US
against the world? Trump’s America and the new global order
In
1989, the political scientist said liberal democracy signalled ‘the
end of history’. He looks at the nationalist politics now reshaping
the west
Francis Fukuyama
NOVEMBER 11, 2016
by: Francis Fukuyama
Donald Trump’s
stunning electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton marks a watershed not
just for American politics, but for the entire world order. We appear
to be entering a new age of populist nationalism, in which the
dominant liberal order that has been constructed since the 1950s has
come under attack from angry and energised democratic majorities. The
risk of sliding into a world of competitive and equally angry
nationalisms is huge, and if this happens it would mark as momentous
a juncture as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The manner of
Trump’s victory lays bare the social basis of the movement he has
mobilised. A look at the voting map shows Clinton’s support
concentrated geographically in cities along the coasts, with swaths
of rural and small-town America voting solidly for Trump. The most
surprising shifts were his flipping of Pennsylvania, Michigan and
Wisconsin, three northern industrial states that were so solidly
Democratic in recent elections that Clinton didn’t even bother to
campaign in the latter one. He won by being able to win over
unionised workers who had been hit by deindustrialisation, promising
to “make America great again” by restoring their lost
manufacturing jobs.
We have seen this
story before. This is the story of Brexit, where the pro-Leave vote
was similarly concentrated in rural areas and small towns and cities
outside London. It is also true in France, where working-class voters
whose parents and grandparents used to vote for the Communist or
Socialist parties are voting for Marine Le Pen’s National Front.
But populist
nationalism is a far broader phenomenon than that. Vladimir Putin
remains unpopular among more educated voters in big cities such as St
Petersburg and Moscow, but has a huge support base in the rest of the
country. The same is true of Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, who has an enthusiastic support base among the country’s
conservative lower middle class, or Hungary’s prime minister Viktor
Orban, who is popular everywhere but in Budapest.
Social class,
defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become
the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised
and emerging-market countries. This, in turn, is driven directly by
globalisation and the march of technology, which has been facilitated
in turn by the liberal world order created largely by the US since
1945.
When we talk about a
liberal world order, we are speaking about the rules-based system of
international trade and investment that has fuelled global growth in
recent years. This is the system that allows iPhones to be assembled
in China and shipped to customers in the US or Europe in the week
before Christmas. It has also facilitated the movement of millions of
people from poorer countries to richer ones, where they can find
greater opportunities for themselves and their children. This system
has worked as advertised: between 1970 and the US financial crisis of
2008, global output of goods and services quadrupled, bringing
hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, not just in China and
India but in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
But as everyone is
painfully aware now, the benefits of this system did not filter down
to the whole population. The working classes in the developed world
saw their jobs disappear as companies outsourced and squeezed
efficiencies in response to a ruthlessly competitive global market.
This long-term story
was hugely exacerbated by the US subprime crisis of 2008, and the
euro crisis that hit Europe a couple of years later. In both cases,
systems designed by elites — liberalised financial markets in the
US case, and European policies such as the euro and the Schengen
system of internal migration — collapsed dramatically in the face
of external shocks. The costs of these failures were again much more
heavily borne by ordinary workers than by the elites themselves. Ever
since, the real question should not have been why populism has
emerged in 2016, but why it took so long to become manifest.
In the US, there was
a political failure insofar as the system did not adequately
represent the traditional working class. The Republican party was
dominated by corporate America and its allies who had profited
handsomely from globalisation, while the Democratic party had become
the party of identity politics: a coalition of women,
African-Americans, Hispanics, environmentalists, and the LGBT
community, that lost its focus on economic issues.
The result of the
election undermines US global leadership
The failure of the
American left to represent the working class is mirrored in similar
failures across Europe. European social democracy had made its peace
with globalisation a couple of decades ago, in the form of Blairite
centrism or the kind of neoliberal reformism engineered by Gerhard
Schröder’s Social Democrats in the 2000s.
But the broader
failure of the left was the same one made in the lead-up to 1914 and
the Great war, when, in the apt phrase of the British-Czech
philosopher, Ernest Gellner, a letter sent to a mailbox marked
“class” was mistakenly delivered to one marked “nation.”
Nation almost always trumps class because it is able to tap into a
powerful source of identity, the desire to connect with an organic
cultural community. This longing for identity is now emerging in the
form of the American alt-right, a formerly ostracised collection of
groups espousing white nationalism in one form or another. But even
short of these extremists, many ordinary American citizens began to
wonder why their communities were filling up with immigrants, and who
had authorised a system of politically correct language by which one
could not even complain about the problem. This is why Donald Trump
received a huge number of votes from better-educated and more
well-off voters as well, who were not victims of globalisation but
still felt their country was being taken from them. Needless to say,
this dynamic underlay the Brexit vote as well.
