Understanding Diplomacy in the 21st Century

20 Mar 2017

By Sascha Lohmann for Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP)

            

Traditional state-led diplomacy is in crisis, argues Sascha Lohmann. We still need designated specialists who manage cross-border relations, but since the 1980s they’ve lost the intellectual and practical hegemony they once enjoyed over their domain. Many people now see diplomacy “as an institution of international societies, not of individual states.” Well if that’s true, how do you reconcile these two seemingly incompatible approaches? Lohmann thinks stressing economic statecraft is one option.

This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in March 2017.

Diagnosing the Crisis of (State-led) Diplomacy or Trying to Save It?
The project Diplomacy in the 21st Century, initiated and organized by a retired ambassador and former political director of the German Foreign Office, can be understood as a manifestation of the lingering crisis of traditional state-led diplomacy as well as a potential vehicle for designing effective remedies. These two different understandings, the notion of crisis symptom as well as crisis treatment, could serve as normative axes around which the project’s research agenda might rotate, respectively. With regards to the first normative axis, the analytical focus would be to formulate a precise crisis diagnosis. This could be achieved by analyzing the increasing social and political participation of diverse actors in international relations coupled with rapid technological advances in communication as well as infrastructure sectors that taken together decisively impact the traditional practice of state-led diplomacy. With respect to the second normative axis, the project’s agenda could focus on providing analytically-backed arguments for why state-led diplomacy could remain relevant despite the profound social and political transformation.
Regardless of the normative Erkenntnisinteresse, any inquiry into the theory and practice of diplomacy in the 21st century must take into account the evolution of the understanding of diplomacy during the latter half of the 20th century and the plurality of analytical perspectives it has spawned. This is of utmost importance because choosing any of these different analytical perspectives has profound empirical and normative implications for how the practice of diplomacy will be conceived, evaluated and justified in the 21st century. In fact, different perspectives provide different answers to the fundamental question emphasized by Paul Sharp that “when it is that people begin to recognize aspects of their relations as diplomatic, why they do so, and with what consequences.” According to him, this can be attributed to “an uneasy consensus around the idea that diplomacy is whatever diplomats do, but it quickly falls apart again around the question of who are the diplomats.” As a consequence, analytical perspectives based on the traditional concept of state-led diplomacy might be useful for providing potential remedies for the challenges of this particular practice. In contrast, other perspectives that broaden the hitherto narrowly defined concept beyond the interaction among nation states could in fact better account for the marginalization of diplomats by rival state as well as transnational actors.

Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the empirical and normative implications of conceptual choices. In the first part, I provide a brief survey of the evolution of the concept of diplomacy based on two analytical perspectives on its empirical manifestation. In the second part, I try to combine both perspectives by focusing on the increasing use of economic state-craft in the form of international sanctions. Doing so might help to equally provide a concise crisis diagnosis while offering some hints at how it could be remedied.

Two Analytical Approaches to Understand Diplomacy
Etymologically, the term diplomacy most likely derived from the ancient Greek word diploun (for twofold or double) that was used in connection with diplomas (special documents carried by religious envoys that were supposed to ensure a safe journey). Beginning in the sixteenth century, the qualifier “diplomatic” came to refer to the science of codifying handwriting that was needed to authenticate the validity of diplomas issued by religious authorities. After the British parliamentarian Edward Burke replaced what had previously called negotiation by diplomacy at the end of the 18th century, the subsequent understanding of diplomacy would significantly depart from the original meaning of the term. In the course of an advancing modernity, diplomacy in theory and practice came to be understood as peaceful conduct of between consolidated political entities such as kingdoms and nation states. Toward the end of the 20th century, the prevailing conceptualization of diplomacy got substantially broadened which blurred the analytical focus.

The Traditional Perspective on Diplomacy
The traditionally narrow perspective on diplomacy focuses on those actions by specially authorized personnel which are concerned with the professional management of cross-border activities among different kinds of political communities such as tribes, kingdoms, empires, or nation states. Those actions encompass different means short of physical force. Firstly exercised by aristocrats, diplomacy had been increasingly practiced by the emerging bourgeois class since the 19th century. This homogenous cast of diplomats eventually exercised a more or less unrivalled intellectual hegemony over how diplomacy would be conceptualized. In this respect, they declared diplomacy among sovereign entities as the norm while regarding themselves as the only “real” diplomats, a powerful epistemic claim backed up by the symbolic and material resources provided through the institution of the nation state as well as a unique set of responsibilities. For a long time, these traditional diplomats could credit themselves for possessing superior knowledge about the art of diplomacy. Their practical wisdom left its mark on academia providing the intellectual springboard of the emerging discipline of International Relations. Consequently, their writings spawned a vast veteran’s literature chronicling encounters and achievements which long dominated the surrounding discourse on the concept of diplomacy. This state-centric bias was deeply entrenched in the traditional perspective on diplomacy as the “professional management of relations across sovereignties.” Furthermore, this traditional perspective on diplomacy emphasized its non-violent means, official character, and the many representative as well as communicative functions. According to Geoff R. Berridge, diplomacy’s “chief purpose is to enable states to secure the objectives of their foreign policies without resort to force, propaganda, or law.” Due to its non-violent character, diplomacy appeared as “the most important institution of [the] society of states.”

Painting a rather historical picture of the conduct of state-led diplomacy, this traditional perspective long dominated the IR sub-discipline of Diplomatic Studies which remained largely immune to outside theorizing by academics. Instead, the practice of state-led diplomacy mainly determined its theory. The long dominance of this narrow perspective on diplomacy was mainly responsible that “the study of diplomacy remains marginal to and almost disconnected from the rest of the field [of IR theory].” As result, “rigorous theoretical and careful empirical work on diplomacy […] is extremely sparse.” Hence, examples of further theorizing diplomacy along the lines of dominant IR paradigms remained marginal in the field of Diplomatic Studies. After the Cold War, this previously one-way interaction between the practice and theory of diplomacy would gradually become more mutual due to innovative theoretical interventions and fundamental social changes.

Broadening the Concept of Diplomacy
As James Der Derian argued that “it could well be that diplomacy has suffered from theoretical neglect to the extent that power politics has profited - in theory and practice. When diplomacy is construed as a continuation of war by other means, as is often the realpolitik case, then little intellectual energy needs to be wasted on the illumination of power’s shadow.” Starting in the late 1980s, a new generation of (post-positivist) scholars, including Der Derian, set out to uncover the powerful intellectual forces that had successfully fixed the uniform meaning of diplomacy as interactions among sovereign entities. Their critical interventions signaled the beginning of a decisive change in conceptualizing diplomacy beyond the traditional state-centric perspective.
As the academic field further expanded and compartmentalized, the different analytical perspectives on diplomacy were increasingly shaped by the mutual interaction of scholars and practitioners. This interaction was mainly driven by the loosening of the intellectual hegemony of state-sanctioned diplomats over the discourse about the concept of diplomacy. This loss of intellectual hegemony was in turn spurred by fundamental social and technological transformations in international relations which had grown more interconnected since the 1970s and even more rapidly after the end of the Cold War. The sources of this sea change were twofold: Firstly, many cross-border social exchanges were increasingly managed by a multitude of other state as well as non-state actors. Coupled with a host of transnational challenges such WMD proliferation, transnational violent extremism, climate change, and unregulated migration flows, this increasingly complex landscape required new forms of international cooperation well beyond the capacities of single nation states and thus traditional state-led diplomacy. Secondly, the fundamental transformation in international relations was in addition driven by rapid advances in communication technology. In fact, the emergence of modern mass media had already allowed a greater number of ordinary folks, including journalist as well as academics, to gaze behind the curtain of the Arcanum of state-led diplomacy since the late 19th century. After the end of the Cold War, however, the expanding numbers of actors and their access to information - again accelerated by the advent of the digital age - made the use official channels to secretly and thus confidentially negotiate hidden from public scrutiny much harder.

Taken together, these social and technological changes reduced the prerogative of state-led diplomacy as main mediator in international relations. The increasing acknowledgement of the importance of non-state actors undermined the exclusive application of the concept of diplomacy to politically authorized officials acting on behalf of nation states. As the understanding of diplomacy was broadened, conceptually it evolved into a kind of umbrella term for describing a wide-range of activities undertaken not only by state but any kind of non-state actors including businesses, civil society groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and supra-national institutions. Looking at the contemporary field of Diplomatic Studies, there now exist an elaborated academic discourse based on multiple theoretical perspectives on what diplomacy “really” is. This plurality of analytical perspectives emphasizes different processes and actors that can be conceptualized as being diplomatic. Costas M. Constantinou and Paul Sharp offered a useful typology of these different perspectives on diplomacy as: (1) specific instrument of consolidated political communities such as nation states or international organizations to create and maintain peace, (2) medium (context for solving inter-state conflicts) or (3) mixture of both. Another typology is provided by Christer Jönsson who differentiated diplomatic practices as (1) the content of foreign affairs [foreign policy analysis] (2) the conduct of foreign policy [theories of statecraft], (3) the management of international relations by means of negotiation [theories of bargaining], (4) the use of diplomatic personnel or services, (5) a particular manner of behavior or habitus, (6) a craft including a set of skills of diplomats.
Any of these different perspectives on diplomacy has profound empirical and normative implications. For example, scholarly accounts in the tradition of the English School that emphasize the role of diplomacy as an institution of international society undermine the outstanding role of traditional diplomats in international relations. As summarized by Christer Jönsson and Martin Hall, such a perspective would regard “diplomacy as an institution of international societies, not of individual states” which would be “crucial in forging compromise” among universal and particular propensities of different societies. Such a broad conceptualization of diplomacy is also adopted by other leading scholars of the field. Paul Sharp defined diplomacy as “[t]he way in which relations between groups [including state as well as non-state actors] that regard themselves as separate ought to be conducted if the principle of living in groups is to be retained as good, and if unnecessary and unwanted conflict is to have a chance of being avoided.” In his magisterial 2009 book, Sharp came close to equating diplomacy with tolerance and a peaceful coexistence among groups of people.

In sum, contemporary scholarship in the field of Diplomatic Studies finds diplomats as “the traditional ‘gatekeepers’ [to be] struggling to maintain relevance and [to be] reforming in a bid to hang on to the keys to the gate.” This challenge to traditional diplomatic practice has been traced by the increasing incorporating of many non-traditional diplomatic tasks as well as multi-faceted other duties. Nevertheless, such broader conceptualization of diplomacy bid farewell to the sole prerogative in conducting international relations in the face of the rise of a multitude of non-state actors transacting on different issues and regions on the basis of what has been described as polylateral diplomacy (Geoffrey Wiseman). Seen from these broader perspectives on the concept of diplomacy, the long-term prospects of an entire profession seem to be at stake.

Combining the Two Perspectives
As Alexander Stagnell has rightly warned, adopting such broad perspectives on the concept of diplomacy inevitably blurs the analytical focus. Doing so will ultimately diminish our understanding of key dynamics and processes of international relations. To prevent this outcome, both analytical approaches to study diplomacy should be combined by keeping the traditional concept of diplomacy as interaction among sovereign entities while at the same time broadening the conceptualizations of the means and ends involved. In fact, theoretically-informed accounts of the means and ends of state-led diplomacy are still rare. This seems especially troublesome with respect to the changing nature of statecraft. This change in the global patterns of how statecraft is conducted has been characterized by the declining utility of the use of military force. This is mainly due to three trends: Firstly, any use of military force among major powers possessing nuclear weapons would be overshadowed by a mutual assured destruction. Further, it is exacerbated by the emergence of post-heroic societies across Western countries where material affluence correlates positively with post-material values including a high intolerance, if not allergy, to casualties. Finally, a rapidly growing political and economic interdependence has fuelled what has been termed an “illicit globalization.” It associated unconventional threats such as the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, trans-national violent extremism as well as crime, and human trafficking cannot be effectively addressed by the use of military force.

As the political utility of the use of military force declined dramatically, the importance of economic statecraft has been greatly elevated in the 21st century in which markets will most likely emerged as the main battlefields of international relations. In fact, the use of economic sanctions is now the preferred policy option to effectively address a wide range of threats to national security. This is due to the fact that the use of economic sanctions is economically as well as politically less costly than military force but can be much more invasive than negotiations and propaganda. In particular, the use of financial sanctions turned out to be the go-to option to confront a vast array of conventional and unconventional challenges after the end of the Cold War.

Confronted with these changing patterns of how statecraft is being conducted, diplomats find themselves in a subordinated role in yielding its powerful economic instruments. At the same time, other actors within diplomat’s own governments, most notably officials from finance and economics ministries with no or only very little diplomatic experience and related skills, have encroached upon their formerly exclusive competencies. This ongoing marginalization might be a path-dependent result of the widespread disregard of economics that traditionally prevailed within the diplomatic corps, comprised mostly of aristocrats who viewed the emancipation of the merchant middle class with utter disdain. Regardless of its sources, the declining role of diplomats exhausts itself to serving as mere “orchestrators.” As such, they are tasked with organizing international coalitions of the willing in order to enhance its effectiveness for creating economic pain for those who are targeted. However, the much more important task of designing and implementing these economic measures is being done by a new cast of “financial warriors” who increasingly merge in their actions the responsibilities of diplomats as well as soldiers. So when the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution that contained multilateral sanctions against the financing of terrorism in December 2015, only economic and finance ministers participated in the session. After 9/11, the U.S. State Department has struggled to keep the initiative in designing and implementing anti-terrorism sanctions vis-à-vis the National Security Council (NSC) within the White House as well as the Office for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) within the U.S. Treasury Department. In February 2015, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Intelligence David S. Cohen, one of the main architects of the severe financial sanctions against Iran, assumed the post of Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Up until now, there remain only two institutionalized career paths for institutional positions in the conduct of statecraft, namely those of soldier and diplomat. In order to account for the rising importance of economic statecraft, the two must either be complemented by a third career path or the existing education and vocational training of diplomats must be supplemented by theoretical and practical knowledge about how to best use economic instruments. Currently, both alternatives more or less lack required knowledge given the dearth of literature on those economic instruments of diplomacy which can be employed coercively in negotiations. In fact, existing scholarship has overwhelmingly focused on diplomacy’s relationship to the use of military force as a “diplomacy of violence.” Coercive diplomacy as a concept is not geared at defeating an adversary or enemy but to change its behavior. This is supposed to be achieved by relying on “threat-based bargaining process. […] defined as the deliberate and purposive use of overt threats to influence another’s strategic choices.” For Alexander George, the concept of coercive diplomacy would be entirely defensive as thus different from Thomas Schelling’s strategy that must therefore be more accurately termed as compellance.

As the literature on coercive diplomacy privileged the threat or limited use of military force, it has little to say about the economic instruments of statecraft. This neglect is mirrored in the recent “practice turn” in IR theory and Diplomatic Studies has produced insights into what diplomats normally do or what forms of diplomatic knowledge exist. In addition, recent scholarship has produced anthropological accounts of the various diplomatic roles or “scripts” official state representatives fulfill. While these findings might enhance our understanding about what is going on behind the walls of foreign ministries, it tells us little about the how state bureaucracies decide about the processes and actors that are involved in yield economic instruments of statecraft coercively.
Theorizing the Economic Means of Diplomacy.

The theory and practice of diplomacy as related to economic statecraft has not been adequately dealt with in the discipline of IR, including its sub-field of Diplomatic Studies. Whereas some conceptualizations of economic diplomacy surely exist, such perspectives commonly focus only on its non-coercive aspects. Those are related to the promotion of business interests, the negotiation of trade agreements and institutions of economic governance as well as foreign aid. In this vein, scholars identified a trend toward a privatization of diplomacy through the spread of the multinational company and the intrusion of influential business groups into the policy-making process. However, the use of trade and financial sanctions as one of the most public and consequential part of “economic diplomacy” is often neglected. This is remarkable, given that Western as well as non-Western countries have frequently used their economic exchange relationships with other nations as means of coercive diplomacy.

Therefore, practitioners must look to other social science disciplines such as International Political Economy to find insightful treatments of the economic means of state-craft, although these accounts tend to be less interested in the conduct of statecraft. Also, there still exists great conceptual disorder in the study of the economic means of diplomacy commonly lacking a clear differentiation of instruments from the processes of their application as well as from descriptions and value judgments about the produced outcomes. While David A. Baldwin has masterfully avoided these common pitfalls in his seminal book Economic Statecraft, he regrettably shied away from connecting his superb analytical framework to the discussion about the concept of diplomacy, arguing that such a move “broadens the concept of ‘diplomacy’ so much that it makes it difficult to think in terms of diplomatic alternatives to economic techniques.” Baldwin rightly critiqued the overtly simplistic typology of the techniques of statecraft as either pertaining to war or diplomacy. But by rejecting the concept of diplomacy, however, his insightful thoughts failed to gain the attention of diplomats. This is unfortunate as his book can be read as a manual for diplomats who might want to regain lost ground in the conduct of economic statecraft.

About the Author
Sascha Lohmann is a fellow at The Americas Research Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP).
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Will the Liberal Order Survive? by Joseph S.Nye.Jr.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Will the Liberal Order Survive?

The History of an Idea

Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

JOSEPH S. NYE JR. is University Distinguished Service Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the author of Is the American Century Over?

During the nineteenth century [1], the United States played a minor role in the global balance of power. The country did not maintain a large standing army, and as late as the 1870s, the U.S. Navy was smaller than the navy of Chile. Americans had no problems using force to acquire land or resources (as Mexico and the Native American nations could attest), but for the most part, both the U.S. government and the American public opposed significant involvement in international affairs outside the Western Hemisphere [2].
A flirtation with imperialism at the end of the century drew U.S. attention outward, as did the growing U.S. role in the world economy, paving the way for President Woodrow Wilson [3] to take the United States into World War I. But the costs of the war and the failure of Wilson’s ambitious attempt to reform international politics afterward turned U.S. attention inward once again during the 1920s and 1930s, leading to the strange situation of an increasingly great power holding itself aloof from an increasingly turbulent world.
Like their counterparts elsewhere, U.S. policymakers sought to advance their country’s national interests, usually in straightforward, narrowly defined ways. They saw international politics and economics as an intense competition among states constantly jockeying for position and advantage. When the Great Depression hit, therefore, U.S. officials, like others, raced to protect their domestic economy as quickly and fully as possible, adopting beggar-thy-neighbor tariffs and deepening the crisis in the process. And a few years later, when aggressive dictatorships emerged and threatened peace, they and their counterparts in Europe and elsewhere did something similar in the security sphere, trying to ignore the growing dangers, pass the buck, or defer conflict through appeasement.
By this point, the United States had become the world’s strongest power, but it saw no value in devoting resources or attention to providing global public goods such as an open economy or international security. There was no U.S.-led liberal order in the 1930s, and the result was a “low dishonest decade,” in the words of W. H. Auden, of depression, tyranny, war, and genocide.
With their countries drawn into the conflagration despite their efforts to avoid it, Western officials spent the first half of the 1940s trying to defeat the Axis powers while working to construct a different and better world for afterward. Rather than continue to see economic and security issues as solely national concerns, they now sought to cooperate with one another, devising a rules-based system that in theory would allow like-minded nations to enjoy peace and prosperity in common.
The liberal international order that emerged after 1945 was a loose array of multilateral institutions in which the United States provided global public goods such as freer trade and freedom of the seas and weaker states were given institutional access to the exercise of U.S. power. The Bretton Woods institutions were set up while the war was still in progress. When other countries proved too poor or weak to fend for themselves afterward, the Truman administration decided to break with U.S. tradition and make open-ended alliances, provide substantial aid to other countries, and deploy U.S. military forces abroad. Washington gave the United Kingdom a major loan in 1946, took responsibility for supporting pro-Western governments in Greece and Turkey in 1947, invested heavily in European recovery with the Marshall Plan in 1948, created NATO in 1949, led a military coalition to protect South Korea from invasion in 1950, and signed a new security treaty with Japan in 1960.
These and other actions both bolstered the order and contained Soviet power. As the American diplomat George Kennan and others noted, there were five crucial areas of industrial productivity and strength in the postwar world: the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and Northeast Asia. To protect itself and prevent a third world war, Washington chose to isolate the Soviet Union and bind itself tightly to the other three, and U.S. troops remain in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere to this day. And within this framework, global economic, social, and ecological interdependence grew. By 1970, economic globalization had recovered to the level it had reached before being disrupted by World War I in 1914.
The mythology that has grown up around the order can be exaggerated. Washington may have displayed a general preference for democracy and openness, but it frequently supported dictators or made cynical self-interested moves along the way. In its first dec­ades, the postwar system was largely limited to a group of like-minded states centered on the Atlantic littoral; it did not include many large countries such as China, India, and the Soviet bloc states, and it did not always have benign effects on nonmembers. In global military terms, the United States was not hegemonic, because the Soviet Union balanced U.S. power. And even when its power was greatest, Washington could not prevent the “loss” of China, the partition of Germany and Berlin, a draw in Korea, Soviet suppression of insurrections within its own bloc, the creation and survival of a communist regime in Cuba, and failure in Vietnam.
Americans have had bitter debates and partisan differences over military interventions and other foreign policy issues over the years, and they have often grumbled about paying for the defense of other rich countries. Still, the demonstrable success of the order in helping secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades has led to a strong consensus that defending, deepening, and extending this system has been and continues to be the central task of U.S. foreign policy.

U.S. National Archives

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin and the Yalta Conference, 1945

Until now, that is—for recently, the desirability and sustainability of the order have been called into question as never before. Some critics, such as U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, have argued that the costs of maintaining the order outweigh its benefits and that Washington would be better off handling its interactions with other countries on a case-by-case transactional basis, making sure it “wins” rather than “loses” on each deal or commitment. Others claim that the foundations of the order are eroding because of a long-term global power transition involving the dramatic rise of Asian economies such as China and India. And still others see it as threatened by a broader diffusion of power from governments to nonstate actors thanks to ongoing changes in politics, society, and technology. The order, in short, is facing its greatest challenges in generations. Can it survive, and will it?

POWER CHALLENGED AND DIFFUSED 

Public goods are benefits that apply to everyone and are denied to no one. At the national level, governments provide many of these to their citizens: safety for people and property, economic infrastructure, a clean environment. In the absence of international government, global public goods—a clean climate or financial stability or freedom of the seas—have sometimes been provided by coalitions led by the largest power, which benefits the most from these goods and can afford to pay for them. When the strongest powers fail to appreciate this dynamic, global public goods are underproduced and everybody suffers.
The mythology that has grown up around the order can be exaggerated.
Some observers see the main threat to the current liberal order coming from the rapid rise of a China that does not always appear to appreciate that great power carries with it great responsibilities. They worry that China is about to pass the United States in power and that when it does, it will not uphold the current order because it views it as an external imposition reflecting others’ interests more than its own. This concern is misguided, however, for two reasons: because China is unlikely to surpass the United States in power anytime soon and because it understands and appreciates the order more than is commonly realized. 
Contrary to the current conventional wisdom, China is not about to replace the United States as the world’s dominant country. Power involves the ability to get what you want from others, and it can involve payment, coercion, or attraction. China’s economy has grown dramatically in recent decades, but it is still only 61 percent of the size of the U.S. economy, and its rate of growth is slowing. And even if China does surpass the United States in total economic size some decades from now, economic might is just part of the geopolitical equation. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, the United States spends four times as much on its military as does China, and although Chinese capabilities have been increasing in recent years, serious observers think that China will not be able to exclude the United States from the western Pacific, much less exercise global military hegemony. And as for soft power, the ability to attract others, a recent index published by Portland, a London consultancy, ranks the United States first and China 28th. And as China tries to catch up, the United States will not be standing still. It has favorable demographics, increasingly cheap energy, and the world’s leading universities and technology companies.
Moreover, China benefits from and appreciates the existing international order more than it sometimes acknowledges. It is one of only five countries with a veto in the UN Security Council and has gained from liberal economic institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (where it accepts dispute-settlement judgments that go against it) and the International Monetary Fund (where its voting rights have increased and it fills an important deputy director position). China is now the second-largest funder of UN peacekeeping forces and has participated in UN programs related to Ebola and climate change. In 2015, Beijing joined with Washington in developing new norms for dealing with climate change and conflicts in cyberspace. On balance, China has tried not to overthrow the current order but rather to increase its influence within it.
The order is facing its greatest challenges in generations.
The order will inevitably look somewhat different as the twenty-first century progresses. China, India, and other economies will continue to grow, and the U.S. share of the world economy will drop. But no other country, including China, is poised to displace the United States from its dominant position. Even so, the order may still be threatened by a general diffusion of power away from governments toward nonstate actors. The information revolution is putting a number of transnational issues, such as financial stability, climate change, terrorism, pandemics, and cybersecurity, on the global agenda at the same time as it is weakening the ability of all governments to respond. 
Complexity is growing, and world politics will soon not be the sole province of governments. Individuals and private organizations—from corporations and nongovernmental organizations to terrorists and social movements—are being empowered, and informal networks will undercut the monopoly on power of traditional bureaucracies. Governments will continue to possess power and resources, but the stage on which they play will become ever more crowded, and they will have less ability to direct the action.
Even if the United States remains the largest power, accordingly, it will not be able to achieve many of its international goals acting alone. For example, international financial stability is vital to the prosperity of Americans, but the United States needs the cooperation of others to ensure it. Global climate change and rising sea levels will affect the quality of life, but Americans cannot manage these problems by themselves. And in a world where borders are becoming more porous, letting in everything from drugs to infectious diseases to terrorism, nations must use soft power to develop networks and build institutions to address shared threats and challenges.
China is unlikely to surpass the United States in power anytime soon.
Washington can provide some important global public goods largely by itself. The U.S. Navy is crucial when it comes to policing the law of the seas and defending freedom of navigation, and the U.S. Federal Reserve undergirds international financial stability by serving as a lender of last resort. On the new transnational issues, however, success will require the cooperation of others—and thus empowering others can help the United States accomplish its own goals. In this sense, power becomes a positive-sum game: one needs to think of not just the United States’ power over others but also the power to solve problems that the United States can acquire by working with others. In such a world, the ability to connect with others becomes a major source of power, and here, too, the United States leads the pack. The United States comes first in the Lowy Institute’s ranking of nations by number of embassies, consulates, and missions. It has some 60 treaty allies, and The Economist estimates that nearly 100 of the 150 largest countries lean toward it, while only 21 lean against it.
Increasingly, however, the openness that enables the United States to build networks, maintain institutions, and sustain alliances is itself under siege. This is why the most important challenge to the provision of world order in the twenty-first century comes not from without but from within.
POPULISM VS. GLOBALIZATION
Even if the United States continues to possess more military, economic, and soft-power resources than any other country, it may choose not to use those resources to provide public goods for the international system at large. It did so during the interwar years, after all, and in the wake of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, a 2013 poll found that 52 percent of Americans believed that “the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.”
The 2016 presidential election was marked by populist reactions to globalization and trade agreements in both major parties, and the liberal international order is a project of just the sort of cosmopolitan elites whom populists see as the enemy. The roots of populist reactions are both economic and cultural. Areas that have lost jobs to foreign competition appear to have tended to support Trump, but so did older white males who have lost status with the rise in power of other demographic groups. The U.S. Census Bureau projects that in less than three decades, whites will no longer be a racial majority in the United States, precipitating the anxiety and fear that contributed to Trump’s appeal, and such trends suggest that populist passions will outlast Trump’s campaign.
It has become almost conventional wisdom to argue that the populist surge in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere marks the beginning of the end of the contemporary era of globalization and that turbulence may follow in its wake, as happened after the end of an earlier period of globalization a century ago. But circumstances are so different today that the analogy doesn’t hold up. There are so many buffers against turbulence now, at both the domestic and the international level, that a descent into economic and geopolitical chaos, as in the 1930s, is not in the cards. Discontent and frustration are likely to continue, and the election of Trump and the British vote to leave the EU demonstrate that populist reactions are common to many Western democracies. Policy elites who want to support globalization and an open economy will clearly need to pay more attention to economic inequality, help those disrupted by change, and stimulate broad-based economic growth.
It would be a mistake to read too much about long-term trends in U.S. public opinion from the heated rhetoric of the recent election. The prospects for elaborate trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership have suffered, but there is not likely to be a reversion to protectionism on the scale of the 1930s. A June 2016 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, for example, found that 65 percent of Americans thought that globalization was mostly good for the United States, despite concerns about a loss of jobs. And campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, in a 2015 Pew survey, 51 percent of respondents said that immigrants strengthened the country.
World politics will soon not be the sole province of governments.
Nor will the United States lose the ability to afford to sustain the order. Washington currently spends less than four percent of its GDP on defense and foreign affairs. That is less than half the share that it spent at the height of the Cold War. Alliances are not significant economic burdens, and in some cases, such as that of Japan, it is cheaper to station troops overseas than at home. The problem is not guns versus butter but guns versus butter versus taxes. Because of a desire to avoid raising taxes or further increasing the national debt, the U.S. national security budget is currently locked in a zero-sum tradeoff with domestic expenditures on education, infrastructure, and research and development. Politics, not absolute economic constraints, will determine how much is spent on what.
The disappointing track record of recent U.S. military interventions has also undermined domestic support for an engaged global role. In an age of transnational terrorism and refugee crises, keeping aloof from all intervention in the domestic affairs of other countries is neither possible nor desirable. But regions such as the Middle East are likely to experience turmoil for decades, and Washington will need to be more careful about the tasks it takes on. Invasion and occupation breed resentment and opposition, which in turn raise the costs of intervention while lowering the odds of success, further undermining public support for an engaged foreign policy.
Political fragmentation and demagoguery, finally, pose yet another challenge to the United States’ ability to provide responsible international leadership, and the 2016 election revealed just how fragmented the American electorate is. The U.S. Senate, for example, has failed to ratify the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, despite the fact that the country is relying on it to help protect freedom of navigation in the South China Sea against Chinese provocations. Congress failed for five years to fulfill an important U.S. commitment to support the reallocation of International Monetary Fund quotas from Europe to China, even though it would have cost almost nothing to do so. Congress has passed laws violating the international legal principle of sovereign immunity, a principle that protects not just foreign governments but also American diplomatic and military personnel abroad. And domestic resistance to putting a price on carbon emissions makes it hard for the United States to lead the fight against climate change.
The United States will remain the world’s leading military power for dec­ades to come, and military force will remain an important component of U.S. power. A rising China and a declining Russia frighten their neighbors, and U.S. security guarantees in Asia and Europe provide critical reassurance for the stability that underlies the prosperity of the liberal order. Markets depend on a framework of security, and maintaining alliances is an important source of influence for the United States.
At the same time, military force is a blunt instrument unsuited to dealing with many situations. Trying to control the domestic politics of nationalist foreign populations is a recipe for failure, and force has little to offer in addressing issues such as climate change, financial stability, or Internet governance. Maintaining networks, working with other countries and international institutions, and helping establish norms to deal with new transnational issues are crucial. It is a mistake to equate globalization with trade agreements. Even if economic globalization were to slow, technology is creating ecological, political, and social globalization that will all require cooperative responses.
Leadership is not the same as domination, and Washington’s role in helping stabilize the world and underwrite its continued progress may be even more important now than ever. Americans and others may not notice the security and prosperity that the liberal order provides until they are gone—but by then, it may be too late.

Graham Fuller'in " Başkan Trump" başlıklı yazısı

President Trump

November 9, 2016

Graham E. Fuller

The very words hit the ear as a shock; the mind is not ready for it.

And that is exactly the problem. We could not see it coming. Among other things this tawdry and interminable election represents a massive American intelligence failure. Not failure of IQ, but failure to grasp reality—now a deeply engrained American characteristic. We not only fail to perceive and grasp reality abroad, but now even at home. 

The Establishment was cocksure down to the last hours that such a thing could not, would not happen. It had drunk its own Kool-Aid.

A huge portion of this intelligence failure rests with the Democratic Party. Its complacent certitude of its right to win, expressed right down to the end of election day, was vivid. Such smugness also fed the anger of Trump supporters, many of whom were apparently shamed into hiding it, but who voted Donald Trump in the anonymity of the polling place. 

It did not fully grasp the racism that still runs so deeply in American society,  the poisonous and corrosive legacy of slavery that has not truly been internalized by most white people. The prejudice against Latino, and especially Mexican people, betrays ignorance of the historical reality that vast areas of rising Latino power in the US today are precisely those regions that once constituted an integral part of a large state of Mexico, its society, culture and politics—Texas, Arizona, California.

The US power Establishment—the two national parties, the bureaucracy, the “deep state,” the military, the security establishment, Wall Street and the corporations—all have believed in their own exceptionalism and right to dominate and determine the course of American society—and indeed even much of the rest of the world.

We had no reason to expect that the Republican Party could serve as the natural voice of those who feel disenfranchised and economically marginalized—dissed in the fullest sense. In this sense, Trump was a revolution from within the ranks of the Republican Party. Or perhaps more accurately, he seized the mechanism of the Republican Party to broadcast a message that the Republican establishment could not see or believe until too late.

And there was widespread and shocking misogyny towards Hillary Clinton and women. And there was shocking racism in the subliminal hostility to the legitimacy of  President Obama. That cannot be blamed on the Democratic establishment.

But for all the ugliness of the Trump campaign, the failure and the blame for this situation rests more deeply with the Democratic Party. This is the party that nominally is supposed to represent the liberal conscience of the country, of those who feel excluded or disadvantaged or just plain hurting within American society. Yet the party’s establishment not only remained insensitive to the deep source of discontent across American society, it actively sought to crush expressions of it. It was openly allied with corporate American, reveling in the contest of who could collect greater bribe money. 

Bernie Sanders, however, did represent a true, clear, open voice articulating a great deal—but not all—of what was profoundly wrong in American society and politics. The Democratic establishment mocked, diminished, or ignored that message as best it could, including President Obama himself. Yet ironically Sanders would likely have defeated Trump.

The performance of the New York Times is especially egregious in this regard. I pick on the Times because it is supposed to represent America’s greatest newspaper, the “newspaper of record,” in theory a voice of centrist liberalism in the country. Yet the Times, fully representing establishment and corporate interests, would not/ could not acknowledge the Sanders campaign for what it was. It treated it as an amusing human interest story at most, a sideshow while the big boys got on with serious politics. It constantly opposed Sanders to the end. And once Hillary Clinton was the anointed candidate, the Times turned its powerful establishment guns against Trump as the sole remaining threat to the Establishment. 

There are lots of things to dislike or even condemn about Trump and many of his followers. But the Times abandoned any pretense of deeper examination of the establishment that Trump was posing. It became all anti-Trump all day 24/7 with every single writer and voice assigned a niche role in denigrating Trump. News coverage was indistinguishable from editorial.

The paper became analytically a bore, predictable, a kind of Pravda-on-Hudson. Same-old same-old every day. They began to believe it. One had to turn to the foreign press to sometimes get a little broader and deeper analysis. 

