The crisis of the West and the return of the citizen

Skribent: Sebastian Milbank

Bildet: Edvard Munch

The liberal international order is being subjected to ferocious pressure and the hardest sort of questioning. A long and dispiriting trail of post-Cold War failures and follies paves the way to the current crisis. Globalised industries, mass migration and humanitarian wars have produced not a more united humanity, but a more divided West, one in which populist parties are insurgent everywhere. In a shattering month for liberal assumptions, America has voted against a UN motion condemning Russia, forcing through, instead, a generic call for peace over the protests of Britain and France. This came on the heels of Vice President Vance telling the Munich Security Conference that the greatest threat to democracy in Europe came from its increasingly censorious governing elites. It seems clear that America will push for a great power bargain over the future of Ukraine, a deal in which Europe is likely to get little say. 

Europe is a continent that prides itself on having learned the lessons of history, but it is increasingly evident that it has learnt wrong and partial lessons. The seedbed of totalitarianism was a continent wracked by the chaos of a global financial system, the collapse of international law, and rising violence and disorder. No wonder that the post-war West made such titanic efforts to narrow economic inequality, regulate finance, and protect national industries. Long running tensions, like those between socialist trade unions and conservative Catholics, were bridged, creating Europe’s distinct balance of Christian and Social Democratic ideals. 

As time has passed another narrative has come to predominate: Karl Popper’s manichean paradigm of the open and closed societies. Popper asserted that societies were either “closed” or “open”. The former he defines as irrational, collectivist, tribalist, authoritarian and unfree. The latter is governed by humanitarian universalism, individual liberty, freedom of expression and speech, and rationalism. Ironically, given Popper’s wholesale attack on what he calls “historicism” — the idea there is a natural rhythm or destiny in history — his binary political framework effectively split history into progress and regression. 

Like Bentham before him, Popper is that rare and dangerously powerful phenomenon: the bad philosopher with gigantic influence. Any undergraduate can poke his absurd readings of Plato and Hegel full of holes, but his ideas have become the spirit of our age. His two philosophical instincts perfectly matched the rising desires and intuitions of a new generation. On the one hand, an indeterminate, almost less than rational worship of openness, an iconoclastic mania for ripping down traditions, boundaries, and limits. On the other, a chilly faith in technocratic manipulation by a new social science, created in imitation of the material sciences. An unbounded world governed by social engineers. 

In succession, Europe has lost essential aspects of its post-war stability. First, its spiritual strength and unity, victim to a rising scepticism in the 60s and 70s. Secondly its economic equality and class solidarity, shattered in the 80s and 90s. Finally, economic prosperity itself has fled since 2008, and has been dealt successive blows following the pandemic and the Ukraine war. 

The shattering of Christian Democracy has gone hand in hand with the collapse of Social Democracy, as the sense of social and national unity that underpinned the European system falls away. Disturbing surveys in the United Kingdom reveal both an unprecedented lack of faith in democracy amongst the young, and that these young people have lower levels of social trust than older generations. Both class and ethnic tension are on the rise in Europe, yet as younger generations become more individualistic, lacking membership of trade union, social club, political party or church, large scale group reconciliation is only likely to become harder, and polarisation more extreme. 

Other, less obvious divides are also yawning open. Generational tensions, exacerbated by burgeoning pension obligations, youth unemployment, and the generational housing gap are an increasing feature of politics across Europe, with young people increasingly voting for parties of the extreme left and right. But young people are not a monolithic group bound by shared interests. They are divided by education and gender (and often both). Non college educated young men are the most likely to vote for parties of the populist right — in many cases of the very far right. Women who go to university (and many more girls now go to university than boys) are diverging far to the left of young men in general. No less stark are regional divides, with city dwellers (ironically) driving green policies that push for decarbonisation and pedestrianisation, whilst rural and suburban voters see congestion charges, carbon taxes and traffic calming measures as an attack on their way of life. 

The population of the West has become a strange beast — untrusting but passive, restive yet resigned, identitarian as well as individualist. The same British people who say they trust none of the major parties on the issues, voted Brexit, and have given reform a lead in the polls, were also those who meekly obeyed pandemic restrictions, and reported on neighbours who breached them. For all that the closest comparison to our age is the crisis of the 1930s, the differences loom as large as the parallels. Despite widespread mistrust, divisions and anger, political violence has not meaningfully returned to the European stage. There are no equivalents to Weimar street violence and paramilitarism in any European state, and no European country West of Belarus where civil war, revolution or coup d'etat appear likely. Outside of the Russian threat, there is little sign of interstate conflict either. 

