are such innovations elsewhere that have positive spillover effects, or that hurt a local sector by competition.”

Because states cannot simply specify how strong their economies are, their options are consequently limited:

“…even the things that states do govern about their economies, they have never sovereignly controlled. The public budget, the tax system, public debt, monetary and exchange policy: these have always been constrained by international actors.”

Public debt is a particularly good example. A government can’t carry on borrowing if no one is willing to lend to it. Levy’s key argument is that if people buy into the myth of untrammelled national sovereignty (whether in the economic or other spheres), then – when things go wrong – they become susceptible to populist narratives:

“I suggest that the sense of control that is often attributed to voters in the olden days was really a sense of satisfaction with outcomes. Long years of economic growth in the West, broadly shared in, and in excess of the expectations of people who had lived through wars and economic collapse, propelled this satisfaction.”

“Things look rather different when expectations are suddenly, sharply disappointed, as in the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. It’s all too easy for opportunistic politicians in such moments to tell the story: the reason why things went so badly is that control was taken away from you — whether by faceless international bureaucrats, greedy financiers, or alien others…”

One can see why this explanation of recent events is attractive to pro-establishment liberals: it portrays the populist revolt as being wrong not only in its demands, but in its complaints too. However Levy’s account of the “sovereign myth”, as he calls it, has a few flaws of its own.

For a start it overlooks a number of cases where control clearly has been taken away from national electorates. For instance, control over monetary policy (because it has been surrendered to the Eurozone); or control over immigration policy (because it has been surrendered to the Single Market).  These things actually happened and the voters have noticed.

One also has to doubt whether many voters truly expect their governments to be omnipotent. Most of us understand that nations must steer as best they can across the cold ocean of economic reality – and that whether economies sink or swim is down to a combination of (in)competence and luck. Personal experience of everyday life teaches you two very basic lessons: that actions have consequences and that sh*t happens.

If, in the wake of the financial crisis, voters were radicalised is not because their expectations were “suddenly sharply disappointed”, it is because while they themselves took the consequences of bad decision-making and bad luck, the elites were given special protection. To take just three examples (and there are many more): bailouts for bankers, executive pay-rises divorced from executive performance, and the share price subsidy scheme otherwise known as quantitative easing.

Far from voting against reality, electorates are voting to share it around more fairly:

Sh*t and consequences for everyone!