Conclusion

If the politics of prudent diffidence and the restoration of political balance, civil association, and limited constitutional rule, proves incapable of recovering political conduct under contingent conditions, what alternative dispositions might mould the contours of our post historical future? This chapter concludes the book by examining how historically body politics have died from a variety of internal and external distempers and how this might be Europe’s fate. It further considers how a brave new artificially intelligent world might organize new liberal and illiberal progressive futures either through a digitally administered party state like China or Singapore or what Silicon Valley envisages as an algorithmically managed, digital oligarchy that renders individual autonomy and democracy redundant. Both envisage a technocratically managed future where AI caters to and defines the needs of a dependent citizen body eking out its days in either a distracted or opiated stupor. Both forms of technocratic rationalism represent the antithesis of the understanding of civil society as a local and contingent compact between the dead, the living, and the yet to be born.

Introduction

The introduction outlines the question this work addresses. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact between 1989-92, it was ubiquitously held in the western media, business, government and academe that history was ‘being driven in a coherent direction’ towards a secular, liberal democratic, secular and borderless end. A quarter of a century later this vision lay in tatters. How, we might ask, did the progressive commitment to universal ideals come, over time, to lose faith in the prospect of global meliorism leading to a liberal international order governed by abstract norms? And what were the consequences of this loss of faith?

The Networked Global Order

Economic redistribution, and social equality required an interconnected, regional and global trading order. After 1989, it was easy to believe that a liberal democratic model, supported by US-sponsored international rules, would spread across the globe. However, over two decades, unmoveable progressive values proved internally and externally unsustainable. After 2008, the US subprime and Eurozone financial crises eroded the economic preconditions supporting these values and undermined the already fragile relationship between the nation state, the market, the media, and a cosmopolitan faith in a liberal democratic end of history. Ironically, liberal progressive values, committed to the idea that all social ills were amenable to technocratic remedy and that the state was a suitable instrument for making such change, rationally engineered inegalitarian outcomes. This chapter examines how the financial crisis destroyed the meliorist assumption linking capitalism, globalization, and democracy rendering the pursuit of universal emancipation and social justice increasingly redundant. One consequence of this evolution was an artificial intelligence and new technology driven intangible economic order. The new economy incubated a paranoid populist style of identity politics that emerged after 2016. Instead of convergence, the new intangible capitalist structure erected a burgeoning divide between a cosmopolitan elite and a disenfranchised, nation based, precariat class.

The Revenge of Politics and the Search for Order

The creative destruction that the financial crisis unleashed created a political and economic climate increasingly inimical to liberal, secular, progressive, or socially just outcomes. Western governments ruling according to a rationalist technique fatally underestimated the role that non-negotiable cultural understandings continued to play at the end of history. The attempt to give legal force to incommensurable values and cultures in circumstances of deep pluralism provoked fragmentation, intolerance and violence rather than social cohesion. The illusion of liberal internationalism and the legacy it bequeathed in terms of the decline of the nation state and its traditional political institutions created a climate where new ideologies emerged and old ones that had never lost a subterranean presence in Europe’s dark heart flourished once more. In this chapter, we shall discuss the commonalities between the return of these repressed identities and political religions, as history and the search for order recommenced after 2016, before examining the possible range of Western responses and their implications for the future of a limited, secular, liberal order, reconsidering how the concept of national interest defined in prudential terms of limited power and constitutional or rule-based order might save us from recent moral and rationalist excess and restore political balance.

Maxims or Axioms?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall the West set off to re-make the world. Its abstract norms and progressive values set the global agenda. The consequences proved disastrous, and not only for the West. In these circumstances of revisionism abroad and populism at home, is it possible to recuperate a more circumscribed international vision that recognizes that universal moral principles cannot be applied to the actions of states in their abstract universal formulation, but require filtering through the concrete circumstances of time and place? In order to examine the utility of such prudent counsel, this chapter first elucidates the limitations of the liberal, normative, rationalist approach to war and peace and its unintended fragmentation of the global order after 2008. We shall then consider how earlier European thinking, at the inception of the modern state, about the nature of state interest and the supreme virtue in politics, prudence. Prudence is a virtue that does not signal, but weighs the consequences of alternative political actions. This chapter further considers how a prudent statecraft might more usefully inform the conduct of US and European foreign policy today.

