Larsson läser

Janerik Larsson

Janerik Larsson

John Gray är en engelsk politisk filosof – nu pensionerad från sin professur på London School of Economics – som rört sig över hela den politiska kartan. Han började till vänster, blev sedan en av den brittiska nyliberalismens främsta namn innan han fortsatte högerut. Hans artiklar och böcker på senare år präglats av stor svartsyn vad gäller mänskligheten och vart historien är på väg. I senaste utgåvan av den brittiska idétidskriften Prospect gisslar han vad han menar är den naiva västliga historiedeterminism som går ut på att liberalism och demokrati till slut kommer att segra.

I en lång essä argumenterar han mot den föreställningen. Bland hans måltavlor finns tanken att en växande global medelklass kommer att etablera en bestående liberal, marknadsekonomisk och demokratisk världsordning.

Detta är hans bild av ett Östeuropa – och ett Europa –  i Rysslands slagskugga:

In the eyes of many in the region, the Soviet debacle was an opportunity to reclaim a normalcy denied them for over 40 years. A sort of normality has returned; but it is the kind that Europe experienced in much of the first half of the last century, a condition of chronic crisis. Structural flaws in the single currency have left much of southern Europe in permanent depression. Reunited by the fall of communism, the continent has been re-divided by the European project. Across Europe, there has been a resurgence of the far right and the politics of hate.

Post-communist countries are now the last redoubt, outside Germany, of the European project. Promising to entrench liberal democracy, the EU is seen as offering security, first of all against Russia, but also as a protector of liberal values. But this safety is mostly illusory. Who can seriously believe that Germany will go to war with Russia for the third time in a century in order to protect Poland or the Baltic states? Nor is the EU a guarantor of liberal values. Versions of democracy exist throughout Eastern Europe, but these democracies vary greatly in the degree to which they respect liberal norms. While it presides over a revival of many of the themes of European fascism—including the demonisation of Jews—Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary is not a dictatorship of the kind that existed in the interwar period. A more modern development, Orbán’s regime has harnessed popular sovereignty to create an illiberal democracy.

Och han avslutar sin genomgång av tillståndet i världen i morgon:

A succession of cycles and contingencies, history has no overall direction. But if any trend can be discerned at the present time, it is hardly favourable to the west. In part this is the normal course of history. The western pre-eminence of the past few hundred years was never going to be permanent. But western decline is also a process that has been accelerated by repeated attempts to export western institutions. As the American historian Barbara Tuchman showed in her great 1984 book The March of Folly, many of history’s catastrophes have been the result not of error but of what she calls “folly”—the pursuit of hubristic policies that could be known in advance to be unworkable or self-defeating. Much that the west has done over the past quarter-century can be described as folly in Tuchman’s sense.

In any conceivable future, there will be many different kinds of regime. Tyranny and anarchy will be as common as liberal and illiberal democracy; ethnic nationalism will be a persistent force, while clan loyalties and hatreds will be more politically important, in some countries, than nationality; geopolitical struggle will intensify, war mutate into novel and hybrid forms and empire renew itself in new guises; religion will be a deciding force in the formation and destruction of states. There will be many cultures and ways of life, continuously changing and interacting without melting into anything like a universal civilisation. If values such as freedom and tolerance are to survive, this is the world in which they must somehow live. Coping with this world requires realistic thinking of a kind that the liberal mind, as it exists today, is incapable. But this ruling liberalism gives its believers something realist thinking cannot supply—a story, or myth, in which they can shape the future of humankind. As it faces an increasingly disordered world, the greatest danger for the west comes from the groundless faith that history is on its side.

I samma nummer av Prospect finns också en lång intervju med Henry Kissinger. Den tar utgångspunkt i hans nya bok ”World Order”. Prospects chefredaktör Bronwen Maddox summerar:

His prescriptions for US policy in Ukraine, Iran and the Middle East are subtle and engaged in a way that the Obama administration has not generally been. Kissinger has a gift for putting words to the competing passions in American foreign policy, if only because he seems to share both impulses himself.

That brings us to the central question that he throws at the US itself: is all the effort of its foreign policy amounting to more than the defence of its interests, in one arena after another, or is the very idea of progress sentimental? The US is now confronted by the question, he writes, of whether “foreign policy [is] a story with a beginning and an end, in which final victories are possible?”

He is hardly cheerful that at this point, confronted by China, Russia, and versions of militant Islam, the west is succeeding in promoting its values and its version of world order. On the other hand, as this book makes resoundingly clear, he refuses to relinquish the belief that the proper goal of American foreign policy is to get closer to that destination.

 

Om gästbloggen

Janerik Larsson är gästbloggare hos SvD Ledare. Han är skribent, författare och journalist, verksam i Stiftelsen Fritt Näringsliv och pr-byrån Prime. Bloggar om svensk politik och har en internationell utblick mot främst brittiska och amerikanska medier.
Åsikter är hans egna.
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