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In the 1920s, the leading world powers allowed these centrifugal forces to gather steam, paving the way for the world’s descent into depression, violent conflict and a second world war, even more destructive than the first. A similar outcome is hardly preordained today. But the combination of stressors bodes ill for multilateral cooperation, particularly as the world’s inherited international institutions struggle to address not only well-established threats like nuclear weapons but emerging ones like competition in cyberspace and the specter of global ecological collapse.
Were Abraham Lincoln alive today, he would see little geopolitical evidence of the “better angels of our nature.” Only 30 years since the Cold War’s end, the principles of political liberalism—freedom, equality, pluralism and tolerance—are on the ropes in many countries. India, the world’s largest democracy, recently enacted a new citizenship law that critics say discriminates against Muslim immigrants and undermines the nation’s commitment to religious pluralism. The United States under President Donald Trump has slashed refugee admissions and proposed severe restrictions on legal migration, in a fashion reminiscent of the draconian acts of Congress limiting immigration in 1921 and 1924.
The global democratic recession continues into its 13th year, echoing trends in interwar Europe. Historian Elizabeth Wiskemann titled her study of that period “Europe of the Dictators.” In nation after nation, the center failed to hold, empowering extremists both right and left. Today, centrist parties are again under pressure across the continent. Populism is surging elsewhere, too, empowering demagogues and emboldening elected strongmen from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. True authoritarians, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, continue to tighten their grip. This is most alarming in the case of Xi, who has overseen the creation of an Orwellian surveillance state that takes advantage of the latest advances in artificial intelligence and other dystopian technology to preside over 1.4 billion people.
The anti-democratic tide is no mere anomaly. The advent of social media and “narrowcasting” has upended the information landscape and coarsened political dialogue worldwide, sharpening prejudices and propagating falsehoods with unprecedented speed. When the two main U.S. political parties cannot agree on the truth, or even on standards by which to judge fact claims, and when the president of the United States lies more than 15,000 times before finishing a single term in office, the window for functional political discourse narrows to a slit. Even where dictators are absent, then, the civic space for reasoned debate is shrinking.
The 1920s saw intense ideological and political turmoil in many nations. Communists and fascists clashed in advanced economies, while anti-colonial sentiments stirred within Europe’s overseas empires. Economic injustice and inequality magnified societal divisions and heightened political tensions, particularly as disruptive industrial technologies and management practices altered working conditions for many laborers. Even as stock indices hit record levels, the wealth generated from that economic growth flowed disproportionately to the upper echelons of society.
Despite growing economic and political tensions, the great powers managed to keep economic and geopolitical rivalries in check during the 1920s, creating what historian Sally Marks terms “the illusion of peace.” For example, they negotiated the Washington and London Naval Treaties in 1922 and 1930, respectively, to prevent an arms race in the Pacific. In Europe, meanwhile, Britain and France sought to keep Germany down and then, when that failed, to integrate it back into the family of nations, but by then it was too late.
These stopgap measures broke down in the 1930s. As the world descended into economic depression, the major powers, including the United States, responded with beggar-thy-neighbor monetary and protectionist trade policies, fragmenting the world economy into competing blocs. The League of Nations, which the United States never joined, proved toothless in preserving regional power balances in Europe and Asia and thwarting aggression by Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.
Such historical precedents provide a cautionary tale for our own time. Today’s unsettling pace of innovation and widespread automation may eliminate many livelihoods across all income levels, exacerbating inequality and societal tensions. Rivalry between the United States and China could lead to economic and technological decoupling, potentially fragmenting the world economy into competing blocs. Making matters worse, an ambivalent and unpredictable America under Trump is failing to do enough to support a favorable balance of power and discourage Chinese adventurism in Asia—or Russian adventurism in Europe, for that matter.
What makes these trends especially worrisome is the absence of any clear leader, or set of leaders, among the world’s great powers. Here, the situation looks even more like the 1920s. During the interwar period, the United States declined to assume the mantle of global leadership. The U.S. Senate rejected membership in the League of Nations, dooming it to failure. That same year, Americans elected as president the isolationist Warren G. Harding, who declared in his first message to Congress, “In the existing League of Nations, world-governing with its super-powers, this Republic will have no part.”
A century later, there is another sovereignty-obsessed Republican in the White House, turning his back on global leadership and waging war on the world order America made. One of Trump’s favored targets is the World Trade Organization, which risks the same slow decline into irrelevance that the League of Nations experienced. His administration’s penchant for transactional bilateralism, combined with China’s predatory mercantilism, could hasten the fragmentation of the world economy and leave it both vulnerable to and adrift in the event of another global economic crisis. Charles S. Kindleberger, one of the premier historians of the Great Depression, famously attributed its depth and duration to a combination of British impotence and U.S. indifference to do anything about it. As he formulated it, “the British couldn’t and the United States wouldn’t.” Whether the United States and China would do any better today is unclear.
This vacuum in enlightened international leadership is dangerous. Beyond emboldening authoritarian powers and providing space for spoilers like North Korea to run amok, the absence of any leading advocate for multilateral cooperation makes it unlikely that the world will come together and adopt the ambitious policies it needs to take on its most persistent challenges. |
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