TheClashOfIdeas.the Democratic Malaise

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The Democratic Malaise

Globalization and the Threat to the West

Charles A. Kupchan

Foreign Affairs, January/February 2012

A crisis of governability has engulfed the worlds most advanceddemocracies. It is no accident that the United States, Europe, andJapan are simultaneously experiencing political breakdown; glob-alization is producing a widening gap between what electoratesare asking of their governments and what those governments are

able to deliver. The mismatch between the growing demand forgood governance and its shrinking supply is one of the gravestchallenges facing the Western world today.

Voters in industrialized democracies are looking to their gov-ernments to respond to the decline in living standards and thegrowing inequality resulting from unprecedented global flows ofgoods, services, and capital. They also expect their representativesto deal with surging immigration, global warming, and otherknock-on effects of a globalized world. But Western governmentsare not up to the task. Globalization is making less effective thepolicy levers at their disposal while also diminishing the Weststraditional sway over world affairs by fueling the rise of the rest.The inability of democratic governments to address the needs of

Charles A. Kupchan is Professor of International Aairsat Georgetown University and Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellowat the Council on Foreign Relations. This essay is adapted fromhis forthcoming bookNo Ones World: The West, the Rising Rest, andthe Coming Global Turn (Oxford University Press, 2012).

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their broader publics has, in turn, only increased popular disaffec-tion, further undermining the legitimacy and efficacy of represen-tative institutions.

This crisis of governability within the Western world comes ata particularly inopportune moment. The international system is inthe midst of tectonic change due to the diffusion of wealth andpower to new quarters. Globalization was supposed to have playedto the advantage of liberal societies, which were presumably bestsuited to capitalize on the fast and fluid nature of the global mar-ketplace. But instead, mass publics in the advanced democracies

of North America, Europe, and East Asia have been particularlyhard hitprecisely because their countries economies are bothmature and open to the world.

In contrast, Brazil, India, Turkey, and other rising democraciesare benefiting from the shift of economic vitality from the devel-oped to the developing world. And China is proving particularlyadept at reaping globalizations benefits while limiting its liabili-

tiesin no small part because it has retained control over policyinstruments abandoned by its liberal competitors. State capitalismhas its distinct advantages, at least for now. As a consequence, it isnot just the Wests material primacy that is at stake today but alsothe allure of its version of modernity. Unless liberal democraciescan restore their political and economic solvency, the politics, aswell as the geopolitics, of the twenty-first century may well be upfor grabs.

deer in the headlightsGlobalization has expanded aggregate wealth and enabled devel-oping countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity. The prolif-eration of investment, trade, and communication networks hasdeepened interdependence and its potentially pacifying effects

and has helped pry open nondemocratic states and foster popularuprisings. But at the same time, globalization and the digital econ-omy on which it depends are the main source of the Wests cur-rent crisis of governability. Deindustrialization and outsourcing,

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global trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit andasset bubblesthese consequences of globalization are imposinghardships and insecurity not experienced for generations. The dis-

tress stemming from the economic crisis that began in 2008 is par-ticularly acute, but the underlying problems began much earlier.For the better part of two decades, middle-class wages in theworlds leading democracies have been stagnant, and economic in-equality has been rising sharply as globalization has handsomelyrewarded its winners but left its many losers behind.

These trends are not temporary byproducts of the business cycle,

nor are they due primarily to insufficient regulation of the financialsector, tax cuts amid expensive wars, or other errant policies. Stagnantwages and rising inequality are, as the economic analysts DanielAlpert, Robert Hockett, and Nouriel Roubini recently argued intheir study The Way Forward, a consequence of the integration ofbillions of low-wage workers into the global economy and increasesin productivity stemming from the application of information tech-

nology to the manufacturing sector. These developments havepushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy tollon workers in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West.The resulting dislocation and disaffection among Westernelectorates have been magnified by globalizations intensificationof transnational threats, such as international crime, terrorism,unwanted immigration, and environmental degradation. Adding tothis nasty mix is the information revolution; the Internet and theprofusion of mass media appear to be fueling ideological polariza-tion more than they are cultivating deliberative debate.

