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Stephen M. Walt: What Went Wrong with Liberalism?

Today, liberalism is under threat on multiple fronts. Roger cone of the New York Times writes, the forces of disintegration are on the march. The foundations of the post-war world are trembling. The World Economic Forum says the liberal world order is being challenged by powerful authoritarian movements and anti-liberal fundamentalists. Democracy expert Larry Diamond at Stanford points out that between 2000 and 2015, democracy broke down in 27 countries. And many already authoritarian regimes became even less open and or less responsive to their citizens. Efforts to build stable democracies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans mostly failed. The Arab Spring quickly turned into an Arab Winter almost everywhere. Britain has now voted to leave the EU, signaling disenchantment with the most ambitious liberal project in Europe, turkey, Poland, Hungary, Israel, all headed in illiberal directions, or right-wing party in Germany beat Angela Merkel coalition in local elections last week. And not to forget, the Republican Party in the United States has nominated a presidential candidate who openly disdains the tolerance that is central to liberal societies, repeatedly expresses racist beliefs and cottons to baseless conspiracy theories. So the question is what went wrong between 93 and today? I blame this on several interrelated factors. The first is that we over-promise what liberalism could deliver. They argued, promoters of the liberal experiment argued that spreading democracy, spreading human rights, spreading open markets, and all of these things would guarantee peace and prosperity everywhere and largely for everyone. But of course, that turned out not to be the case. Just thinking of how the spread of markets works, it creates winners, often far more winners and losers, but it does create some losers. People who do not do well, at least in the short-term. As a result, the ladder are rarely happy about it, and the latter can use the same institutions of democracy to make that discontent known. To make matters worse, liberal elites in a number of places made some serious policy blunders. My favorite list, apart from the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the creation of the Euro in Europe widely forecast to be a disaster and proven to be indeed mismanaging the American economy, leading to the financial crisis of 2008. And then especially in Europe, overdoing the politics and the policies of austerity after 2008, therefore, prolonging the economic crisis. Third, some liberal states used non-liberal means to try and spread liberal values with a predictable lack of success. And here are the classic example is the Iraq war. But it's also true of the Western interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. Mckee lesson to draw from that is that military force turns out to be a terrible tool for spreading liberal values. Finally, although liberals are generally supportive of the idea of national self-determination, they failed to appreciate just how persistent and powerful nationalism would be and how these local identities of various kinds would remain even in the midst of the liberal project, the European Union supposed to transcend nationalism, create a new pan-European identity. Where national identities would really only emerge, say, during the European Soccer Cup or something like that. But it's clear, of course, in 2016 that this did not happen. The United States failed to appreciate that creating the formal institutions of democracy was not enough to create a liberal society without norms of tolerance and other imbedded social values. And again, that's especially true if you try to do that with armed force. Finally, it turns out that many people in many places care as much about national identities, historical entities, territorial symbols, traditional cultural values as they do about freedom, or as they do about purely economic benefits. And that those sentiments I think loom especially large when change is very rapid and when mostly homogeneous societies are forced to assimilate people whose backgrounds are different in a very short span of time. Again, we, I think we know for American History, which we always extol as the successful melting pot. But we know that in fact, there have been many moments of tension when new arrivals have experienced resistance. And that blending cultures within a single polity has never been particularly smoother simple when that happens and especially when it's happening rapidly. It provides grist for populous leaders who promise to defend traditional values or make the country great. Again, nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but it is still a very formidable political motivation. And then finally, I would play some blame on ruling elites in a number of liberal societies, especially the United States, where the operation of money in our politics and special interests have created not to be candid and essentially corrupt political class that is increasingly out of touch with ordinary people interested in enriching themselves and largely immune to accountability. The sense, in short, that the game is rigged in favor of the 1%. It's where a lot of this populist anger comes from. And I think is reflected not just in the Trump campaign, but was also reflected in surprising success of Bernie Sanders. On the other end.