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The contemporary liberal order does this by making two things mobile:
capital and labour. Capital mobility enables assets and businesses to move
to different locations where different sets of economic rules exist. When
capital is mobile, capital controls don’t prevent individuals and firms from
moving their assets out of a particular economy, and trade barriers enable
businesses to operate offshore without facing imposing tariffs. Labour
mobility is about moving workers from place to place, in pursuit of the
jobs that are relocated through capital mobility.
The liberal order enables rapid flows of investment and people from place
to place. These flows facilitate economic growth and reduce the cost of
consumer goods, but they also produce instability. Moving too much
money too quickly into any particular part of the world generates bubbles.
Taking too much money out too quickly produces credit crunches. Adding
too many people to a region too quickly strains its public services and
potentially pushes down wages. Taking too many people out of a region
too quickly produces brain drain, starving the region of the skills it needs
to thrive. The order keeps capital and labour mobile, and maintains the
flows. But it doesn’t govern them, and that means the flows can get out of
hand and cause trouble.
The liberal order exists on three levels: the global, the regional and the
national. At the global level, the order consists of large international
organisations that mainly focus on the regulation of trade, borrowing and
investment, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank. At the regional level, the liberal order creates tighter trade
relationships, through agreements such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) – now the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement
(USMCA) – and block organisations such as the European Union (EU). In
the case of the EU, the regional institutions also provide free movement of
people, a currency union, and a common set of fiscal rules and regulations.
At the national level, the liberal order is embodied by the political parties
that are committed to defending and maintaining it, including most of the
traditional centre-Right, centrist and centre-Left parties.
This is not to say that the order is defenceless. Global and regional
institutions do have the ability to inflict economic hardship on voting
populations. The EU, IMF and World Bank can deny states access to
needed funds, threatening them with economic crisis if they fail to toe the
line. Governments know they won’t survive the next election if these
organisations visit financial chaos upon them. In 2015, for instance, Greece
attempted to resist the EU’s austerity demands, threatening to leave the
eurozone’s monetary union if the EU refused to offer more financial
support. But leaving the euro would badly damage Greece’s economy in
the near-term, and Brussels knew it. The EU called Greece’s bluff, and
Greece retreated. Last summer, SYRIZA was trounced by New Democracy,
Greece’s traditional centre-Right party.
This creates a difficult situation for political parties. The liberal order has
brought about economic integration, and that integration has often been
politically disadvantageous. In the post-2008 era, global and regional
institutions have pushed many states to cut public spending, eliminating
social programmes and weakening public services and infrastructure. In
many countries, living standards for the ordinary voter have stagnated or
even backslid. Capital mobility makes it easy for billionaires and
corporations to rapidly move their assets all over the world, and that
means they have a lot of leverage over national governments. If a
government raises taxes to support public services, the people and firms it
attempts to tax might simply move away, depriving the country of both the
tax revenue and the jobs and investment that those people and firms once
supplied. The ensuing recession could swiftly cost that government the
next election. To attract investment, governments are forced to compete
with one another for the favour of oligarchs and transnational
corporations. That means keeping taxes and wages low, and regulations
and labour laws weak.
Some political parties talk about trying to trap investment before it can
escape, with capital controls and trade barriers. A few talk about funding
social spending with monetary sorcery, using quantitative easing to
support flagging social programmes and fabulous new infrastructure. But
even the prospect of a party of this type winning power is enough to
encourage corporations to take their custom elsewhere. Throwing up trade
barriers quickly breaks supply chains, without giving the economy an
opportunity to gradually reorganise the affected sectors. The shock of a
sudden severance would be severe, sending the cost of goods and services
soaring until new arrangements can be made. During that time, inflation
would be elevated even without radical monetary policy. Adding it on
would just make things worse.
Governments aren’t willing to take the risk of capital flight. The anticipated
economic consequences are too severe, and economic consequences mean
electoral consequences. How, then, do they placate their voters? The voters
remember a time, not so long ago, when public services were strong and
their lives were getting better. While they wish for the economic malaise to
end, for things to return to the way they once were, their governments
cannot deliver it. If states can’t make voters happy, they have to find a way
to direct voter resentment elsewhere.