Voters confronted with economic duress, social dislocation,and political division look to their elected representatives for help.But just as globalization is stimulating this pressing demand forresponsive governance, it is also ensuring that its provision is indesperately short supply. For three main reasons, governments

in the industrialized West have entered a period of pronouncedineffectiveness.

First, globalization has made many of the traditional policy toolsused by liberal democracies much blunter instruments. Washington


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has regularly turned to fiscal and monetary policy to modulateeconomic performance. But in the midst of global competitionand unprecedented debt, the U.S. economy seems all but immune

to injections of stimulus spending or the Federal Reserves latestmoves on interest rates. The scope and speed of commercial andfinancial flows mean that decisions and developments else-whereBeijings intransigence on the value of the yuan, Europessluggish response to its financial crisis, the actions of investors andratings agencies, an increase in the quality of Hyundais latestmodelsoutweigh decisions taken in Washington. Europes

democracies long relied on monetary policy to adjust to fluctuationsin national economic performance. But they gave up that optionwhen they joined the eurozone. Japan over the last two decadeshas tried one stimulus strategy after another, but to no avail. In aglobalized world, democracies simply have less control over out-comes than they used to.

Second, many of the problems that Western electorates are

asking their governments to solve require a level of internationalcooperation that is unattainable. The diffusion of power from theWest to the rest means that there are today many new cooks in thekitchen; effective action no longer rests primarily on collaborationamong like-minded democracies. Instead, it depends on cooper-ation among a much larger and more diverse circle of states. TheUnited States now looks to the G-20 to rebalance the interna-tional economy. But consensus is elusive among nations that areat different stages of development and embrace divergent ap-proaches to economic governance. Challenges such as curbingglobal warming or effectively isolating Iran similarly depend on acollective effort that is well beyond reach.

Third, democracies can be nimble and responsive when theirelectorates are content and enjoy a consensus born of rising expec-tations, but they are clumsy and sluggish when their citizens are

downcast and divided. Polities in which governance depends onpopular participation, institutional checks and balances, and com-petition among interest groups appear to be better at distributingbenefits than at apportioning sacrifice. But sacrifice is exactly

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what is necessary to restore economic solvency, which confrontsWestern governments with the unappetizing prospect of pursuingpolicies that threaten to weaken their electoral appeal.

one problem , thre e flavorsIn the United States, partisan confrontation is paralyzing thepolitical system. The underlying cause is the poor state of the U.S.economy. Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses,jobs, and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels

of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle-class wages.Over the past ten years, the average household income in theUnited States has fallen by over ten percent. In the meantime,income inequality has been steadily rising, making the UnitedStates the most unequal country in the industrialized world. Theprimary source of the declining fortunes of the American workeris global competition; jobs have been heading overseas. In addition,

many of the most competitive companies in the digital economydo not have long coattails. Facebooks estimated value is around$70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare thiswith General Motors, which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide. Thewealth of the United States cutting-edge companies is not trick-ling down to the middle class.

These harsh economic realities are helping revive ideologicaland partisan cleavages long muted by the nations rising eco-nomic fortunes. During the decades after World War II, abroadly shared prosperity pulled Democrats and Republicanstoward the political center. But today, Capitol Hill is largely de-void of both centrists and bipartisanship; Democrats campaignfor more stimulus, relief for the unemployed, and taxes on therich, whereas Republicans clamor for radical cuts in the size and

cost of government. Expediting the hollowing out of the centerare partisan redistricting, a media environment that provokesmore than it informs, and a broken campaign finance systemthat has been captured by special interests.


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The resulting polarization is tying the country in knots. Presi-dent Barack Obama realized as much, which is why he enteredoffice promising to be a postpartisan president. But the failure of

Obamas best efforts to revive the economy and restore bipartisancooperation has exposed the systemic nature of the nations economicand political dysfunction. His $787 billion stimulus package,passed without the support of a single House Republican, wasunable to resuscitate an economy plagued by debt, a deficit of mid-dle-class jobs, and the global slowdown. Since the Republicansgained control of the House in 2010, partisan confrontation has

stood in the way of progress on nearly every issue. Bills to promoteeconomic growth either fail to pass or are so watered down thatthey have little impact. Immigration reform and legislation to curbglobal warming are not even on the table.