The great difference between then and now is the psychology of the modern European citizen. Then, much of Europe still had one foot in an unimaginable poverty. Then, most of Europe was schooled in collective loyalties, whether religious faith, national feeling, class solidarity, or all three. There was far more faith, perhaps dangerously naive faith, in shared struggle and endeavour, and far more fear of a collapse into barbarism and abject misery. Now, even the poorest European cannot imagine a life without heating, electricity and running water; without readily available healthcare; without once unthinkable technologies and conveniences in every household and coat pocket. Now, we are schooled in material comfort and individual self-expression. Now, social organisation is a thing done to us, not by us. We have no faith in the visible hand of collective power, but unconsciously rely on the invisible hand of public and private technocratic management for every aspect of life. 

A certain bored, cynical superiority and complacency predominate. Irony and detachment are the watchwords of social status. Consumerism is pursued without restraint, appetite is no longer shaming. The earnestness and discipline alike of 100 years ago are equally alien to us. 

This new psychology has had a strange and paradoxical effect. On the one hand, it has produced a more defiant, less trusting population, with brittle attachments and loyalties. Politics has become faster-moving, more chaotic, more rhetorically extreme. Yet the march of populism across the West has produced more light than heat. Whilst fascist and communist parties in power produced revolutionary change, the victory of a populist party has yet to spell the end of democracy, or even genuinely radical policy divergence, in any Western country. 

This is unlikely to persist. Yet the alternatives are disturbing. Strong traditional ties of identity were a major factor in resistance to totalitarian ideologies in the 20th century — with whole populations now possessing weak or no ties, the body politic may have lost crucial inoculants. Very strong ideologies and identities, whether fundamentalist religious movements like Islamism, neopagan fascism, transhumanism, anarchism or occultism, are already showing surprising resurgences, especially online. The possibility of such forces gathering enough momentum to take power is worrying in itself. But there are other unhappy possibilities.

The three wealthiest men in the world are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg and Jeff Bezos. All three built their fortunes through the explosion of virtual capitalism, and the control and manipulation of individual data and the means of digital communication and trade. All three have made massive interventions into public opinion and politics, Musk most prominently through his role in DOGE and the acquisition of Twitter, but Zuckerburg more lastingly through his ability to censor news content for billions, and Bezos through his monopoly power in book publishing, and his acquisition of the Washington Post. 

If psychology sets us apart from the 30s, a great part of that difference is traceable to technological change. One popular theory has blamed fascism on the megaphone, and it is undoubtedly true that totalitarian movements have pioneered the use of mass communications to exert political power and propaganda. The radio, the loudspeaker and the cinema screen were powerful one-way tools for disseminating ideas approved by the state. Successful putschists have known to seize control of television and radio stations ever since. 

The digital disruption of traditional media seemingly changed all that. For those who grow up with a screen in their hand, truth is always multiple and contested, your own voice always exertable. Yet communication is a double edged sword. The Romanian Securitate, the Communist secret police, kept ruthless control of the country by monitoring all of society. To do it, they had to recruit, it is estimated, as many as one in 43 of the entire population as informants, plant thousands of microphones, and maintain buildings full of files filled with personal information. Today that same trick is pulled off by your supermarket loyalty card, video streaming service, dating app and voice activated TV. 

The liberal “marketplace of ideas” has become highly literal, as a way has been found to monetise human thought, belief and desire itself. Whether or not Dawkins’ mimetic theory of ideas was a good model of historic intellectual development, it was a prescient account of how social media operates. Like the marketplace as a whole, the intellectual marketplace is rigged in favour of those who set the rules and control the assets, only to a far greater and more unchallenged extent. 

