Liberals who think they can export their values everywhere are making the globe more dangerous
Source - Daily Telegraph - 29/08/21
Defeat in Afghanistan has prompted many clichés and glib conclusions. With a wise nod, commentators call it “the graveyard of empires”. Despite all evidence, politicians insist, “we must work to moderate the Taliban”.
It has become fashionable, too, to deride the suggestion that “history has ended”, famously made by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was the idea, based on Hegel’s belief that history is the progress of reason, that liberal democracy and market capitalism had triumphed and no alternative ideological system could challenge them.
It should not have taken humiliation in Afghanistan to realise that history is very much still here with us. At home, liberal democracies are struggling to cope with bifurcated labour markets, stagnant pay and deep inequality. They are struggling to contain social fissures caused by ageing populations and changing demographics, radical individualism, woke ideologies and political fragmentation.
Internationally, challenges abound. Putin’s Russia murders political opponents, attacks neighbouring states and props up a dictatorship in Belarus. Xi’s China has embraced a mutated form of market capitalism while repudiating liberal democracy, oppressing the Uighurs, destroying Hong Kong and menacing other countries. Across the Muslim world, autocrats cling to power using violence, Islamists seek to overturn secular government, and caliphists dream of an Islamic state governed by sharia law.
As the West’s relative decline demonstrates, history is not linear, it does not reflect the progress of reason, and the lasting triumph of one particular form of government is neither inevitable nor really even possible. Humanity can enjoy progress in scientific discovery and knowledge, but that progress does not necessarily extend to wisdom, the application of knowledge, nor our responses to new and changing threats and challenges. We experience overreach and setbacks, hubris and defeat, errors and the eventual eclipse of powerful states by others.
But Afghanistan – as well as the other economic, trading and geopolitical realities dawning upon us – ought to prompt us to question other Western and liberal assumptions.
The first and most obvious is liberal universalism. The earliest liberal thinkers formed their philosophy by imagining a state of nature, a kind of year zero, with no government, no security, and a life of danger and violence. To escape this brutal world, they imagined people would form a social contract in which certain rights – to life and to property for example – were guaranteed and we would otherwise be left to live in freedom.
The problem with the theory is that the state of nature never existed. Our rights and obligations were inherited from the past, granted to us by a complex network of family, culture and institutions, all of which were shaped by the passage of time and the places we are from.
But liberalism is too often blind to these particularities. It assumes we are the same, with the same wants and needs, wherever we are from. And the wants and needs it identifies are unavoidably based on Western and – however much modern liberals might deny it – Christian assumptions. Just think about the way we talk about Islam and Islamic countries, which, for example, have entirely different attitudes to the rights of women and the desirability of secular government.
Those same intellectual seeds also cause liberals and Westerners to think of humans as rational individuals concerned mostly about their own personal interests. But as modern psychologists and ancient philosophers attest, humans are a complicated mix of competitive and co-operative, individualistic and tribal. Our membership of broader identities – families, localities, tribes, nations, faiths and ethnicities – matters more than liberals admit.
And so in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the West completely overlooked tribal and ethnic identities. It insisted on building national and alien structures of government. It looked on, bemused, as economic and social development programmes failed to win round a population that, in many parts of the country at least, felt greater affiliation to the Taliban, and more respect for the efficiency of its administration, than the corrupt governments led by Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani.
A further Western and liberal assumption to go under in Afghanistan is the naïve belief in inevitable, inexorable progress. Not just in the sense intended by Fukuyama, but the idea that pluralism and rationalism must always lead to social progress. The trouble with this thinking, of course, is that what progress means is unavoidably in the eye of the beholder. And those who dispute such progress, or hope for a different future, quickly come to be seen as backward or mendacious.
The allied invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was supposed to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban, but the mission soon became about imposing liberal democracy and Western social norms on a people who – even among those who loathed the Taliban – were reluctant to accept values so far removed from their own traditions. Far from demonstrating the inevitability of progress, Afghanistan has only served to remind us of the fragility of civilisation and peace.
This leads us to the final broken Western assumption: the myth of the “liberal, rules-based international order”. Multilateralism and international institutions are real and valuable things, but it is a delusion to think the “rules-based order” is fair or democratic. It is nothing more than a world system working in American and Western interests, enforced by US economic and military might. Many politicians have grown to believe their own mythology, kidding themselves that summits and treaties alone can work without tanks, troops and gunships. But American unilateralism – ending the Afghan war like it began the war in Iraq – has shown the global rules-based order to be the myth it has always been.
As Westerners we are entitled to believe our way of life, and the principles by which we organise our societies, are preferable and even better than the alternatives we see around the world. But while we must stand up for our way of life more resolutely at home, we must also be realistic about how the world works elsewhere. We are not living through the end of history, but if we learn from experience we might yet witness the end of Western hubris.
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