Liberals of the World, unite!

The election of Donald Trump as the next US president, together with the vote in the UK to exit the EU, has threatened the very existence of the liberal world order. There is an urgent need to understand this threat and its roots and to come up with ways to deal with it.

First of all, we need to realise that the liberal world order is not the natural state of affairs. Most people living in the West were born and raised in liberal societies and now they take their liberty for granted. However, the liberal world order is an artificial construct based on the operation of certain instutions and prinicples. 

Trump's platform that the US voters supported en masse was directly opposed to the very institutions and principles that support this order. Given the role of the US and the UK as the main architects and guardians of these principles and institutions, the existential threat from the election of Trump and from the Brexit is not imaginary - rather the opposite, it is very poignant indeed.

The liberal world order that we take for granted was created in the wake of the World War II. There is no dark conspiracy involved here.

The liberal world order is supported by global institutions, such as the United Nations, international institutions and treaties such as the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, regional arrangements such as the European Union and the North American Free Trade Agreement and bilateral agreements, such as the Security Treaty Between the United States and Japan. 

The degree to which these institutions can be characterized as liberal varies. Regional governance arrangements, such as the European Union can be characterized as quite liberal, as they require their members to uphold certain standards of human rights, rule of law, and freedom of trade, of expression and of movement. The more we widen the geographical scope, the less liberal these institutions become, with less liberal regimes allowed to participate in the broader international and global organizations. The least deserving of the term liberal are the global institutions, such as the UN. Nevertheless, they form part of the overall governance infrastructure, formed as a result of the liberal ambition to replace military antagonism with political dialogue and economic cooperation.

The history of how the post-WWII insitutions were created is well documented and worth revising (but not in this blog post). Its architects were experts of the winning powers in WWII (USA, UK, France and for a brief period of time China and the Soviet Union). Enlightened individuals, such as John Maynard Keynes, participated in the design of the institutions that would safeguard the liberal world.

Why is liberalism failing in the very countries that imposed it on (a part of) the world as a means to prevent another devastating World War?

This is not a simple question to answer, especially in the relatively short form of a blog post. First, there is a major fault in the design of the liberal world order. The global institutions overseeing it are drawing their authority from sovereign states. The channels that transfer democratic legitimacy from the citizens of the member-states to the governing authorities of these organizations are extremely convoluted. The major decisions are most often taken behind closed doors, by appointed individuals, selected through a process of haggling between national governments, with little mandate to justify their decisions to anyone but (at best) the governments of the nation states (some of which can hardly be described as liberal democracies). The very basic tenet for a liberal society of a body politic, selected directly by the people, with checks and balances that safeguard its democratic legitimacy is absent from the architecture of the institutions overseeing the liberal world order. This leads to disillusionment and eventually to disenfranchisement.

Another basic tenet of a liberal society - free trade - is also not fully present. For free trade to produce the desired outcome, all economic resources (capital, goods and, yes, labour) should be free to flow in the direction where their use is optimal. This ensures an efficient, stable equilibrium in the system. What we have now is a global economic system with very free flows of capital, somewhat free flows of goods (with tariffs, quotas, non-tarrif barriers impeding the flows) and virtually no freedom for the movement of labour (except in billateral and regional arrangements, such as the EU). This (among other things) creates huge disparities in the wealth distribution across countries and regions, and within societies, fuelling tensions and, yes, disenfranchisement.

The lack of direct democratic legitimacy and control of the global and the international governing institutions has made them weak, placing great power in the hands of national  governments. As a result, power is not equally distributed among the citizens of the global society. Governments of states with greater military and/or economic prowess have a much stronger voice in the world affairs. Meanwhile, institutions that require stronger consensus between the national governments, such as the UN, are crippled by conflicting interests, unable to make and/or enforce any decision of practical importance.

The unequal distribution of power across countries implies that the votes in some countries have much more weight than that in others. Again, this leads to disenfranchisement with the world order.

The disenfranchisement is exacerbated by the fact that in some countries, the citizens have little or no opportunity to participate in a democratic franchise to start with. The fact that autocratic or even dictatorial  regimes take part in (at leas some of) the world governing bodies further undermines the legitimacy of the world order. Not to mention the significant democratic deficit even in the liberal western democracies. 

The skewness of the distribution of power across the countries has allowed or failed to prevent actions, such as the imposition or the support of dictatorships in Latin America, North Africa, Southern Europe and the Middle East, gross human right violations in Israel and elsewhere, and military interventions, such as the US-led invasion of Iraq, which can hardly be justified on liberal principles. Combined with the fact that authoritarian regimes were allowed to participate  in core (supposedly) liberal institutions such as NATO and WTO, makes it even harder  to argue that the world order is based on liberal principles, rather than on the economic interests of powerful nations, groups and individuals.

With weak global/international institutions, there is little care taken for promoting the common good at this level. Loopholes, such as the existance of tax heavens, further drain legitimacy from the system, as they shift economic and thus political power to private entities, such as corporations, their shareholders and managers, and other wealthy individuals. This undermines the legitimacy even of democracies with  liberal traditions that have lasted for centuries.

