The good news is that very few of the problems most obviously afflicting the United Kingdom are unique to this country. The bad news is that across most of the western world politics is dysfunctional and sclerotic. Local differences of crisis contrast more in degree than kind but collectively they point to this gloomy conclusion: the great postwar settlement founded on liberal democracy is unravelling.
The evidence for this is easily found almost everywhere. At present the US is stress-testing the basis for the republic itself. It may yet survive Trumpism but not without significant cost. To the north, state-approved and state-accelerated killing accounts for an increasing number of Canadian deaths each year.
In Britain, meanwhile, some advocates for assisted dying note how it might usefully reduce the population or, at the very least, lessen costs for the NHS. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that there is something decadent about all this; a society that is happy to play fast and loose with life like this is liable to embrace carelessness in other matters of policy.
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But then Europe is, literally, dying anyway. The median age in Italy is 49 and the size of the labour force in many southern and eastern European countries is forecast to fall by as much as 20 per cent in the next two decades. The continent is becoming a care home.
Fewer workers must support an ever-larger non-working population. In Germany, spending on social protection is equal to nearly 30 per cent of GDP; in France, a prime minister falls because the public won’t accept raising the pension age to 64.
Everyone knows this is unsustainable but no one can do anything about it. Some solutions are presently impossible. Immigration is a kind of blood transfusion for dying societies yet mass migration is politically toxic everywhere.
Slow decay is more comfortable. But since that decay heaps additional burdens on an already unlucky younger generation, do not be surprised when the young revolt against a fraying social democratic consensus they are expected to fund without enjoying the prospect of benefiting from it themselves in the fullness of time.
Here we might pause to note that even Remainers can recognise that Europe’s relative decline was the most intellectually bracing argument for Brexit. Unfortunately, the success of “Global Britain” depended on our political class embracing super-globalisation at precisely the moment that voters almost everywhere turned against it. There was never any good reason for supposing that the people of Sunderland wished to be Singapore-on-Wear — and so it has proved.
Paradoxically, it sometimes feels as though liberal democracy’s final triumph is creating the conditions for its demise. Politics is a series of organised compromises. Everyone gets a piece of cake but no one receives as much as they might want. At some point, however, you can have too much of a good thing. Checks and balances are necessary protections but, taken too far, they become a means of stifling any and all activity.
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Why can’t we build anything? Why can’t we sort out illegal immigration? Because, in part, we have built systems designed to thwart quick decision-making and decisive action. This extends to other policy areas too. The will of the people constrains politicians everywhere and the people resist tax increases and spending cuts alike. The result is a kind of constipation. “We’d love to do that,” leaders say, “but we can’t.”
No wonder parties across Europe that promise a simpler, clearer, more decisive politics are on the rise. The centre is in retreat almost everywhere. You can understand the appeal of the diagnosis offered by the parties of the far right and hard left even if you also reasonably doubt their suggested cures.
The stench of old lessons being forgotten can sometimes be overwhelming. Look online and you will find little revivals of Hitlerism and Stalinism alike. Even if some of this is merely stupid young people edgily pushing boundaries, much of it is more troubling than that.
Old taboos are losing their potency. Millions of people are now exposed to the view that Churchill was a warmonger and Hitler’s good sense was underrated. Revisionism is often useful but sometimes a vibe-shift is both chiefly and merely poisonous.
The institutions of that postwar consensus are rotting, too. The United Nations is a busted flush and, in the West, old alliances are unravelling with little indication as to what, if anything, might replace them. America’s fading commitment to European security — a loss that will endure after Trump has gone — also indicates a chapter closing. In one sense this has proved a salutary experience, exposing anew the gulf between European pretensions and European realities.
Collectively, the West has failed Ukraine. Fine words have been matched with half-deeds. European leaders will the ends — a sovereign Ukraine — without delivering the means by which such a state might be guaranteed. Is it really surprising that Russia, a bald man desperately searching for his lost wig, now prods and probes and tests European frontiers in Poland and Estonia?
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Might this actually be the end of history? Francis Fukuyama, a thinker as misunderstood as King Canute, was right to reckon that liberalism was a development beyond which no further progress would be made. What follows is not guaranteed to be better and already, in fact, looks like something worse.
Perhaps this is a little what it felt like to be present in the fading years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. A grand, if admittedly imperfect, experiment quietly going mouldy.