Tuesday, March 1, 2022

The End of Whig History

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, March 01, 2022

 

Wandel durch Handel” — “Change through trade” — wasn’t the worst idea in history. There was a time when it made good sense, and there remain some contexts in which it still does.

 

It was an idea that grew out of optimism and error, a species of “Whig history,” the belief that the world is carried by natural social and economic forces ever in the direction of enlightenment and liberty. Vladimir Putin is many things, but he is not a Whig.

 

I come from a Whiggish generation.

 

History cannot be condensed into discrete single events, but there are moments that become a kind of psychological shorthand for a generation: If you are an O.G. Baby Boomer such as Oliver Stone, born 1946, it is the assassination of President Kennedy, the event that produced the distinctive undercurrent of paranoia and terror in the 1960s, the poisoned soil in which Flower Power was planted. For first-wave Millennials such as Pete Buttigieg, an Afghanistan veteran born in 1982, it was 9/11, a terrorist attack that succeeded in at least one of its aims: making ours a fearful society.

 

For my generation, the defining event was a happy occasion: the fall of the Berlin Wall.

 

Contrary to Generation X’s famously cynical reputation, coming of age at the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the tech boom (was there a better year to graduate from college than 1997?) arguably left us mentally disfigured by excessive optimism. Kurt Cobain may be the poster boy for Generation X, but we produced a bumper crop of optimistic globalists and techno-utopians: Elon MuskSatya NadellaSergey Brin and Larry PageEmmanuel MacronCharles MichelJack DorseyMichael Dell, etc.

 

(Of course, we also produced a few techno-pessimists such as Peter Thiel, along with a raft of cartwheeling imbeciles such as Beto O’Rourke and Justin Trudeau. Generalities cannot be avoided.)

 

Some of those Generation X optimists have had their fingers burned a little bit, too: Mark Leonard (born 1974) of the European Council on Foreign Relations published Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century in 2005; this year, he’s published The Age of Unpeace and is doing a podcast series called “Therapy for Internationalists.” Leonard’s thesis is that the very same connectivity that inspired so much optimism in the immediate post–Cold War era has been weaponized in our time, not only in the digital realm but across many points of contact, from trade to immigration. The result is a world that is not quite at war — or wasn’t, until last week — but not at peace, either.

 

The case for optimism after the fall of the Berlin Wall is expressed in the German slogan Wandel durch Handel, the belief that the world’s closed societies and their repressive governments could be improved, if not necessarily brought all the way around to Western-style liberal democracy, by trade, which would bring both cultural contact and economic development. The theory holds that as societies become more affluent and engage in more market activity, the newly empowered bourgeoisie will feel more urgently the need to protect property rights and personal choice; that contact with the United States, Europe, and Japan will make them want the openness and individual liberty those nations have; and that this situation will push the influential classes in those societies inexorably in the direction of liberal democracy, with the state either being dragged along unwillingly or being entirely transformed, as in post-war Japan. Liberal democracy would be spread by affluence like a happy infection.

 

Where there are property rights, there will be human rights — so we thought.

 

Optimism is a powerful force, but it is not the only force at work — profit is another. Wandel durch Handel was a powerful idea because it joined the ruling class’s heartfelt idealism to its economic self-interest. In that sense, it is as much an American school of thought as a German one, but the dynamic is particularly evident in Germany’s relations with China and Russia, in which commercial considerations have been excessively prioritized.

 

The German situation is politically complex: Because Germany’s exports are well-diversified, its exports to China — its No. 2 export market — amount to only 7.4 percent of total exports. But while China may not account for a very large share of overall German exports, it accounts for a large share of the sales of several politically influential firms — China is the largest market for Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen Group (which includes Audi, Porsche, Bentley, Lamborghini, and other automotive marques, along with Ducati motorcycles), and BMW, along with a number of other leading manufacturers and industrial concerns. And manufacturers do not only have customers in China — they have factories there, too, and very large investments in those factories.

 

The United States has a relatively competitive and confrontational form of politics, and its government is one of checks and balances; Angela Merkel, in comparison, held power for 16 years and enjoyed legislative prerogatives that a U.S. president could only envy. This has the effect of making the corporatist tendency a little less powerful in the United States than in Germany and most of the rest of the European Union.

