Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) (18 page)

In promoting the notion of a self-regulating market, neoliberals approach conservative terrain. One of conservatism’s key features is a belief in the extra-human origins of the social order, reflecting sets of rules that derive from the divine, the historical, the economic, or the ‘natural’. Neoliberals provide a self-assured economic version of the naturally balanced system. In that version, attempts to direct and coordinate human effort can trigger catastrophic intervention when ‘natural’ economic rules are flouted. Hayek’s inspiration is evident on this point. In terms of liberalism’s layers, neoliberalism has been decoupled from its closest antecedent, layer two market liberalism, which nourished a moral vision of markets as a part of a civilizing endeavour, emphasizing individual talent not corporate power. There are few vestiges of an ethical mission towards a fair society among neoliberals—instead, levels of social inequality have been rising under neoliberal policies. And there is little commitment to engaging the engines of progress in the quest for human self-improvement. The welfare-state role of layer four is whittled away or handed over to private organizations. The constitutional arrangements of layer one, with their safeguarding of individual space and liberation from tyranny, are retained but effectively redirected towards free competition among powerful and vastly unequal economic players. In sum, neoliberals do not possess the minimum kit to be located squarely at the heart of 21st century liberalism. Put more forcefully, the complex morphology of liberalism is shattered and becomes barely recognizable.

East European liberalism after 1989

One intriguing aspect of neoliberalism has been its attractiveness to a number of former communist countries following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. In the absence of a strong liberal tradition in those countries it was hardly surprising that garbled versions of liberalism took hold in Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. What in fact went under the name of liberalism pulled in two very different directions. The already weak manifestations of liberalism in Eastern Europe suffered an identity crisis in the post-communist search for new identities: its emblematic defence of individual liberty and social solidarity were consigned to civil society, while its equally characteristic championing of competition and private property were the province of a market society. The two parts shared little and were made to lead separate institutional and ideological lives.

The appeal of neoliberalism was understandable in countries whose economies had suffered under communism. The personal circumstances of most citizens made a consumer society on imagined ‘Western’ models of opulence particularly alluring. Citizens were prompted to search for a more efficient economic system whose fruits were tangible and immediate, and neoliberalism seemed to hold out the prospect of a fast fix. But the other direction some East European countries took was a flight from the oppressive and dictatorial states under which people had lived. Here liberals genuinely had to make up lost ground for the many decades endured under totalitarian systems, in particular the absence of robust, basic first layer constraints and procedures. The liberal language of human rights and of bringing back the rule of law and democratic constitutional arrangements was in the mouths of many (
Figure 5
). As against the powerful state under communism, many liberals pinned their hopes on the strengthening of civil society as a refuge from the state. ‘Civil society’ was the prevalent term for the network of voluntary and private associations that made up society, in the civic and cultural as well as the economic spheres.

5.
Shortly before becoming Czech president in December 1989, Václav Havel waves to crowds in Prague celebrating freedom after the collapse of communism.

In that soil, fourth layer welfare liberalism, relying as it did on the benevolence of an active and democratic state, but a state nonetheless, could hardly flourish. Both civil society and market society tendencies shared the quest to diminish the centrality of the state as far as possible, whether it acted for good or for evil. The state, in the words of the Polish academic Jerzy Szacki, was seen ‘as the agent of all social injustice’, a position quite out of step with left-liberal ideological and philosophical theories. Collective action was mistakenly identified with the socialist collectivism of the old regimes. Anything even remotely associated with collectivism was thus to be avoided.

The belief in the harmonious functioning of civil society without some state regulation amidst the complexities of the modern world was naive and illusory, as it previously had been in liberalism’s past history, when private and charitable institutions proved unable to provide solutions to the social problems of the 19th century. Indeed, neoliberalism now illustrated once again how dominant private interests merely moved in to fill the power vacuum caused by bypassing the state. At the same time, visions of civil society in Eastern Europe demanded levels of social homogeneity that fifth layer multicultural liberals would consider utopian and regard with suspicion. And the misleading idea that civil society was a parallel society, happily separate from the distasteful world of politics, implied that political issues did not permeate the whole of society. The discrete notions of the state, the government, and politics were frequently and carelessly equated. Liberalism failed to take deeper roots in Eastern Europe, while its ideas of liberty were pressed into personalized and idealized intellectual and artistic spheres.

The pseudo-liberals

Although neoliberals may genuinely, if misguidedly, believe that they are the most important heirs to the liberal tradition, other societies—especially in Europe—have produced ideologies that knowingly obscure their credentials. They dress themselves up in a pseudo-liberal discourse that is laid bare, like the emperor’s new clothes, the moment we apply the morphological approach to ideologies.

The deliberate misappropriation of liberalism can become a political weapon designed to mask the true intentions of an ideology or to render its rhetoric more palatable. The right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, for example, has exploited the liberal language of economic freedoms to disguise another kind of ‘freedom’ it is pushing: that of the nation’s emancipation from foreigners and large-scale immigration. In the Netherlands, the List Pim Fortuyn combined a tolerant attitude to homosexuality with strong anti-Islamic and xenophobic policies. Its successor—named ‘The Freedom Party’ in the same populist tradition of obfuscation—continues with resistance to the integration of immigrants alongside a condemnation of layer five social pluralism. In all those cases the most valued liberty is that of promoting what is claimed to be a dominant national culture, while demonizing people from different ethnic groups. As the well-known adage has it, just as one swallow does not make a summer, so one or two liberal-sounding ideas do not constitute liberalism—especially when blatantly illiberal ideas are deliberately stacked behind them.