The Language of Progress and the Closure of the European Mind

Scepticism concerning the direction of progress and the policies required to achieve it, exposed new liberalism’s incoherent character. The Home Office’s decision to ignore an intransigent minority censoring works it found offensive created a precedent. The death threats issued against Salman Rushdie represented the opening shots in a cultural war on freedom. The Religious Hatred Act (2006) gave it legislative sanction. It reflected the dialectical clash between a sui generis Euro-Islam and the secular, progressive universalism that ironically made it possible. This cultural war and the exclusive identities it upheld constituted an assault on the secular right to speak sacrilegiously of sacred things. Endorsed after 9/11 by the progressive attempt to empathize with or cherish minority cultural understandings, it not only closed debate, but also restricted and distorted the political language in which debate might be conducted. Hate speech, trigger warnings and no platforming campaigns were its inexorable consequence. This illiberal outcome was quite a remarkable achievement of the post-Rawlsian liberal mind. This chapter examines the curious accommodation between fanaticism and multicultural, illiberal liberalism after 2001 and its disturbing implications for censorship, democratic freedom, tolerance and an open society.

The Incoherence of the Philosophers1

Failure to confront the ideological challenge that Islamism presented at home and abroad exposed the incoherence at the core of new liberalism’s inclusive, but diversity aware, secular agenda. After the millennium confusion over the theory and practice of external war and countering terrorism at home posed an intractable dilemma for the progressive mind. Who or what was the enemy? How should just war to advance liberal internationalism be conducted after 9/11? And did jihadism represent an existential threat or a mere blip on the teleological highway to history’s end? The answers these questions received unravelled the illusions about identity, social justice and multicultural harmony that held the progressive vision together. The refusal of the official mind to refute illiberal belief systems that proposed a different and apocalyptic end to history appeared increasingly misguided. Misunderstanding the threat facilitated criticism that viewed violence against the west as emancipatory resistance and new laws to curb terrorism exposing the west’s fear of the non-western other. Seeking to empathize with and appease jihadism, global ethics engaged in a practice of moral equivalence that distorted an already ambiguous political vocabulary concerning rights, liberty, justice and equality which governed western political conduct.

The End of History and the Kantian Moment

This chapter examines the economic, technological and financial changes that facilitated liberal globalization. To understand, The technological advances of the 1980’s that facilitated globalization rendered rigid, closed, bureaucratic regimes redundant. The economic process established the structural preconditions that enabled the idea that history had ended and a new borderless world of political and economic convergence had emerged. The rise of the middle classes under global market conditions inexorably presaged modernization leading to democratization. Although, for a brief period after 1989, it seemed there might be an illiberal Asian alternative to the end of history, the Asian Financial Crisis (1997) demonstrated the ultimate redundancy of authoritarian alternatives to global liberalism. At the millennium, a democracy friendly ‘golden straightjacket’ shrank the state everywhere and opened it to a liberal institutional order, affording the preconditions for what Immanuel Kant foresaw in 1794 as a universal cosmopolitan and perpetual peace. However, the fact that some undeveloped countries and the blue collar working classes within developed states had lost out in this process of globalization, required, not more liberalization but a new borderless, post ideological, post historical third way in politics to realize perpetual global peace.

The Progressive Mind and the Islamist Challenge

At the millennium a progressive consensus influenced and constrained western democratic behaviour. The new consensus transcended conventional party politics. Its more prominent exponents considered developed states without enemies. It was no longer implausible to embed a realistic utopia, where global citizens, cherishing minority rights, would enable cosmopolitan democracy to flourish in a world society. This ambitious project pursued the universal emancipation of the culturally and colonially oppressed. Yet when the progressive mind encountered a rejection of its values expressed in a politically religious, Islamist idiom, it refused to countenance it. Assuming all problems available to rational solution, the progressive liberal order dismissed faith-based rejections of its universally shared, but essentially secular norms. The consequences of this rejection were fateful. Political Islam, in an absolutist mode, found the west’s commitment to secularism, democracy and progress delusional. This chapter explores the manner in which a distinctively Islamist idiom of expression, that in an extreme form, countenanced violence to instantiate its apocalyptic version of the end of history, rejected the secular liberal vision, but found in its tolerance, technological resources helpful to the promulgation of its postmodern message, in the Muslim world and across Europe.

Afterword

The scientific and business performance models applied to the university sector from the 1980s changed the academy in ways that facilitated the domination of a progressive orthodoxy and conformity with its values at the end of history. Rational management and the infantilization of students undermined academic freedom and repressed heterodox viewpoints in a number of key ways. This afterword shows how an evolving managerialism preoccupied with branding, conformity and uniformity, an obsession with large research grants, research metrics and student satisfaction facilitated a progressive ideological preoccupation with diversity, identity and no platforming. Conformity with the ruling progressive campus ideology has had the practical consequence of estranging a millennial generation of students from notions of freedom of expression and tolerance. Regulation, conformity, and uniformity of practices have progressively infantilized conduct on campus. This overarching structure has had, we shall further show, a particularly perverse outcome on the study of the humanities in general and on the theory of international relations in particular.