 

But if Berlin’s policy-makers have been far too easily captured by commercial calculation, there are nonetheless many of us in the United States and elsewhere who must confess: “Ich bin ein Berliner, too, damn it.” In the United States, we see commercial capture in matters great and small, from heavy industry seeking protectionist tariffs to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s desire to raise taxes on everybody except medical-device manufacturers in the state she represents.

 

In the United States, foreign policy is almost completely dominated by domestic commercial concerns, such as protecting profits and jobs in uncompetitive firms, along with symbolic tribal gestures — e.g., Barack Obama’s signing the Paris Agreement while knowing it would never be implemented and making no effort even to get the Senate to approve it. As with most areas of government policy, foreign policy is too easily shaped by a relatively small number of highly motivated parties who have an intense interest in one or two issues while the average president or senator — to say nothing of the average voter — must divide his attention among a bewildering array of issues, none of which is of urgent personal interest to him. That is our old friend, “concentrated benefits vs. dispersed costs,” the reason American taxpayers are forced to fund billions of dollars in agricultural subsidies designed to make our groceries more expensive.

 

Many of those to whom the nature of such problems has long been perfectly obvious in domestic affairs nonetheless maintained excessively high hopes about the power of business activities to reshape political cultures or to harmonize international relations. Trade, investment, exchange, and shared economic interests are important and valuable, but we have had too much confidence in them. That has been obvious for some time: The strongest and most utopian version of that idea died with George W. Bush’s democracy project in the Middle East.

 

At the conclusion of the 1994 debate about the Clinton administration’s decision to grant China “most-favored nation” trading status — the beginning of the modern U.S.–China economic relationship — our friends at the Heritage Foundation asserted: “By increasing prosperity in China through greater trade, the U.S. can help to create the economic freedoms that are the foundation upon which political freedom will someday emerge.” That is not what came to pass in the following decades. But if Wandel durch Handel is a dead letter, no credible alternative has yet been developed. Instead, what we mostly have seen is a deepening and widening of corporatist rent-seeking behavior, with tariffs and other sanctions designed not to produce changes in the policies of governments abroad but simply to benefit domestic business interests. That sort of neo-mercantilism has a great deal of attraction to populists on the right and on the left, but it does not provide a real basis — neither a moral basis nor a practical basis — for a new and relevant policy approach. It is only another way of saying, “What’s good for GM is good for America,” something most of us stopped believing back in 2008.

 

Beijing’s repression and abuses are not news, and neither are Putin’s rapacity and brutality. Neither is the willingness of German manufacturers and American investors to turn a blind eye to such abuses when the money is right. But the world has been changed in the past few years: in a profound way by the trauma of the Covid-19 epidemic, and in ways that will not be digested for some time by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We are presented with a window for meaningful change.

 

Whatever form that change takes, it will probably have to begin with deeper, richer, and more structured cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies with the specific intent of preventing Sino-Russian dominance — of the world or of their corners of it. For the United States, that means more engagement — simultaneously realistic and openhanded — with our European allies and with the other democracies around the world, especially in Asia and Eastern Europe.

 

A place for Americans to begin might be acknowledging our own recent democracy deficit and taking steps to repair the damage that has been done to our democratic institutions.

 

In Other News . . .

 

The Ukrainian border guard’s taunt of defiance on Snake Island — “Russian warship, go f*** yourself” — deserves a place in history beside μολὼν λαβέ and, “Give me liberty or give me death.” I think that the paperwork enacting the various sanctions being put forward around the world should be headlined: “Russian bank, go f*** yourself,” “Russian oligarch, go f*** yourself,” “Russian soccer team, go f*** yourself,” and, for our friends at CPAC, “Russian stooge, go f*** yourself.”

 

In Closing

 

I would characterize the free world’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine as less than what’s needed but more than I expected. But even as we follow a course of action that will necessarily hurt the Russian people as a whole, we should keep in mind — and in our hearts — the fact that many Russians are as unhappy to live under Putin’s bootheel as the Ukrainians would be.

 

Russia is not jam-packed with wall-to-wall Putinists. Not even close — this isn’t CPAC we’re talking about.

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