It’s a weird, premature, and slightly macabre reaction, from thinkers who should know better.
It’s a weird, premature, and slightly macabre reaction, from thinkers who should know better.
I t’s been three weeks since Russia invaded. Just three weeks.
Already, fed by what they are glimpsing on Twitter and hearing in private chat rooms, liberal-minded commentators are celebrating the renewal and forthcoming triumph of all their ideas over all their enemies globally. Moral clarity is back! Populism and nationalism are totally finished!
It’s a weird, premature, and slightly macabre reaction, from thinkers who should know better. Thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s own book, The End of History, is a misunderstood classic. It presciently anticipates that peoples and rulers may get bored with the end of ideological struggle and seek to restart history again.
But, in recent years, Fukuyama has been troubled by the rise of populism and has offered a weak rejoinder to it in his book Identity. Seeing Russians struggle on the field, he seems to have succumbed to the common caricature of his own End of History thesis and predicts total victory for every party and political figure he currently admires, and defeat for all the ones he fears. This should be a blaring sign that one has been carried away, as history is rarely so neat.
The invasion has already done huge damage to populists all over the world, who prior to the attack uniformly expressed sympathy for Putin. That includes Matteo Salvini, Jair Bolsonaro, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and of course Donald Trump. The politics of the war has exposed their openly authoritarian leanings.
This is true only in part. Éric Zemmour already did fatal damage to Marine Le Pen, and he does seem to be sinking because of the politics of the war. Donald Trump’s political fortunes were already failing.
But Fukuyama leaves out many of the other “populist nationalist” rogues’ gallery, because they don’t fit his invidious description. He leaves out “Brexit” Britain, which has generously assisted Ukraine. Poland, led by the populist nationalist PIS — a mortal threat to democracy, according to the Atlantic — has been the leading country in NATO for assisting Ukrainian refugees and advocating an unmistakably strong response. The Polish prime minister went to Berlin himself and pled for such a response.
Ukraine has also been assisted mightily by Turkey, led by the mini-Putinist strongman Reycep Erdogan. Finally, there is Ukraine itself. Zelensky is also a populist nationalist — he’s a celebrity like Donald Trump — who was elected to reform out-of-touch Ukrainian governance. He has used openly illiberal tactics that would make Viktor Orbán blush, such as shutting down opposition television networks. And he pursues a classic nationalist cultural politics, providing support for the Ukrainian language and erecting immense hurdles to the publication and broadcast of the Russian language.
Further, the biggest flip-flop in Europe over the last month was not among the populists, but the Germans, the supposed torchbearers for international liberalism during the Trump years. They had pursued Ostpolitik by default. Meanwhile, in the international press, Orbán is taking a beating for being too pro-Putin and coming onside to sanctions on Russia only belatedly. But in Hungary, responding to actual democratic sentiment in the weeks ahead of the election, Orbán is emphasizing not his alignment with NATO, but his determination to protect Hungary from forces beyond its control, to not embroil it in a war or dangers it cannot handle.
Fukuyama’s buzzard triumphalism has been echoed everywhere. By commentators in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Portuguese gadfly Bruno Maçães declared that John Mearsheimer, the famous advocate for foreign-policy realism, who predicted this conflict rather presciently eight years ago, had lost his credibility and reputation. Shouldn’t the people behind the Bucharest Declaration have lost their reputations? The statement was meant to protect Georgia and Ukraine, yet in both cases, Russia proved its willingness to risk the use and censure of military action to veto their aspirations, and redraw their borders.
Also, in the short term, we have responded to war fever the way democratic publics always do, by becoming less liberal ourselves. While Germany still purchases energy from Russia until its great policy changes can be effected in the real world, Germans are casting out Russian artists, and Americans are taking out their frustration on Russian businesses and ballerinas. Talk-show hosts are speculating that Tucker Carlson and Tulsi Gabbard could be detained and tried by the American military for supposedly spreading Russian propaganda — that is, having opinions that are at odds with prevailing consensus. War always makes us less free.
Not only is Fukuyama’s triumphalism deeply premature, but it also makes no sense; it reflects a Cold War thinking in which one ideological bloc is led by the Kremlin, and the free world is led by, if not Biden, something like the Atlantic Ideas conferences.
Though some populists and nationalists have said stupidly admiring things of Vladimir Putin, these political trends are not primarily about devotion to Moscow, and never were. Populism is a response to the poor performance and self-serving of elites who lead national and common institutions; it is a rebellion against incompetence and corruption. Nationalism is more multifarious. But broadly speaking, in the last decade nationalism is the political response of the “losers” of globalization and elite policy consensus. The political costs that mass immigration, freer trade, and green policies impose on workers, fishers, and farmers do not disappear because people are embarrassed by what Vladimir Putin did. Thinking so is an elite fantasy. It is, paradoxically, a hope that Vladimir Putin’s blunders somehow excuse liberal failures.
Finally, it is simply all premature.
Despite all their supply and morale problems, Russians continue to advance in Ukraine. Ukrainians continue to die there and flee to foreign nations. Ukraine’s economy is destroyed. Reportedly, President Zelensky is already, in the media, conceding one of Russia’s war demands, that Ukraine never join NATO. The possibility of a durable settlement post-war seems impossible. If no popular government in Ukraine could support the Minsk agreements before this war, I do not see how any popular government elected by Ukrainians will support closing their own Western future, or recognizing all of Putin’s territorial claims.
And Zelensky’s problems may not even be ones of polls or popular mandates. Nationalist movements are often split by factional disputes. (Trust me; I’m part Irish!) Ukraine has many varieties of nationalism, not all of them trusting of his leadership. Short of the complete destruction of the Russian state, Zelensky is going to negotiate a peace settlement. He will instantly be transformed from the man who resisted Putin to the one who parlayed with him, and then tried to make the new settlement stick among Ukrainians who resent it.
Fukuyama predicts with certainty:
Russian defeat will make possible a “new birth of freedom,” and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a bunch of brave Ukrainians.
Well, I’m glad Francis got his groove back. Moral clarity is a great tonic for pontificators. What consolation this victory is to Ukrainians, I leave for them to answer.