Trump gets away with continuing to support the liberal order by opposing
it in public while continuing to maintain the economic relationships that
are its foundation. Trump didn’t simply suspend trade with China, because
his purpose is not to end US dependence on cheap foreign imports.
Instead, he wishes to perform strength for the home audience. By vilifying
China and gradually discouraging US firms from doing business there,
Trump can appear to stand up to the liberal order while simply
exchanging one set of East Asian trading partners for another. In this way,
he gets the political credit for appearing hostile to the order, without
taking action that would substantially raise the cost of goods and services
in the near-term.
Trump won’t rip the liberal order apart, but he creates space for the person
who will
From the point of view of the liberal order, this strategy is suboptimal, and
it works only from the premise that the liberal order doesn’t enjoy much
legitimacy. It’s a defensive strategy, aimed at maintaining an international
order that no longer inspires people of its own accord. The order would
prefer to restore its legitimacy and get populations enthusiastic about
further integration. By maintaining itself through allowing national
governments to performatively mock it, the legitimacy of the liberal order
is further corroded. It becomes even less credible and even less inspiring.
This means that governments have to go further and further with their
performances of defiance to continue to please ever more grouchy voting
populations.
This decentralisation can take many forms. Nation-states such as the UK,
France and Spain might devolve more and more powers to their regional
and local institutions. Some of these regions might become politically
independent. In the US, the federal government might push more
responsibilities on to state governments, and those states might in turn
push more responsibilities on to municipalities. More radically,
governments might begin making use of ballot initiatives, referenda,
citizens’ juries and public assemblies to make ordinary people feel more
involved in the process while at the same time divesting the national
government of its own responsibility and culpability for decisions.
In this way, the radical democracy strategy becomes an inversion of the
nationalist strategy. Both the radical democrats and the nationalists would
create a situation in which the nation-state cannot meaningfully be
blamed for the consequences of the liberal order. The nationalists
accomplish this by blaming the order, performing subversion while
continuing to obey. The radical democrats accomplish this by creating new
institutions that make the people themselves feel responsible for their own
situations. They attempt to ‘responsibilise’ ordinary voters. The nationalist
strategy’s weakness is that it maintains the liberal order by condemning it,
undermining the very thing it maintains. The radical democrats
completely divert attention from the order by making politics about the
local level – about you. You become the one responsible for the order, for
the flows, and for any instability those flows bring to your community.
These local institutions, however, cannot actually alter the flows. This
responsibility is built on lies and misdirection. It functions as an elaborate
way of forcing the citizens to internalise the political system’s failures as
their own. Radical democrats would give citizens the appearance of direct
power without the fact of it, obscuring where the real power lies – with the
liberal order. That would suit the order just fine. But radical democracy
wouldn’t deal with the substance of the grievances that have led so many
voters to grow frustrated. It would enable the order to continue
disappointing people by convincing them that they are the ones
disappointing themselves.
The other option is to make a genuine effort to build some kind of global
polity
The trouble is that there are few people who want to do this. Part of what
makes both nationalism and radical democracy appealing is that these
strategies emphasise our national, individual or group distinctiveness.
Global political institutions collapse distinctions, making singular
decisions for the whole world. We don’t want a one-size-fits-all model. But
unfortunately for us, the liberal order has already given us one. In the
liberal order’s one-size-fits-all model, we must all accept ungoverned flows
of capital and labour and, if we try to resist those flows, economic
devastation is visited upon us. We have no say in the model, because the
nation-states that are meant to represent us are increasingly moribund.
So we are faced with a terrible choice. We can continue to embrace the
nationalist strategy of keeping the liberal order alive by creating the
conditions under which it will die. That will end in the dissolution of the
order, collapsing economic growth, with massive increases in the costs of
goods and services. Our living standards will be dramatically reduced. The
nation-state will make a comeback, but at the cost of the prosperity that we
have been building since the Second World War.