So what will be the
concrete consequences of the Trump victory for the international
system? Contrary to his critics, Trump does have a consistent and
thought-through position: he is a nationalist on economic policy, and
in relation to the global political system. He has clearly stated
that he will seek to renegotiate existing trade agreements such as
Nafta and presumably the WTO, and if he doesn’t get what he wants,
he is willing to contemplate exiting from them. And he has expressed
admiration for “strong” leaders such as Russia’s Putin who
nonetheless get results through decisive action. He is
correspondingly much less enamoured of traditional US allies such as
those in Nato, or Japan and South Korea, whom he has accused of
freeriding on American power. This suggests that support for them
will also be conditional on a renegotiation of the cost-sharing
arrangements now in place.
Social class,
defined now by one’s level of education, is becoming the single
most important social fracture
The dangers of these
positions for both the global economy and for the global security
system are impossible to overstate. The world today is brimming with
economic nationalism. Traditionally, an open trade and investment
regime has depended on the hegemonic power of the US to remain
afloat. If the US begins acting unilaterally to change the terms of
the contract, there are many powerful players around the world who
would be happy to retaliate, and set off a downward economic spiral
reminiscent of the 1930s.
The danger to the
international security system is as great. Russia and China have
emerged in the past decades as leading authoritarian great powers,
both of whom have territorial ambitions. Trump’s position on Russia
is particularly troubling: he has never uttered a critical word about
Putin, and has suggested that his takeover of Crimea was perhaps
justified. Given his general ignorance about most aspects of foreign
policy, his consistent specificity with regard to Russia suggests
that Putin has some hidden leverage over him, perhaps in the form of
debts to Russian sources that keep his business empire afloat. The
first victim of any Trumpist attempt to “get along better” with
Russia will be Ukraine and Georgia, two countries that have relied on
US support to retain their independence as struggling democracies.
More broadly, a
Trump presidency will signal the end of an era in which America
symbolised democracy itself to people living under corrupt
authoritarian governments around the world. American influence has
always depended more on its “soft power” rather than misguided
projections of force such as the invasion of Iraq. America’s choice
last Tuesday signifies a switching of sides from the liberal
internationalist camp, to the populist nationalist one. It is no
accident that Trump was strongly supported by Ukip’s Nigel Farage,
and that one of the first people to congratulate him was the National
Front’s Marine Le Pen.
Over the past year,
a new populist-nationalist internationale has appeared, by which
like-minded groups share information and support across borders.
Putin’s Russia is one of the most enthusiastic contributors to this
cause, not because it cares about other people’s national identity,
but simply to be disruptive. The information war that Russia has
waged through its hacking of Democratic National Committee emails has
already had a hugely corrosive effect on American institutions, and
we can expect this to continue.
There remain a
number of large uncertainties with regard to this new America. While
Trump is a consistent nationalist at heart, he is also very
transactional. What will he do when he discovers that other countries
will not renegotiate existing trade pacts or alliance arrangements on
his terms? Will he settle for the best deal he can get, or simply
walk away? There has been a lot of talk about the dangers of his
finger on the nuclear trigger, but my sense is that he is much more
isolationist at heart than someone eager to use military force around
the world. When he confronts the reality of dealing with the Syrian
civil war, he may well end up taking a page from the Obama playbook
and simply continue to sit this one out.
This is the point at
which the matter of character will come into play. Like many other
Americans, I find it hard to conceive of a personality less suited to
be the leader of the free world. This stems only in part from his
substantive policy positions, as much from his extreme vanity and
sensitivity to perceived slights. Last week, when on a stage with
Medal of Honor winners, he blurted out that he too was brave,
“financially brave”. He has asserted that he wants payback
against all his enemies and critics. When faced with other world
leaders who will slight him, will he react like a challenged Mafia
boss, or like a transactional businessman?
A Trump presidency
will signal the end of an era in which America symbolised democracy
Today, the greatest
challenge to liberal democracy comes not so much from overtly
authoritarian powers such as China, as from within. In the US,
Britain, Europe, and a host of other countries, the democratic part
of the political system is rising up against the liberal part, and
threatening to use its apparent legitimacy to rip apart the rules
that have heretofore constrained behaviour, anchoring an open and
tolerant world. The liberal elites that have created the system need
to listen to the angry voices outside the gates and think about
social equality and identity as top-drawer issues they must address.
One way or the other, we are going to be in for a rough ride over the
next few years.
The writer is a
senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute and author of
‘Political Order and Political Decay’
Photographs:
Reuters; Eyevine; Getty Images; AP
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário