We're Finally On Our Own
I wrote this short essay for a newspaper in December of 2023, as an end of year discussion piece. It got cut for space reasons, but I wanted to publish it today because the horror coming out of Rafah made me think again of making a desperate plea to the liberal centre to rediscover their conscience and respect for international law.
In September 1939, as German tanks rolled into Poland, W.H. Auden wrote a poem, much quoted since. His description of the thirties as a “low, dishonest decade” has been ringing in my ears as this grim year ends.
It’s been twenty years since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a violation of international law so gross that it seemed to warp and distort everything that came after. That war showed the impotence of international institutions, most especially the United Nations. The decades since have not been kind to them either, unable to stop flagrant violations of international law on every continent. The promises of globalisation have also proven utterly hollow. Instead of a gradual withering away of national hatreds and the construction of a global village, the 21st century has seen a dramatic escalation of right wing ethnic nationalism, and consequent territorial irridentism. One by one frozen conflicts have thawed, and in the absence of meaningful consequences, military states have reasserted their dominance over disputed territories, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Kashmir, to the Donbass, to the West Bank. Fragile democracies in the Sahel, discredited by their closeness to former imperial masters, have collapsed in the face of a wave of military coups. In countries across the world discrimination against internal minorities has become open pogrom. Already untenable situations have degraded further.
And in the supposedly civilised west, virtually every country has seen a massive strengthening of right wing and far-right nationalist parties, capitalizing on years of austerity and national gloom to win seats, join coalitions and even lead governments. In response, the liberal centre and even elements of the centre-left have stepped up anti-immigration efforts. Men and women in sensible suits make deals with Libyan militias to cage the migrants they don’t want turning up on their shores. The Mediterranean is now a graveyard, not only of tens of thousands of human beings but of the pretensions to human rights that the European Union trumpeted since its inception. This year, in particular, has felt as if the bill for every violation of international law, every compromised settlement of the 1990s has come due. Gone are gestures from powerful states at reconciliation, and in their place a simple acknowledgment that might makes right. The bleeding edge of all of this, of course, is Gaza. What is still being done there by the IDF, cheered on by a radicalized Israeli public and carefully protected by liberals in the west, shames us all, and makes a mockery of any pretensions to international law or order.
The 2010s began with a little more hope. As Vincent Bevins covers in his excellent new book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution”, the last fifteen years saw an unprecedented wave of mass action, both in scale and spread, following the economic collapse of the late ‘00s. Governments gave in to demands, others teetered and fell, still others cracked down hard and yet at the decade’s close, little positive seemed to have come of it. Those irresistible human energies ebbed and flowed and finally disappeared. Sometimes the dictatorship returned with a new leader, sometimes the country collapsed into civil war, sometimes reactionary forces seized the moment to claim power for themselves. And this new right, once they took power, were gleeful revolutionaries, laying waste not only to their political enemies on the left but the basic institutions of the state. A striking characteristic of right wing regimes across the world in the last ten years has been their determination to undo tentative attempts at reconciliation, from Trump’s dismantling of the Iran nuclear deal to Colombian president Iván Duque’s attempts to destroy the peace process in that country. Liberals themselves seem to have succumbed to gloomy fatalism, offering little resistance to these vandals, and sometimes joining them. The radical left, as such, is put in the strange position of playing the role that liberals once saw themselves in: as institutionalists, compromisers, peacemakers. A left that dreamed of liberation now desperately calls for ceasefire. All this on a planet that, it needs not be said, gets warmer and more volatile by the day.
Where then to find a source of hope? The answer lies not in the statistical trickery of Stephen Pinker et al, who suggest that despite all evidence in front of your face, now is the most peaceful and prosperous time of all. Rather, the good liberal should look inside themselves for courage. The courage to abandon their shop-worn Cold War enmities about the radical left and recognise them as the only real allies they still have. To take a small leap of faith, rediscover the spirit of the Popular Front, and stand proudly against this nihilistic machine that the 21st century has built.
In Chile, the original laboratory of neoliberalism, popular mobilisation was so profound that it catapulted a former student radical into the presidency. Gabriel Boric took office in 2022 to great rejoicing on the left and a premature declaration of victory, as if a stake had finally been put through the heart of Pinochet. Boric then ran headlong into the entrenched institutions of the reactionary right, who still controlled the legislature and other poles of power in the country. The progressive new constitution he championed was rejected by the electorate. Another one drafted by the right was also defeated. Many voters, it seems, have yet to make up their minds. The Chilean centre, like liberals around the world, face a choice. Perhaps the same choice that liberals have faced for over a hundred years. Whether to side with a left who go a little far for their tastes, or a right who will go further than your worst nightmares can imagine. A hundred years ago it was socialism or barbarism. Now it is barbarism or something, anything else.