More hearteningly, we got to see the significant power of the left-of-center voices,  primarily relegated to the internet, which made major contributions in understanding the phenomena at hand if anybody bothered to look. The Nation has to rank high in this regard, a publication largely dismissed by the Establishment as marginal, ideological and crank. So did other sites like Truth-Out, Common Sense, Real News, Real World News, Consortium News, Tom Englehardt, and Reader Supported News.  It was not that these sites were right about everything, and god knows each had their own clear perspective and preferences as well, but they were willing to examine the alternative realities around us in the world. The Establishment and the Main Stream Media never got beyond their own smug stance in support of what they believed was the dominant, anointed perspective. 

What do we now face with the election of Trump? The scariest thing is that we don’t really know. There is a welter of conflicting signals and we each have had our favorite reasons to hate him. Yet manifestly Trump has had his fingers on the pulse of a huge portion of the country that feels angry, oppressed and isolated. (Sanders grasped this as well.) Trump is also an opportunist. He will say anything to get elected. Most politicians will, but he did it better. (Sanders, to his credit, did not say anything to get elected—that is why the Establishment was so shocked, dismissive and incredulous about him.)  

How else to explain the rush of the entire spectrum of the Establishment, Democrat and Republican, including leading neoconservatives, to publicly repudiate Trump and declare Hillary as their candidate? 

At this point, Trump’s checkered and inconsistent platform record makes it hard to know who the real Trump is. President Obama is probably right that Trump would seem to be temperamentally unfit to be president. But Trump is not the first to be so. 

Let’s remember that for much of his earlier campaign Trump was often to the left of Hillary—he said the rich should pay more taxes, he attacked and discredited Bush Jr.’s military adventures, he said he could get along with Putin, he said that the US should adopt a neutral stance on the Palestinian issue, he opposed the corporatization of foreign policy in the form of “globalization,” and he opposed compulsive US intervention abroad.  He tacitly acknowledged that America was no longer “great”—fairly evident by so many measures, but denied shrilly by Hillary.  Trump has subsequently backed off from many of these positions. Were those his instinctive “default” positions? They served him well at the outset, along with lots of other bad ideas and attitudes.

The Republican and Democratic Establishments and the American “deep state” are indeed aware that they may be losing their sinecure on political, financial, military and security policy. How successful might they be in enfolding Trump within their embrace and “rightly guiding” him. And do we want that?

The co-optive power of the American “deep state” is great.The Republican and Democrat Establishment may be deeply competitive on domestic issues, especially social ones. But they  seem to close ranks on foreign policy. There has been no debate, no discussion about American “exceptionalism,” its right to intervene anywhere and everywhere in the world, and the need to maintain American supremacy in all things, especially military. The knee-jerk hatred of Russia as its former Cold War opponent, now no longer prostrate. America’s deep fear of China as a rising and successful rival. The reluctance to embrace multilateralism except on US terms. The routine preference for military solutions (“if we have it, why not use it?”) involving issues that above all require diplomatic and political solutions. US reluctance to acknowledge the importance of other rising nations, among them the BRICS. The tendency to believe that every issue in the world may represent a “vital American interest.” 

In the absence of information so far on whose President Trump’s actual appointees will be, it is hard to speculate about future foreign policy. Initial rumors of potential nominees are disquieting. But I tend to think that Trump, by himself, may not be any more likely to stumble into war than Hillary Clinton would have been. Worryingly, the foreign policy “deep state” may override him.

Domestically, non-white Americans, and all women, have much reason to fear his language—even more, to fear the views and voices of many of Trump’s supporters. But Trump may have enough ego to now try to be president of “all of America.” His FDR, New Deal instincts—occasionally uttered— could be significant. A bold, dramatic new domestic agenda could have great impact and be entirely affordable, but only if corporations pay their taxes and if half the US military budget—bigger than the next ten nations in the world combined—was dedicated to fixing America’s crying infrastructural and economic needs for the bottom 90% of the population. Shockingly, we have a military budget six times greater than the monies allocated to American education —and this in a techno-competitive world.

In the end, this election represents the total collapse of the Republican Party (which is not a true conservative party but a corporate and socially reactionary party). And the election has now gutted the Democratic Establishment as well. It had it coming. 

But the forces that have kept this country on the wrong path for so long are so intractable, so institutionalized, so resistant to change that it may just require just such a massive shake-up of the system to allow new and creative forces to arise. 

Strikingly, America is the only democracy in the world that has no Left. The US political spectrum begins just right of center with Obama (except on social issues) and marches on across to a Crazy Right. Indeed, it is slanderous to be called a liberal today, much less a “leftist.” (Being a “rightist” is fine.) Above all, we should hope that a true genuine Left will now arise in the country, of which Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are important components.  Youth will be its vital second base. Its ranks will grow rapidly if Trump fails to deliver.

The need for big time change has never been more apparent. Will this cataclysm within the Establishment now give birth to new creative forces, bigger than Trump himself?

Graham E. Fuller is a former senior CIA official, author of numerous books on geopolitics and the Muslim World; his latest book is “Breaking Faith: A novel of espionage and an American’s crisis of conscience in Pakistan.”

Populism on the march by Fareed Zakaria

Comment November/December 2016 Issue
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Domestic Politics

Populism on the March

Why the West Is in Trouble

By Fareed Zakaria

About the Author:

FAREED ZAKARIA is the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS, on CNN. Some of the ideas in this essay draw on his columns in The Washington Post. Follow him on Twitter @FareedZakaria

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Donald Trump’s admirers and critics would probably agree on one thing: he is different. One of his chief Republican supporters, Newt Gingrich, describes him as a “unique, extraordinary experience.” And of course, in some ways—his celebrity, his flexibility with the facts—Trump is unusual. But in an important sense, he is not: Trump is part of a broad populist upsurge running through the Western world. It can be seen in countries of widely varying circumstances, from prosperous Sweden to crisis-ridden Greece. In most, populism remains an opposition movement, although one that is growing in strength; in others, such as Hungary, it is now the reigning ideology. But almost everywhere, populism has captured the public’s attention.
What is populism? It means different things to different groups, but all versions share a suspicion of and hostility toward elites, mainstream politics, and established institutions. Populism sees itself as speaking for the forgotten “ordinary” person and often imagines itself as the voice of genuine patriotism. “The only antidote to decades of ruinous rule by a small handful of elites is a bold infusion of popular will. On every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the governing elite are wrong,” Trump wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April 2016. Norbert Hofer, who ran an “Austria first” presidential campaign in 2016, explained to his opponent—conveniently, a former professor—“You have the haute volée [high society] behind you; I have the people with me.”
Historically, populism has come in left- and right-wing variants, and both are flourishing today, from Bernie Sanders to Trump, and from Syriza, the leftist party currently in power in Greece, to the National Front, in France. But today’s left-wing populism is neither distinctive nor particularly puzzling. Western countries have long had a far left that critiques mainstream left-wing parties as too market-oriented and accommodating of big business. In the wake of the Cold War, center-left parties moved much closer toward the center—think of Bill Clinton in the United States and Tony Blair in the United Kingdom—thus opening up a gap that could be filled by populists. That gap remained empty, how­ever, until the financial crisis of 2007–8. The subsequent downturn caused households in the United States to lose trillions in wealth and led unemployment in countries such as Greece and Spain to rise to 20 percent and above, where it has remained ever since. It is hardly surprising that following the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the populist left experienced a surge of energy.
The new left’s agenda is not so different from the old left’s. If anything, in many European countries, left-wing populist parties are now closer to the center than they were 30 years ago. Syriza, for example, is not nearly as socialist as was the main Greek socialist party, PASOK, in the 1970s and 1980s. In power, it has implemented market reforms and austerity, an agenda with only slight variations from that of the governing party that preceded it. Were Podemos, Spain’s version of Syriza, to come to power—and it gained only about 20 percent of the vote in the country’s most recent election—it would probably find itself in a similar position.
Right-wing populist parties, on the other hand, are experiencing a new and striking rise in country after country across Europe. France’s National Front is positioned to make the runoff in next year’s presidential election. Austria’s Freedom Party almost won the presidency this year and still might, since the final round of the election was annulled and rescheduled for December. Not every nation has succumbed to the temptation. Spain, with its recent history of right-wing dictatorship, has shown little appetite for these kinds of parties. But Germany, a country that has grappled with its history of extremism more than any other, now has a right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany, growing in strength. And of course, there is Trump. While many Americans believe that Trump is a singular phenomenon, representative of no larger, lasting agenda, accumulating evidence suggests otherwise. The political scientist Justin Gest adapted the basic platform of the far-right British National Party and asked white Americans whether they would support a party dedicated to “stopping mass immigration, providing American jobs to American workers, preserving America’s Christian heritage and stopping the threat of Islam.” Sixty-five percent of those polled said they would. Trumpism, Gest concluded, would outlast Trump.

