At the TLS: Tom Stevenson rhetorical sketch book, about the vexing question of 'geopolitical realignment'.
Political Observer provides a selective commentary.
Headline: Goodbye to all that
Sub-headline: Are we really in the midst of geopolitical realignment?
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/age-of-unpeace-mark-leonard-disorder-helen-thompson-book-review-tom-stevenson/
Mr. Stevenson * reviews two books, one by a Technocrat and and one by an Academic, although in the political present, those two roles are nearly indistinguishable. The opening paragraph of the review/polemic is a wonder of nearly breath taking concision/compression, or is it caricature?
There is a tendency among members of the establishment in advanced industrial societies to look on the crises of the past decade – the Arab uprisings and their brutal suppression; the Eurozone crisis; the re-emergence of Chinese nationalism; the protracted shocks of 2016, in the forms of Brexit and Donald Trump, not to mention the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine – as part of a slow-motion collapse, with the vague but inescapable sense that the world is coming apart. The global financial crisis of 2008–9 already proved that something could be terribly wrong with an ostensibly invulnerable edifice. Perhaps, the thinking goes, this insight extends further, to the “liberal international order”, or even to globalized capitalism itself? Those who once felt comfortable with the veneer of order presented by American power, or who had mistaken its euphemisms for reality, have been much put out.
The Age of Unpeace by Mark Leonard, son of an MP and founder of the ‘European Council on Foreign Relations’. With a bit of research on the internet The Reader will discover that this ‘Council’ is fully supported by Stanford University’s ‘Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies’ whose Director is Michael A. McFaul. Who is also a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution. Mr. Leonard is allied with Neo-Cons. That information should put that Reader on alert? But back to the essay, what follows might qualify as kind of psychological/political profile of Mr Leonard’s ‘evolution’ on the question of Europe.
In The Age of Unpeace, Mark Leonard confesses his puzzlement at the re-emergence of nationalist resistance to “globalization” – a phenomenon that, for him, appears to lack investment banks, asset managers and the political institutions that surround them. The son of a Europhile MP and a professor of German literature, Leonard is the founder of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a book he now regrets: Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century (2005). In it, he argued that the EU was a symbol of civilized interconnection and enlightened statecraft. He still credits the EU and its predecessors with the elimination of conflict in Europe, omitting to acknowledge the importance of the US/Soviet occupation of the continent, or that Europe remains dotted with American military installations. The past few years have been a tough time for people like Leonard, for whom a world dominated by the US once represented “the dream of a liberal international order cemented by economic globalisation and the internet, and governed by liberal democracy and free-market capitalism”. But theorists of America’s waning hegemony, who were so vocal during last year’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, can at least account for this loss. European rejection of the EU as a perfection of liberal capitalist principles (as represented by Brexit and some continental political movements) remains harder to comprehend.
This is if that ‘profile’ was larded in cliché, as demonstrated in this one sentence fragment: ‘‘the dream of a liberal international order cemented by economic globalisation and the internet, and governed by liberal democracy and free-market capitalism”. It’s almost a pastiche of Hayek via Jean Monnet. But note this bit of comic relief :
Leonard seeks an explanation in global economic trends and technological developments. Digital media, he believes, must take some of the blame for our “fragmenting reality” and the end of consensus.
Followed by this:
But the central problem, he avers, is that the connections between nations produced by transnational economic production have engendered conflict rather than convergence.
Mr. Stevenson seems to be losing patience with Mr. Leonard:
As with his earlier book on Europe, reality has not collaborated with Leonard’s publishing schedule.
…
To have declared that conventional wars have “all but disappeared”, except “in Africa”, was foolish at the time of publication late last year. It now seems absurd. Leonard’s thesis is that the primary form of conflict has become the “connectivity war”, fought over the internet, trade, border controls and finance. This isn’t a cause for celebration, in his view, because connectivity wars have higher body counts than conventional ones. And it is this phenomenon that is supposed to be responsible for Trump, Brexit and the hollowing out of liberal internationalist designs.