The relative success of liberalism, and the tolerance and openness of its most humanistic versions, makes it an easy target for ideological scavengers and the object of permanent attack from crusading or populist movements. Liberalism’s own integrity is not helped by the different faces it presents to the world or, indeed, by the complexity of arguments it marshals when, to the contrary, political action demands simplification. But that is the common fate of any ideology that seeks to compete over the control of political language.

Liberal internationalism

Whereas neoliberalism is rarely seen by its critics as part of the liberal family, there is another area that has fashioned its own take on liberalism. This is not a case of misappropriation but of trimming and recasting. Over the past half-century or so, the language of international relations has repeatedly referred to a ‘liberal world order’. The proponents of that view are prone to a macro view of liberalism in which broad contours are adumbrated but the fine distinguishing details that identify an ideology as liberal are elided. As Georg Sørensen has observed, ‘Liberal ideas about the international sphere are less developed than liberal ideas about domestic politics’. Whereas liberal ideas and ideologies in domestic settings are both complex and frequently challenged and criticized by other ideologies, competing as they do against conservative, nationalist, socialist, green, fundamentalist, or populist tendencies, there is paradoxically a large degree of consensus among international relations analysts that the world order is a liberal one. Yet it is difficult to talk of a recognizably liberal world order emanating from the so-called ‘West’ and underpinned in particular by the nigh-hegemonic status of the USA. For that international order is supported and often aggressively promoted on a micro level by conservative, nationalist, and quasi-populist governments as well as by social-democratic welfare states, none of which falls happily into the liberal camp as seen by the discerning analyst of ideologies.

What, then, is a ‘liberal world order’ and why is the term so popular both among many players in the international arena and among international relations experts? At its heart are three assumptions, explicit or implicit. First, that ‘liberal-democracy’ refers not to an ideology but to a type of regime, to a set of institutional political arrangements and a rule-based system for which the phrase ‘liberal-democracy’ is a useful abbreviation. Those arrangements are mainly in line with the minimalist base that first layer liberalism advocates, but they lag far behind liberal transformations since the mid-19th century. It is now a commonplace for many conservative, social-democratic, nationalist, or populist systems—particularly in Europe and in the American continent, but also in Australia, New Zealand, India, and Japan—to accept constitutionalism and the rule of law without adopting ideologies that are notably or unambiguously liberal. The over-generalizing postulation that all those polities are liberal in their interactions leads theorists of international relations to contend that liberal principles are frequently violated in practice by liberal states.

It would be more plausible to maintain that so-called ‘liberal states’ do not necessarily possess either liberal governments or comprehensive liberal ideologies. Their practices may not be liberal to begin with because their liberalism is either nominal and thin or profoundly outbalanced by non-liberal ideas. To describe George W. Bush’s foreign policy with regard to Iraq as promoting liberty and democracy in seeking forcibly to impose regime change does not imply that American policy was liberal under the highly conservative Republicans in any of the senses suggested by the third or fourth layers of liberalism. To the contrary, it risks disparaging liberalism as a whole. Even the promotion of liberty itself, described as a ‘liberal impulse’ in the international order, is no guarantee of membership of the liberal family if it entails, in R.H. Tawney’s famous phrase, that ‘freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’.

The second assumption is that liberalism always involves an economy based on capitalism and markets (an assumption to be distinguished from the exaggerated neoliberal inflating of free markets at the expense of most other liberal values). That is insufficiently nuanced, for neither capitalism nor markets are fixed quantities. They display degrees of control and regulation that vary vastly within different ideological frameworks. Some libertarians will be far more accommodating to free markets than welfare liberals. And some business entrepreneurs will be far more attuned to the profit motive than those liberals who wish to divert some of those profits—through taxation and other means—towards public and socially beneficial goods and services. As was seen in
Chapter 4
, incompatibility among liberal core concepts results in very different decontestations and orderings, often in direct competition with each other. If in the past private property was part of the ethos inherited from Locke and others, neither it nor capitalism itself—as a system of investment and expansion of financial and commercial power—have been specifically or uniquely liberal over the past century, contrary to the prevailing views of the liberal international order. Capitalism has been endorsed and pursued by non-liberal states such as China, as well as within European and American countries whose ideologies and regimes are, or were, patently not just conservative or socialist but nationalist or fascist.

The third assumption holds that to be liberal on the international scene is usually associated with the promotion of universal human rights and with peaceful conflict resolution. But there is divergence over which human rights should be protected and advanced, a divergence that parallels the difference between the first liberal layer on the one hand and the third and fourth on the other. The established list of human rights principally contains the rights of respect for individual freedom; protection from tyranny and torture; security; property ownership; and gender, race, and religious equality—and, collectively, of national self-determination. It was only subsequently that the United Nations and other international agencies attempted to shift the emphasis to the right to human development that is central to layer three, and to the relatively generous range of social and economic rights that is central to layer four.