Francis Fukuyama
FINANCIAL TIMES | 11-11-16
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In 1989, the political scientist said liberal
democracy signalled ‘the end of history’. He looks at the nationalist politics
now reshaping the west
Francis
Fukuyama
Donald Trump’s stunning electoral defeat of Hillary
Clinton marks a watershed not just for American politics, but for the entire
world order. We appear to be entering a new age of populist nationalism, in
which the dominant liberal order that has been constructed since the 1950s has
come under attack from angry and energised democratic majorities. The risk of
sliding into a world of competitive and equally angry nationalisms is huge, and
if this happens it would mark as momentous a juncture as the fall of the Berlin
Wall in 1989.
The manner of Trump’s victory lays bare the social
basis of the movement he has mobilised. A look at the voting map shows
Clinton’s support concentrated geographically in cities along the coasts, with
swaths of rural and small-town America voting solidly for Trump. The most
surprising shifts were his flipping of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin,
three northern industrial states that were so solidly Democratic in recent
elections that Clinton didn’t even bother to campaign in the latter one. He won
by being able to win over unionised workers who had been hit by
deindustrialisation, promising to “make America great again” by restoring their
lost manufacturing jobs.
We have seen this story before. This is the story of
Brexit, where the pro-Leave vote was similarly concentrated in rural areas and
small towns and cities outside London. It is also true in France, where
working-class voters whose parents and grandparents used to vote for the
Communist or Socialist parties are voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Front.
But populist nationalism is a far broader phenomenon
than that. Vladimir Putin remains unpopular among more educated voters in big
cities such as St Petersburg and Moscow, but has a huge support base in the
rest of the country. The same is true of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, who has an enthusiastic support base among the country’s conservative
lower middle class, or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban, who is popular
everywhere but in Budapest.
Social class, defined today by one’s level of
education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in
countless industrialised and emerging-market countries. This, in turn, is
driven directly by globalisation and the march of technology, which has been
facilitated in turn by the liberal world order created largely by the US since
1945.
When we talk about a liberal world order, we are
speaking about the rules-based system of international trade and investment
that has fuelled global growth in recent years. This is the system that allows
iPhones to be assembled in China and shipped to customers in the US or Europe
in the week before Christmas. It has also facilitated the movement of millions
of people from poorer countries to richer ones, where they can find greater
opportunities for themselves and their children. This system has worked as
advertised: between 1970 and the US financial crisis of 2008, global output of
goods and services quadrupled, bringing hundreds of millions of people out of
poverty, not just in China and India but in Latin America and sub-Saharan
Africa.
But as everyone is painfully aware now, the benefits
of this system did not filter down to the whole population. The working classes
in the developed world saw their jobs disappear as companies outsourced and
squeezed efficiencies in response to a ruthlessly competitive global market.
This long-term story was hugely exacerbated by the
US subprime crisis of 2008, and the euro crisis that hit Europe a couple of
years later. In both cases, systems designed by elites — liberalised financial
markets in the US case, and European policies such as the euro and the Schengen
system of internal migration — collapsed dramatically in the face of external
shocks. The costs of these failures were again much more heavily borne by
ordinary workers than by the elites themselves. Ever since, the real question
should not have been why populism has emerged in 2016, but why it took so long
to become manifest.
In the US, there was a political failure insofar as
the system did not adequately represent the traditional working class. The
Republican party was dominated by corporate America and its allies who had
profited handsomely from globalisation, while the Democratic party had become
the party of identity politics: a coalition of women, African-Americans,
Hispanics, environmentalists, and the LGBT community, that lost its focus on
economic issues.
The failure of the American left to represent the
working class is mirrored in similar failures across Europe. European social
democracy had made its peace with globalisation a couple of decades ago, in the
form of Blairite centrism or the kind of neoliberal reformism engineered by
Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrats in the 2000s.
But the broader failure of the left was the same one
made in the lead-up to 1914 and the Great war, when, in the apt phrase of the
British-Czech philosopher, Ernest Gellner, a letter sent to a mailbox marked
“class” was mistakenly delivered to one marked “nation.” Nation almost always
trumps class because it is able to tap into a powerful source of identity, the
desire to connect with an organic cultural community. This longing for identity
is now emerging in the form of the American alt-right, a formerly ostracised
collection of groups espousing white nationalism in one form or another. But
even short of these extremists, many ordinary American citizens began to wonder
why their communities were filling up with immigrants, and who had authorised a
system of politically correct language by which one could not even complain
about the problem. This is why Donald Trump received a huge number of votes
from better-educated and more well-off voters as well, who were not victims of
globalisation but still felt their country was being taken from them. Needless
to say, this dynamic underlay the Brexit vote as well.