Ineffective governance, combined with daily doses of partisanbile, has pushed public approval of Congress to historic lows. Spread-ing frustration has spawned the Occupy Wall Street movement

the first sustained bout of public protests since the Vietnam War.The electorates discontent only deepens the challenges of gover-nance, as vulnerable politicians cater to the narrow interests of theparty base and the nations political system loses what little windit has in its sails.

Europes crisis of governability, meanwhile, is taking the formof a renationalization of its politics. Publics are revolting againstthe double dislocations of European integration and globalization.As a consequence, the EUs member states are busily clawing backthe prerogatives of sovereignty, threatening the project of Euro-pean political and economic integration set in motion after WorldWar II. As in the United States, economic conditions are the rootof the problem. Over the past two decades, middle-class incomes inmost major European economies have been falling and inequalityhas been rising. Unemployment in Spain stands at over 20 percent,

and even Germany, the EUs premier economy, saw its middleclass contract by 13 percent between 2000 and 2008. Those who slipthrough the cracks find a fraying safety net beneath them; Europescomfortable welfare systems, which have become unsustainable in

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the face of global competition, are being dramatically scaled back.The austerity stemming from the ongoing debt crisis in the euro-zone has only made matters worse. Greeks are as angry about the

EU-enforced belt-tightening as Germans are about having to bailout Europes economic laggards.

Europes aging population has made immigration an economicnecessity. But the lack of progress in integrating Muslim immi-grants into the social mainstream has intensified discomfort overthe EUs willingness to accept more outsiders into its midst. Far-right parties have been the beneficiaries of this anxiety, and their

hard-edged nationalism targets not only immigrants but also theEU.Generational change is taking its own toll on popular enthusiasmfor European integration. Europeans with memories of WorldWar II see the EU as Europes escape route from its bloody past.But younger Europeans have no past from which to flee. Whereastheir elders viewed the European project as an article of faith, cur-rent leaders and electorates tend to assess the EU through a cold

and often negativevaluation of costs and benefits.The collective governance that the EU desperately needs inorder to thrive in a globalized world rests uneasily with a politicalstreet that is becoming decidedly hostile to the European project.Europes institutions could descend to the level of its politics,which would effectively reduce the EU to little more than a tradebloc. Alternatively, national politics could again be infused with aEuropean calling, which would breathe new legitimacy into an in-creasingly hollow union. The latter outcome is much preferable,but it will require leadership and resolve that, at least for now, arenowhere to be found.

Japan, for its part, has been politically adrift since JunichiroKoizumi stepped down as prime minister in 2006. Thereafter, theLiberal Democratic Party (LDP), which had dominated Japanesepolitics throughout most of the postwar era, stumbled badly, los-

ing power to the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in 2009. Theconsolidation of a two-party system had the potential to improvegovernance but instead produced only gridlock and decliningpublic confidence. Japan has cycled through six prime ministers in


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the last five years. This past summer, public approval of the DPJstood at 18 percent. The DPJ and the LDP are as internally dividedas they are at loggerheads. Policymaking has ground to a halt even

on urgent issues; it took over 100 days for the Diet to pass legisla-tion providing relief to the victims of last years earthquake, tsunami,and nuclear disaster.

The trouble began with the bursting of Japans asset bubble in1991, a setback that exposed deeper problems in the countryseconomy and led to a lost decade of recession. Japanese manu-facturers suffered as jobs and investment headed to China and the

Asian tigers. The countrys traditional social compact, by whichcorporations provided lifetime employment and comfortable pen-sions, was no longer sustainable. The past two decades have broughta long slide in middle-class incomes, rising inequality, and a spikein the poverty rate from roughly seven percent in the 1980s to 16percent in 2009. In 1989, Japan ranked fourth in the world in termsof per capita GDP; by 2010, its rank had plummeted to 24th.