The crisis of liberalism extends even to its intelllectual foundations. The cult of economic rationality has hijacked the very fields of thought that gave birth to liberalism - political philosophy, political science and political economy/economics. The idea that the social good derives exclusively from people's choices is based on the axiom that the individuals always maximise their wellbeing. The attempts to make this axiom a refutable proposition have shown that we are not very successful in maximising any empirically meaningfull measure of welfare, such as monetary payoffs or subjective wellbeing. 

Our choices suffer from a great number of well documented anomalies. We are not much good in assessing risk nor do we care that much about our future. We tend to place disproportionately large weight in our decisions on consumption goods and pecuniary values, underestimating the significance of environmental goods and social relations for our happiness. A social system, drawing its legitimacy exclusively from people's choices, does not lead to the optimum outcome in terms of general happiness.

So, the underlying philosophy, design, and operation of the institutions overseeing the liberal world order are deeply flawed, but this is not the main reason why it is failing. The main reason, in my opinion, is that living in a liberal society is counter to human nature.

The struggle for survival in a hostile environment has hardwired, over the millennia, deep into our psyche, a thirst for power. We strive for it. We strive to expand our power to the point where it meets a resisting force of equal or greater power. Our natural tendency is to suppress the weak and obey the strong. To identify with a group (family, clan, tribe, class, race, nation, religion, football team, etc.) and fight for its interests. To tolerate other group identities and to respect the rule of law without a strong enforcement mechanism is deeply unnatural. We are inherently racist, sexist, xenophobic and oppressive.

The force that seems to drive the people's will to support the unnatural liberal order is fear. Fear not only of prosecution by the institutions that enforce this order, and not only of being left out of society, but fear of the horrible circumstances that illiberal world orders have brought in the past, such as the mass destruction and atrocities during WWII. As the memories of these horrors fade, as the generations that have lived through these horrors die out, the fear of the illiberal alternatives dwindles and the will to suppress our dark passions weakens.

The liberal democracies have designed a system of institutions that suppress but do not elliminate our dark passions, our animal instincts, our thirst for power. But the cult of economic rationality is undermining these institutions even in the most liberal of the Western societies. Slim majorities in ill-thought referenda decide constitutional issues with profound and long-lasting effects. A celebrity con with an Ill-fitted, authoritarian temperament was voted in a position of great power. But we are obliged to respect these choices unabridged, because they reflect the rational will of the people.

Thus, we come to the paradox that the system designed to reflect best the will of the individuals is no longer willed by these individuals. Paradoxically, freedom of choice leads to a weakening of the liberal order.

So, is there something that we, the liberally minded individuals, can do to prevent the decay of liberalism? Perhaps, but the odds are stacked against us.

It is very difficult to reform the institutions overseeing the world order on the go, while the liberal position is losing its strength in society. Necessarily, the way forward should be based on a bottom-up approach.

First of all, each one of us should kill or at least gag the fascist lurking deep inside his or her psyche. We should eliminate the prejudices that we hold against other identities (national, sexual, gender, religious, racial, class etc.) and judge each and every individual on their own merits. We should not feel threatened by other identities, but only by illiberal ideologies that pose a direct threat to our liberal societies. We should be wary of and oppose all vestiges of illiberalism, such as right-wing nativism, left-wing bolshevism, radical islamism, etc., first and foremost in our own minds and in our immediate vicinity.

Next, we should realise that rule of law, freedom of speech, religious, racial and any other kind of tolerance, together with all the other tenets of a liberal society, should not be taken for granted, even in the most liberal of the Western democracies. Liberalism is an ideology that depends on people believing in it, not a natural state of mind or a natural state of being. It is an ideology or a set of ideas that should be nurtured and defended, respecting its basic tenets of tolerance and equality of power.

At the political level, we should not vote for illiberals, or candidates with vestiges of illiberalism, or political parties that tolerate illiberal ideas and members. This is not easy in most constituencies, which is not surprising, given the fact that the liberal ideas are foreign to human nature. Liberalism is very brainy, coldhearted  and boring. It cannot excite the passions and bring easy election victories.

At the multinational level, it seems that we should start pretty much from scratch. Liberal countries that are already pretty close together, such as the EU core, could form a political union with proper democratic legitimacy and then gradually expand to include only countries that have fully, wholeheartedly and successfully incorporated the standards of liberal society in their institutions. 

The challenge here is to supercede the existing national identities with a new dynamic identity that expands with the expanding political union. This identity should not have geographic, religious or racial dimensions. Instead, it should reflect one's belonging to an open society of individuals that espouse liberal values and principles.

The existence of such an open-ended identity is a rather utopian idea. The chances that humanity will follow such a path are rather slim. It is much more likely that another round of mass atrocities on global scale is approaching. It is our duty, however, to do whatever is in our power to resist the slide to the horrors of illiberalism.