Social media platforms operate like casinos. Users are continually stimulated and given micro rewards (likes, follows, notifications) to keep them inputting data, or making purchases. Addictive media is privileged, and powerful feedback loops of often highly disturbing, divisive or extreme content help create unhealthy desires and habits in users they would otherwise never have developed. Teenagers self-diagnose with mental illnesses or develop eating disorders through consuming TikTok, ethnic hatred is inflamed by videos of interracial violence on Twitter, girls are lured into making pornography through Instagram and OnlyFans. As well as this poisonous attention economy, there is a pyramid scheme-like influencer economy in which a minority of often already famous individuals at the top inspire others to spend their lives trying to monetise their ephemeral internet fame. A few people win big, whilst most people end up being exploited without ever knowing it. 

The phenomenon, once mocked and marveled at, of the “reality TV star” and the strange social gymnastics of those performing as versions of themselves for the camera has become universalised through the power of the internet. Radical ideology prospers less as a life and soul consuming worldview, as in the days of earnest collectivism, than it does as one recherché identity amongst many, to be tried on and discarded. A young man might be a cackling white nationalist in his edgy male only group chat, a traditional Catholic at church on a Sunday, a good liberal in the office, a progressive activist when trying to pick up girls at university, and an apolitical sports fan at home with his dad. The idea that we might have multiple personae in different settings is scarcely new, but a paradoxical effect of the internet is the sheer scope for siloing radically incompatible worldviews and lifestyles. Online you can give full vent to your sexual fetishes, your weird hobbies, your niche religious and political opinions, and you can find pre-gathered communities that will encourage and reinforce these identities. 

Yet even as this weird fragmentation is enabled, especially in the fringe forums, reddit pages, and Telegram channels, the centrally controlled, highly commercial mainstream of the digital marketplace enforces a certain cultural conformity on the mass of people. Despite polarisation, the same brands of food, clothing, and entertainment, the same celebrity gossip, the same sports teams and lifestyle hacks are infinitely replicated across the majority of the population. Even the shifting balance of power between centrists and populists, left and right, sometimes feels less like a tectonic historical shift than the ever-swaying tides of fashion. 

We stand in a unique and alien landscape, one that defies prior methods of analysis, and upends previous assumptions. It is hard to puzzle out, but give your eyes time to adjust, and realise what you are seeing. Imagine three different realities, each existing in the same space, influencing one another, but operating by different rules. We inhabit this space, and can choose to act within any of the three mediums. This sounds strange, but think of it as a beach. There is an ocean, it tides lapping at the shore. There is a storm cloud overhead, whipping wind and rain around us. And there is the rocky cliff and shoreline itself, and the soft sands beneath our feet. Together there are three different states of being, liquid, gas and solid, intersecting in this place. We can walk along the beach, dive into the ocean, or take a hang glider from the cliff. 

There is the zone of Western democratic politics — think of it as the beach. There is the power of the market, increasingly airy and virtual — imagine it as the stormcloud. And finally there is the element we have yet to touch on: the influence of the developing world, much of it authoritarian, nationalist and illiberal. That, we can render as the ocean beyond, and the incoming tide. 

In our familiar world, there exist the certainties of the mid to late 20th century. This is of mass political life, and its comforts — constitutionalism, international law, human rights, democracy, the welfare state, are of the same species as its dangers — totalitarian fascism and communism, white nationalism, censorship, state terror, interstate conflict, financial collapse. Securing this happy realm is simply a matter of keeping politics within certain acceptable bounds, conflict is over well defined and permitted disputes over the balancing of liberty and security, state and market, equality and individual rights. 

Threatening this narrow idea are ghosts of both past and future. On the one hand, as we have been discussing, we have a virtual reality, one that subordinates this polite negotiation of binary political interest groups to a radically disruptive digital marketplace of ideas and personae. On the other, we see that much of the world is currently going through a fast forwarded version of 19th century European history, as it industrialises at breakneck speed. In the process, they are bringing back things thought banished by late modernity. An increasingly wealthy Muslim world is pouring its fortunes into promoting Islamic fundamentalism worldwide. As China ascends into a global superpower, it is not only embracing nationalist fanaticism, but reviving great power colonialism in Africa and across the developing world. India has moved towards an ever more hysterical religious nationalism, even as it presides over a Dickensian world of economic inequality and industrial pollution. 

The reality of globalisation has drawn these three elements together so they persist in the same spaces. You can land in a European city like Paris, emerging into an airport that embodies an ersatz, commercialized placelessness. One cab ride later, and you can find yourself back in old Europe, browsing independent bookshops stocked full of the latest works of French philosophy and history, pause for a drink in a sleepy cafe, and have the sort of congenial experiences of your parents and grandparents. But step aboard the metro and go to the outskirts, and you can find yourself in parts of the city, poor and dangerous, where Islamism festers, Arabic is spoken on the streets, and the tide of the developing world laps against Europe's shores. The elements do not remain separate either, but freely interpenetrate. Russian hackers try to influence Western politics. Islamists recruit and share memes online, but also found mainstream political parties. The sphere of traditional politics is forced to contend with both ancient tribal politics and global cybercapitalism, all at the same time. 

It is this conjunction of different spheres, each with its own rules and dynamics, chaotically intersecting, which makes our current situation so oddly unreadable and ambiguous. The rise of populism can be given three different interpretations, each belonging to a different sphere. It can be read as the return of the far right, or more positively as a democratic backlash, in our traditional political parlance. Yet it can just as easily be seen as the intrusion of an older nationalistic, religious and illiberal paradigm into Western liberal affairs, driven by the shifting balance of power between a no longer ascendent West and a rising Global South. Yet another explanation could locate populism as an aspect of a new identitarian, polarised internet politics, one that dances to the tune of tech bosses like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerburg. 

Sometimes the disruptive power of cybercapitalism dissolves traditional religious and national bonds, but sometimes it instead disrupts liberal institutions, empowering pre-modern identities in their place. The interactions are complex and often paradoxical, because they are not primarily driven by conscious factions or interest groups, but are the result of technological and social change outpacing once confident assumptions. 

In this new world, there are no inevitable, preordained victors of history. Liberal democracy is not destined to triumph. Technofuturists are not necessarily the future. Fundamentalists and nationalists may win out, or they may not. Is there anything we can usefully conclude beyond extreme indeterminacy?

The ambiguity of the situation is a clarifying clue in itself. In a changed technological and cultural paradigm, with a new social psychology, the old methods of indoctrination and evangelisation have lost their force. Settled societies retain a certain gravitational force, but they are doomed, also to disruption. Yet even as premodern cultures are disintegrating, the vast winds of globalisation bear them up into the stratosphere to rain unexpectedly down elsewhere. The Islamic world rapidly Westernised in the early to mid 20th century. A religious reaction set in, and many Muslims fled to the West to escape it. But when, decades later, the Arab Spring broke across the Middle East, many thousands of Muslims returned from the West to act as jihadis in the ensuing chaos. Ideas have become more fluid, more mimetic, but such fluidity is no law of nature, rather, it is a condition imposed by powerful ideologies backed by old school military power. 

The social and sexual revolutions of the 60s and 70s may have outraged many of those in authority, but they happened under the shadow of American military and economic imperialism, and this was hardly coincidence. America, benignly and otherwise, set the conditions for liberal modernity as Europe has known it since the 1940s, and America, along with great powers like Russia and China, may now be shaking that old order apart. The solidarities of the Cold War, in which European prosperity, equality and security were strategically important to America, and represented a shared, almost spiritual unity, have long since lapsed. The fiscal and military leverage exerted to paternalistically subordinate Western Europe now acts as a ratchet to open European doors to an increasingly chaotic, virtual and dystopian American capitalism. The alternative to surrendering to this increasingly postmodern Americanism may push Europe closer, instead, to no less dystopian models in the form of Russian and Chinese oligarchic totalitarianism and state capitalism. 

We seem faced, again, with Popper’s manichean binary — a radical totalitarian closure, in which society is solidified by force, and technology is ruthlessly centralised in the hands of the state, or a lethal openness, whereby all social bonds are dissolved, and those same tools of control fall into the hands of the market. 

Yet if we escape the limitations of liberal, progressive thinking, we may begin to see a real alternative. Our history, our store of founding myths, has been simplified and filtered to our detriment. 19th century capitalism was every bit as dystopian as today’s virtual technocracy, until it was tamed by potent social and political movements. Making industry an engine of social prosperity, economic opportunity and equality was the work of generations of struggle. Churches educated workers, unions gathered members, impoverished communities pooled their resources, intellectuals and politicians wrote, thought and investigated the conditions of society’s poorest. The modern city was civilised by this generational struggle, and today’s urban chaos and disorder is but an echo of the horrors laid to rest by our great grandparents. 

So fixated are we on mass society, we have forgotten that the vast achievements of the 40s-60s were built on the far longer and more careful efforts of the little platoons which made up pre-war Europe. National welfare was only thinkable, politically and practically, because of the hardwon peace, unity and trust built up over the previous century. The European project itself rested on these foundations, as witnessed by the centrality of subsidiarity — the idea that political power should be exercised at the lowest possible level — in the EU constitution. This principle has been sadly and fragrantly breached in European elites’ growing obsession with homogeneity and free markets, but it remains still. It belongs to a part of the Western tradition that has fallen into abeyance — Catholic personalism and humanism — the ideal of a society not as a contract between individuals, but a corporate body, bound together by a common love, and a common conception of the good: the ancient res publica. 

Though this influence was powerfully and positively felt in the postwar era through Christian Democracy, it was too mediated through both state power and secular liberalism for its full moral force and influence to be felt. It lent its authority to a project of social democracy and state capitalism, that, for all its profound material achievements, was spiritually barren and excessively statist. The idealistic revolts of the 60s and 70s, despite their manifold problems, were an expression of discontent at these limits, and the unmet desires for new ways of living, and alternative models of social organisation. 

The failures of both reaction and revolution in these decades brought us the cynicism and materialism of the 80s and 90s. Now we are again seeing the stirrings of spiritual hunger, but in the context of the kaleidoscopic anarchy of social media and globalisation. But can it possibly be met? And who, in the crazed marketplace of beliefs, will come out the winner? 

Between those selling radical openness and hawking final closure, I wish to set out my own humble stall. The chaos of multiple shallow identities offered by modernity is really a substitute for an older, better way of life. Cicero, whose writing was decisive in shaping later medieval and Western notions of the good life, and good citizen, emphasised the importance of personae in his book On Duties. He argued that the diverging roles men play, both in their general variety, and between their own diverse spheres of duty, reflect a divine harmony and order, conducive to the common good of a republic. Rather than any one person or institution, whether that be family, the state, or the individual to himself, having an absolute claim on us, the purpose of the good life is to balance and mediate these claims upon our person. Christian thinkers, like Augustine, understood this ordering of duties and affections as the ordo amoris (recently given airtime by Vice President Vance), in which our loves, mediated by our social bonds, radiate out to encompass the entire universe. 

This vision of politics puts individual human dignity at its centre (as liberalism purports to do), but it rightly understands this dignity inhering in man’s nature as a social and political animal, giving as much or more weight to voluntary associations, trade unions, guilds, clubs and churches as it does state and individual. Instead of a world ruled by contract and rights, it sees our needs and interests defended by associations and fraternities. Like the ancient polis in which democracy was first born, and the Italian city states where humanistic art and thought flourished again in the Renaissance, politics is fundamentally bound up with friendship and direct participation in public life, not abstract representation and legalism. 

What might this look like in practice? It means subsidiarity being honoured, both nationally and globally. Social welfare must cease to be the primary purview of massive state bureaucracies, and must return to a system of social insurance and charity, managed as locally as possible. Trust must be built into the system, and the reciprocal principle restored. Local politics means real democracy, but it is only half the answer. Only when democracy is introduced into the economic sphere, and social purpose displaces mere profit seeking in Western corporations, can we truly say we have achieved a democratic society. Workers must have a say in the workplace, and a just share of the profits of their labour. It is not enough for us to leave capitalism to ruthlessly grind away and its ills to be cured by taxation. 

A society in which economic and social power is exerted by individuals and associations at every level and in every sphere, is one whose structure and psychology has changed. This inner revolution is perhaps the most significant aspect of all. If we are neither individualists nor collectivists, but citizens, united by friendship rather than contract or authority, then Europe will be a civilisation again. Such a society would be strong and flexible enough to resist the headwinds of globalisation and the rising tide of authoritarianism. We would be sustaining not a lifestyle, but a way of life, one worth defending and promoting. Rather than being open or closed, such a culture would be porous, filtering and mediating new ideas rather than censoring or chaotically unleashing them. 

Can such a heady vision be achieved, with the raging of populists, the manipulations of tech barons and the complacency of liberal elites standing in its way? Perhaps, and perhaps not, but as the tide comes in and the winds rise, the only way to defend Europe is to build — and not to destroy.