The Return of History: Liberal Values and Global Realities Only when we understand the fragility of liberal democracy will we be properly motivated to defend it. Zak Schneider
My socialisation into polite liberal society—my crunchy, Quaker-school education and my progressive cultural milieu in a Northeastern American metropolis—helped to forge my worldview. I was, after all, the product of a culture and a generation in which the liberal world presided over the most peaceful and prosperous societies in the history of humanity. Liberalism seemed to be the natural order of things. I failed to appreciate that my experience was born of a unique moment in human history, and that my enculturation represented a break with normal human existence.
Rather than people competing in conquest and blood, as was the case for nearly all of human history, postwar liberal democracies relied upon consent and converging economic incentives to a greater degree than at any previous time. In this new world, it was taken for granted that liberal values would appeal to anyone given the choice, and reorient people towards economic interdependence and international cooperation. Western societies were free and prosperous, so after the Cold War, many Western commentators and analysts naturally assumed that those newly liberated from tyranny would want to emulate them.
The time I spent living and working in a small Baltic country bordered by an aggressively imperial neighbour forced me to reassess the assumptions with which I was raised. Lithuanians understand that the default state of human beings is not cooperation and humanist values. They were therefore not surprised that, after the Cold War, some actors continued to defy economic self-interest in the name of ideology and festering resentment, bucking the trend of liberalisation.
A failure to appreciate this reality is where well-intentioned liberals like me went wrong. As Robert Kagan argues in his 2018 book, The Jungle Grows Back, our universalist, egalitarian, and cooperative international system requires cultivation and constant care. The Baltics taught me that periods of stability and peace, of the kind I was privileged to experience growing up, are fragile. And only once I began to understand the abnormality of our precarious moment was I properly motivated to defend it. Our experiences in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies have led us to take this form of government for granted and to live under the collective fantasy that we can easily change human intentions everywhere.
Many liberals, especially the left-of-centre kind, have mistakenly assumed that the West is the preeminent cause of international conflict, and that pacifism (or at least non-interference) will bring about an egalitarian world governed by universal values. Even after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022, members of the progressive caucus in the US House of Representatives penned a now-retracted letter to President Biden encouraging his administration to push for a premature diplomatic resolution to the conflict. Despite the menacing belligerence of Russian lawlessness and aggression, the letter’s signatories urged Biden to “[redouble] efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”
That letter was a strategic misunderstanding of Russia’s nature and objectives. In a world where not everyone shares a disposition that values peace, self-determination, and individual human rights, not every conflict can be justly resolved with negotiations. Hard power and deterrence will sometimes be required. Our international rivals today harken back to a time when power was absolute, rules were nonexistent, and zero-sum conflicts over values, borders, and culture predominated. If liberals wish to see their core principles survive, they must be willing to defend them.
This does not require support for military adventurism in every instance. Nor can we afford to retreat from a defence of the values that underpin our era of unmatched flourishing, including human dignity and freedom, sovereignty, individual human rights, and the rule of law. If we are to deter our foes and provide opportunities for our values to spread peacefully, we must have a frank discussion about what defending those values entails.
Principally, it means reconsidering the faulty assumption that all people are motivated by the same goals in all circumstances, and that humanity would naturally converge on similar common ends were it free to do so. Many liberals assumed that their values would spread by contagion after the Cold War as a result of greater personal freedom, integration into common global markets, and increased international contact. The more we engage with autocratic nations, they believed, the more we can change the way those nations organise their societies, and the more we can influence their values and goals. We failed to take seriously the psychology and culture of societies unlike our own, and this mistake was made by liberals on both sides of the Atlantic.
Liberal theoreticians like Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper worried a lot about what Berlin called the “liberal predicament.” Can liberal values sustain themselves through liberal means, and if so, how? Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies was one of the seminal works of the postwar era, and it critiqued this view of naive universality while still affirming the virtue of liberal tolerance. Popper observed that because people do not all value the same social goods, liberal tolerance would need to be applied in moderation and robustly defended. Unlimited tolerance, he pointed out, “must lead to the disappearance of tolerance,” and “if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
With that in mind, Western Europe strove to embody the principles enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as it emerged from the wreckage of World War II. That change was a mighty achievement, and it ushered in an era of unprecedented neutrality, peace, justice, anti-militarism (made possible by American security commitments), and unrivalled prosperity. It took another forty years for the rest of Europe to be liberated from totalitarian occupation, but events in the 1990s only reinforced European complacency. Everyone in the world, it was assumed, would behave rationally given the right combination of economic incentives and an emphasis on the value of individual human life. By the last decade of the 20th century, history appeared to be steering itself towards liberalism’s final triumph.
But rather than remaining sceptical that the kind of intolerance Popper warned us about would dissipate, we moved full-steam ahead. During this period, the United States and Europe tried to integrate Russia into the Western world through the construction of oil pipelines and integration into the financial markets of Europe. We tried to draw China into our global trade system, and successive US Democratic administrations tried to engage with Iran’s revolutionary theocracy in the belief that lifting economic sanctions would diminish its aspiration to develop a nuclear weapon. Some of these policies worked to a degree or for a while, but they all misread the aims of the leadership class in societies quite unlike our own, and in some cases, they misread the aims of the citizenry as well. The dictators of these three countries cynically used Western tolerance to advance their own intolerant agendas.
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