Fabrizio Bensch / REUTERS An anti-immigration protest in Dresden, Germany, October 2015.

WHY THE WEST, AND WHY NOW?

In searching for the sources of the new populism, one should follow Sherlock Holmes’ advice and pay attention to the dog that didn’t bark. Populism is largely absent in Asia, even in the advanced economies of Japan and South Korea. It is actually in retreat in Latin America, where left-wing populists in Argentina, Bolivia, and Venezuela ran their countries into the ground over the last decade. In Europe, however, not only has there been a steady and strong rise in populism almost everywhere, but it has deeper roots than one might imagine. In an important research paper for Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris calculate that since the 1960s, populist parties of the right have doubled their share of the vote in European countries and populists of the left have seen more than a fivefold increase. By the second decade of this century, the average share of seats for right-wing populist parties had risen to 13.7 percent, and it had risen to 11.5 percent for left-wing ones.
The most striking findings of the paper are about the decline of economics as the pivot of politics. The way politics are thought about today is still shaped by the basic twentieth-century left-right divide. Left-wing parties are associated with increased government spending, a larger welfare state, and regulations on business. Right-wing parties have wanted limited government, fewer safety nets, and more laissez-faire policies. Voting patterns traditionally reinforced this ideological divide, with the working class opting for the left and middle and upper classes for the right. Income was usually the best predictor of a person’s political choices.

A convergence in economic policy has contributed to a situation in which the crucial difference between the left and the right is cultural.

Inglehart and Norris point out that this old voting pattern has been waning for decades. “By the 1980s,” they write, “class voting had fallen to the lowest levels ever recorded in Britain, France, Sweden and West Germany. . . . In the U.S., it had fallen so low [by the 1990s] that there was virtually no room for further decline.” Today, an American’s economic status is a bad predictor of his or her voting preferences. His or her views on social issues—say, same-sex marriage—are a much more accurate guide to whether he or she will support Republicans or Democrats. Inglehart and Norris also analyzed party platforms in recent decades and found that since the 1980s, economic issues have become less important. Noneconomic issues—such as those related to gender, race, the environment—have greatly increased in importance.
What can explain this shift, and why is it happening almost entirely in the Western world? Europe and North America include countries with widely varying economic, social, and political conditions. But they face a common challenge—economic stasis. Despite the variety of economic policies they have adopted, all Western countries have seen a drop-off in growth since the 1970s. There have been brief booms, but the secular shift is real, even including the United States. What could account for this decline? In his recent book, The Rise and Fall of Nations, Ruchir Sharma notes that a broad trend like this stagnation must have an equally broad cause. He identifies one factor above all others: demographics. Western countries, from the United States to Poland, Sweden to Greece, have all seen a decline in their fertility rates. The extent varies, but everywhere, families are smaller, fewer workers are entering the labor force, and the ranks of retirees swell by the year. This has a fundamental and negative impact on economic growth.
That slower growth is coupled with challenges that relate to the new global economy. Globalization is now pervasive and entrenched, and the markets of the West are (broadly speaking) the most open in the world. Goods can easily be manufactured in lower-wage economies and shipped to advanced industrial ones. While the effect of increased global trade is positive for economies as a whole, specific sectors get battered, and large swaths of unskilled and semiskilled workers find themselves unemployed or underemployed.
Another trend working its way through the Western world is the information revolution. This is not the place to debate whether new technologies are raising productivity. Suffice it to say, they reinforce the effects of globalization and, in many cases, do more than trade to render certain kinds of jobs obsolete. Take, for example, the new and wondrous technologies pursued by companies such as Google and Uber that are making driverless cars possible. Whatever the other effects of this trend, it cannot be positive for the more than three million Americans who are professional truck drivers. (The most widely held job for an American male today is driving a car, bus, or truck, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson has noted.)
The final challenge is fiscal. Almost every Western country faces a large fiscal burden. The net debt-to-GDP ratio in the European Union in 2015 was 67 percent. In the United States, it was 81 percent. These numbers are not crippling, but they do place constraints on the ability of governments to act. Debts have to be financed, and as expenditures on the elderly rise through pensions and health care, the debt burden will soar. If one secure path to stronger growth is investment—spending on infrastructure, education, science, and technology—this path is made more difficult by the ever-growing fiscal burdens of an aging population.
These constraints—demographics, globalization, technology, and budgets—mean that policymakers have a limited set of options from which to choose. The sensible solutions to the problems of advanced economies these days are inevitably a series of targeted efforts that will collectively improve things: more investments, better worker retraining, reforms of health care. But this incrementalism produces a deep sense of frustration among many voters who want more dramatic solutions and a bold, decisive leader willing to decree them. In the United States and elsewhere, there is rising support for just such a leader, who would dispense with the checks and balances of liberal democracy.

Alexandros Stamatiou / PHASMA / REUTERS

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras in Athens, January 2015.