So what will be the concrete consequences of the
Trump victory for the international system? Contrary to his critics, Trump does
have a consistent and thought-through position: he is a nationalist on economic
policy, and in relation to the global political system. He has clearly stated
that he will seek to renegotiate existing trade agreements such as Nafta and
presumably the WTO, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he is willing to
contemplate exiting from them. And he has expressed admiration for “strong”
leaders such as Russia’s Putin who nonetheless get results through decisive
action. He is correspondingly much less enamoured of traditional US allies such
as those in Nato, or Japan and South Korea, whom he has accused of freeriding
on American power. This suggests that support for them will also be conditional
on a renegotiation of the cost-sharing arrangements now in place.
The dangers of these positions for both the global
economy and for the global security system are impossible to understate. The
world today is brimming with economic nationalism. Traditionally, an open trade
and investment regime has depended on the hegemonic power of the US to remain
afloat. If the US begins acting unilaterally to change the terms of the
contract, there are many powerful players around the world who would be happy
to retaliate, and set off a downward economic spiral reminiscent of the 1930s.
The danger to the international security system is
as great. Russia and China have emerged in the past decades as leading
authoritarian great powers, both of whom have territorial ambitions. Trump’s
position on Russia is particularly troubling: he has never uttered a critical word
about Putin, and has suggested that his takeover of Crimea was perhaps
justified. Given his general ignorance about most aspects of foreign policy,
his consistent specificity with regard to Russia suggests that Putin has some
hidden leverage over him, perhaps in the form of debts to Russian sources that
keep his business empire afloat. The first victim of any Trumpist attempt
to “get along better” with Russia will be Ukraine and Georgia, two countries
that have relied on US support to retain their independence as struggling
democracies.
More broadly, a Trump presidency will signal
the end of an era in which America symbolised democracy itself to people living
under corrupt authoritarian governments around the world. American
influence has always depended more on its “soft power” rather than misguided
projections of force such as the invasion of Iraq. America’s choice last
Tuesday signifies a switching of sides from the liberal internationalist camp,
to the populist nationalist one. It is no accident that Trump was strongly
supported by Ukip’s Nigel Farage, and that one of the first people to
congratulate him was the National Front’s Marine Le Pen.
Over the past year, a new populist-nationalist
internationale has appeared, by which like-minded groups share information and
support across borders. Putin’s Russia is one of the most enthusiastic
contributors to this cause, not because it cares about other people’s national
identity, but simply to be disruptive. The information war that Russia has
waged through its hacking of Democratic National Committee emails has already
had a hugely corrosive effect on American institutions, and we can expect this
to continue.
There remain a number of large uncertainties with
regard to this new America. While Trump is a consistent nationalist at heart,
he is also very transactional. What will he do when he discovers that other
countries will not renegotiate existing trade pacts or alliance arrangements on
his terms? Will he settle for the best deal he can get, or simply walk away?
There has been a lot of talk about the dangers of his finger on the nuclear
trigger, but my sense is that he is much more isolationist at heart than
someone eager to use military force around the world. When he confronts the
reality of dealing with the Syrian civil war, he may well end up taking a page
from the Obama playbook and simply continue to sit this one out.
This is the point at which the matter of character
will come into play. Like many other Americans, I find it hard to conceive of a
personality less suited to be the leader of the free world. This stems only in
part from his substantive policy positions, as much from his extreme vanity and
sensitivity to perceived slights. Last week, when on a stage with Medal of
Honor winners, he blurted out that he too was brave, “financially brave”. He
has asserted that he wants payback against all his enemies and critics. When
faced with other world leaders who will slight him, will he react like a
challenged Mafia boss, or like a transactional businessman?
Today, the greatest challenge to liberal democracy
comes not so much from overtly authoritarian powers such as China, as from
within. In the US, Britain, Europe, and a host of other countries, the
democratic part of the political system is rising up against the liberal part,
and threatening to use its apparent legitimacy to rip apart the rules that have
heretofore constrained behaviour, anchoring an open and tolerant world. The
liberal elites that have created the system need to listen to the angry voices
outside the gates and think about social equality and identity as top-drawer
issues they must address. One way or the other, we are going to be in for a
rough ride over the next few years.
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