….
Here Mr. Stevenson’s impatience with Mr. Leonard’s pseudo-sophisticated yarn-spinning, a step to far?, reaches full bloom:
Formulations of the connectivity/cyber/information-war variety have an appeal in a metaphorized culture where everything must be war. Computer hacking is war. Diplomatic scuffles are war. “Disinformation” (a term devoid of any serviceable meaning) is war. “Migration is a particularly effective weapon for the weak against the strong.” And so on. But a state getting into a disagreement with a neighbour and ending visa-free travel for its citizens is a relatively mundane event. To call it a “connectivity war” is asinine. The register here is dinner-party chatter in an affected provincial style. Leonard does not have this field all to himself: Bruno Maçães and Ian Bremmer make a very decent living from it. But these preachers to the privileged and perplexed can offer no real insights about our contemporary malaise.
( Here is a link to one of my comment’s on Mr. Bremmer, from 2017:
https://stephenkmacksd.com/2017/02/24/ian-bremmer-key-stakeholder-a-comment-by-political-observer/)
When Mr. Stevenson reaches his review of Disorder by Helen Thompson he postulates this:
…
Most analysis of the 2010s lacks an understanding of the energy base of modern capitalism. By contrast, Thompson argues that political history is impossible to understand adequately without a consideration of oil and gas.
…
The first sentence is almost comic in its cultivated ignorance of ‘modern capitalism’ , note this diminution, via the use of the lowercase ! The Reader might again ask to what end? That ‘Capitalism’ in 2008 was rescued from its own greed, with massive injections of Government printed money! Aided by years long Quantitative Easing. This might interfere with Mr. Stevenson’s ‘review thesis’, if this be within it’s reach? This is the TLS, fully owned and operated by The Times, sunk in Thatcherite Nostalgia, in its various iterations/permutations.
Here is another revelatory comment by Mr. Stevenson featuring ‘Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine’ … The many crimes of The American Hegemon are subject to a self-serving Political Amnesia!
The further problem is that Europeans have not decided on, and are not close to deciding on, where Europe is and hence where it ends. Thompson’s analysis here, in stark contrast to that of Leonard, has become more rather than less relevant in the light of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, which began on the day Disorder was published.
The Reader needs to pay particular attention to this penultimate paragraph of Mr. Stevenson’s essay:
Thompson argues international crises are exacerbated by a common deterioration of national politics. Representative democracies have become much less responsive to popular demands for an increase in the labour share of income. The real wages of most of the population of the advanced industrial economies has stagnated or declined. Inequality has worsened across the developed world. The origins of this crisis, which Thompson describes as one of aristocratic excess, also lie in the late 1970s. Financialization has seen states prioritize international capital markets over citizen taxation, in part because of ingenious tax avoidance on the part of the wealthy. Thompson does not cite it, but a recent landmark study conducted at the RAND corporation found that, between 1975 and 2018, the equivalent of $47 trillion had been redistributed from the bottom 90 per cent of the US population to the rich and ultra-rich. These are the brute figures of four decades of one-sided class war (one non-martial “war” that is never mentioned by Mark Leonard). That RAND of all places would publish the definitive quantitative critique of the neo-liberal era is an unusual sign.
A kind of riff on, or more pointedly a kind of hybridity, once the very definition of Post-Modernism. Consider ‘French philosophy of the sixties : an essay on antihumanism’ by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, linked to Piketty, in his Socialist guise, as a possible explanatory frame? The final two sentences of Stevenson’s ‘review’ are instructive of as to a kind of political/moral fatalisms, framed as a question.
This sense of an interregnum is at the root of all contemporary disorder theses. But the status quo was always disordered and other outcomes are possible. What if the series of recent global crises produces no dramatic transformation but only a terrible stasis?
* Tom Stevenson reports from the Middle East and North Africa, international media including the London Review of Books, Financial Times magazines, Africa Confidential, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, and the BBC.
Political Radical