FROM ECONOMICS TO CULTURE

In part because of the broader forces at work in the global economy, there has been a convergence in economic policy around the world in recent decades. In the 1960s, the difference between the left and the right was vast, with the left seeking to nationalize entire industries and the right seeking to get the government out of the economy. When François Mitterrand came to power in France in the early 1980s, for example, he enacted policies that were identifiably socialist, whereas Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan sought to cut taxes, privatize industries and government services, and radically deregulate the private sector.
The end of the Cold War discredited socialism in all forms, and left-wing parties everywhere moved to the center, most successfully under Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom. And although politicians on the right continue to make the laissez-faire case today, it is largely theoretical. In power, especially after the global financial crisis, conservatives have accommodated themselves to the mixed economy, as liberals have to the market. The difference between Blair’s policies and David Cameron’s was real, but in historical perspective, it was rather marginal. Trump’s plans for the economy, meanwhile, include massive infrastructure spending, high tariffs, and a new entitlement for working mothers. He has employed the usual rhetoric about slashing regulations and taxes, but what he has actually promised—let alone what he could actually deliver—has been less different from Hillary Clinton’s agenda than one might assume. In fact, he has boasted that his infrastructure program would be twice as large as hers.
This convergence in economic policy has contributed to a situation in which the crucial difference between the left and the right today is cultural. Despite what one sometimes hears, most analyses of voters for Brexit, Trump, or populist candidates across Europe find that economic factors (such as rising inequality or the effects of trade) are not the most powerful drivers of their support. Cultural values are. The shift began, as Inglehart and Norris note, in the 1970s, when young people embraced a postmaterialist politics centered on self-expression and issues related to gender, race, and the environment. They challenged authority and established institutions and norms, and they were largely successful in introducing new ideas and recasting politics and society. But they also produced a counterreaction. The older generation, particularly men, was traumatized by what it saw as an assault on the civilization and values it cherished and had grown up with. These people began to vote for parties and candidates that they believed would, above all, hold at bay these forces of cultural and social change.
In Europe, that led to the rise of new parties. In the United States, it meant that Republicans began to vote more on the basis of these cultural issues than on economic ones. The Republican Party had lived uneasily as a coalition of disparate groups for decades, finding a fusion between cultural and economic conservatives and foreign policy hawks. But then, the Democrats under Clinton moved to the center, bringing many professionals and white-collar workers into the party’s fold. Working-class whites, on the other hand, found themselves increasingly alienated by the cosmopolitan Democrats and more comfortable with a Republican Party that promised to reflect their values on “the three Gs”—guns, God, and gays. In President Barack Obama’s first term, a new movement, the Tea Party, bubbled up on the right, seemingly as a reaction to the government’s rescue efforts in response to the financial crisis. A comprehensive study by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, however, based on hundreds of interviews with Tea Party followers, concluded that their core motivations were not economic but cultural. As the virulent hostility to Obama has shown, race also plays a role in this cultural reaction.
For a few more years, the conservative establishment in Washington remained focused on economics, not least because its most important financial supporters tended toward libertarianism. But behind the scenes, the gap between it and the party’s base was growing, and Trump’s success has brought that division into the open. Trump’s political genius was to realize that many Republican voters were unmoved by the standard party gospel of free trade, low taxes, deregulation, and entitlement reform but would respond well to a different appeal based on cultural fears and nationalist sentiment.

NATION VS. MIGRATION

Unsurprisingly, the initial and most important issue Trump exploited was immigration. On many other social issues, such as gay rights, even right-wing populists are divided and recognize that the tide is against them. Few conservative politicians today argue for the recriminalization of homosexuality, for instance. But immigration is an explosive issue on which populists are united among themselves and opposed to their elite antagonists.
There is a reality behind the rhetoric, for we are indeed living in an age of mass migration. The world has been transformed by the globalization of goods, services, and information, all of which have produced their share of pain and rejection. But we are now witnessing the globalization of people, and public reaction to that is stronger, more visceral, and more emotional. Western populations have come to understand and accept the influx of foreign goods, ideas, art, and cuisine, but they are far less willing to understand and accept the influx of foreigners themselves—and today there are many of those to notice.

Immigration is the final frontier of globalization.

For the vast majority of human history, people lived, traveled, worked, and died within a few miles of their birthplace. In recent decades, however, Western societies have seen large influxes of people from different lands and alien cultures. In 2015, there were around 250 million international migrants and 65 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Europe has received the largest share, 76 million immigrants, and it is the continent with the greatest anxiety. That anxiety is proving a better guide to voters’ choices than issues such as inequality or slow growth. As a counterexample, consider Japan. The country has had 25 years of sluggish growth and is aging even faster than others, but it doesn’t have many immigrants—and in part as a result, it has not caught the populist fever.
Levels of public anxiety are not directly related to the total number of immigrants in a country or even to the concentration of immigrants in different areas, and polls show some surprising findings. The French, for example, are relatively less concerned about the link between refugees and terrorism than other Europeans are, and negative attitudes toward Muslims have fallen substantially in Germany over the past decade. Still, there does seem to be a correlation between public fears and the pace of immigration. This suggests that the crucial element in the mix is politics: countries where mainstream politicians have failed to heed or address citizens’ concerns have seen rising populism driven by political entrepreneurs fanning fear and latent prejudice. Those countries that have managed immigration and integration better, in contrast, with leadership that is engaged, confident, and practical, have not seen a rise in populist anger. Canada is the role model in this regard, with large numbers of immigrants and a fair number of refugees and yet little backlash.
To be sure, populists have often distorted or even invented facts in order to make their case. In the United States, for example, net immigration from Mexico has been negative for several years. Instead of the illegal immigrant problem growing, in other words, it is actually shrinking. Brexit advocates, similarly, used many misleading or outright false statistics to scare the public. Yet it would be wrong to dismiss the problem as one simply concocted by demagogues (as opposed to merely exploited by them). The number of immigrants entering many European countries is historically high. In the United States, the proportion of Americans who were foreign-born increased from less than five percent in 1970 to almost 14 percent today. And the problem of illegal immigration to the United States remains real, even though it has slowed recently. In many countries, the systems designed to manage immigration and provide services for integrating immigrants have broken down. And yet all too often, governments have refused to fix them, whether because powerful economic interests benefit from cheap labor or because officials fear appearing uncaring or xenophobic.

Immigration is the final frontier of globalization. It is the most intrusive and disruptive because as a result of it, people are dealing not with objects or abstractions; instead, they come face-to-face with other human beings, ones who look, sound, and feel different. And this can give rise to fear, racism, and xenophobia. But not all the reaction is noxious. It must be recognized that the pace of change can move too fast for society to digest. The ideas of disruption and creative destruction have been celebrated so much that it is easy to forget that they look very different to the people being disrupted.
Western societies will have to focus directly on the dangers of too rapid cultural change. That might involve some limits on the rate of immigration and on the kinds of immigrants who are permitted to enter. It should involve much greater efforts and resources devoted to integration and assimilation, as well as better safety nets. Most Western countries need much stronger retraining programs for displaced workers, ones more on the scale of the GI Bill: easily available to all, with government, the private sector, and educational institutions all participating. More effort also needs to be devoted to highlighting the realities of immigration, so that the public is dealing with facts and not phobias. But in the end, there is no substitute for enlightened leadership, the kind that, instead of pandering to people’s worst instincts, appeals to their better angels.
Eventually, we will cross this frontier as well. The most significant divide on the issue of immigration is generational. Young people are the least anxious or fear­ful of foreigners of any group in society. They understand that they are enriched—economically, socially, culturally—by living in diverse, dynamic countries. They take for granted that they should live in an open and connected world, and that is the future they seek. The challenge for the West is to make sure the road to that future is not so rocky that it causes catastrophe along the way