It was to address such problems that Koizumi embarked onambitious efforts to liberalize the economy and reduce the powerof bureaucrats and interest groups. His charisma and ample par-liamentary support made for significant progress, but his LDPand DPJ successors have been too weak to keep the process mov-ing forward. Japan is therefore stuck in a no mans land, exposedto the dislocations of a globalized economy yet not liberalized orstrategic enough to compete effectively.

bitter medicineIt is not by chance that the Wests crisis of governability coincideswith new political strength among rising powers; economic andpolitical vigor is passing from the core to the periphery of theinternational system. And while the worlds most open states are

experiencing a loss of control as they integrate into a globalizedworld, illiberal states, such as China, are deliberately keeping amuch tighter grip on their societies through centralized decision-making, censorship of the media, and state-supervised markets. If

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the leading democracies continue to lose their luster as develop-ing countries chart their rise, the unfolding transition in globalpower will be significantly more destabilizing. Conversely, a re-

alignment of the international pecking order would likely bemore orderly if the Western democracies recouped and providedpurposeful leadership.

What is needed is nothing less than a compelling twenty-first-century answer to the fundamental tensions among democracy,capitalism, and globalization. This new political agenda shouldaim to reassert popular control over political economy, directing

state action toward effective responses to both the economic real-ities of global markets and the demands of mass societies for anequitable distribution of rewards and sacrifices.

The West should pursue three broad strategies to meet thischallenge and thus better equip its democratic institutions for aglobalized world. First, when up against state capitalism and thepotent force of global markets, the Western democracies have

little choice but to engage in strategic economic planning on anunprecedented scale. State-led investment in jobs, infrastructure,education, and research will be required to restore economiccompetitiveness. Second, leaders should seek to channel electoratediscontent toward reformist ends through a progressive brand ofpopulism. By pursuing policies that advantage mass publics ratherthan the party faithful or special interests, politicians can not onlyrebuild their popularity but also reinvigorate democratic institu-tions and the values of citizenship and sacrifice. Third, Westerngovernments must lead their electorates away from the temptationto turn inward. As history makes clear, hard times can stoke pro-tectionism and isolationism. But globalization is here to stay, andretreat is not an option.

None of these strategies will be easy to implement, and embrac-ing all of them together will require extraordinary leadership and

the political courage to match. But until such an agenda is devisedand realized, the democratic malaise will persist.


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Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe. by

jan-werner mller. Yale University Press, 2011, 304 pp. $45.00.

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. by eric

hobsbawm. Yale University Press, 2011, 480 pp. $35.00.

Any intelligent observer of Europe in the 1930s would have beenhard-pressed not to feel that its future belonged to either commu-nism or fascism. Liberal democracy, besieged on the left by StalinsSoviet Union and on the right by Hitlers Germany and Mus-solinis Italy, seemed to stand no chance of survival. Most centraland eastern European countries had already succumbed toauthoritarianism or different variations of fascism, and the GreatDepression suggested that the activist solutions implemented byboth extremes were better than the feeble nostrums liberalismcould offer. Back then, the notion that by the beginning of thetwenty-first century, Europe would be democratic from the Tagusand the Ebro to the Danube and the Vistula would have seemedutterly ridiculous.

The Strange Triumph

of Liberal DemocracyEuropes Ideological Contest

Shlomo Avineri

Foreign Affairs, January/February 2012

Shlomo Avineri is Professor of Political Science at the HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem and the author of, among other books,TheSocial and Political Thought of Karl Marx. He served as DirectorGeneral of Israels Foreign Ministry in the first cabinet of PrimeMinister Yitzhak Rabin.



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And in fact, liberal democracys triumph was hardly inevitable.Two recent books, by authors with greatly differing worldviewsand methodologies, try to explain why history worked out as it

did. In Contesting Democracy, Jan-Werner Mller, a German-born,British-educated political scientist who teaches at Princeton, tracesthe central ideological narratives of European politics during thecentury, arguing essentially that the postwar order emerged andhas proved durable because it offered novel and satisfactory an-swers to major problems. In How to Change the World, meanwhile,the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm grapples with why

Marxism lost out and what it might still have to offer.

the battle for europeMllers book is at once a political history of Europe sinceWorld War I, an inquiry into why Europe failed to achieve con-solidated liberal democracies between the two wars yet was able

to do so after 1945, and a collection of essays on some importantEuropean political thinkers. Although the volumes chaptersshow signs of their origin as separate articles, its overall mes-sage, complex and sometimes highly original, is clear. In a nut-shell, post-1945 democratic development in Western Europewas not achieved easily, nor was it just the reestablishment ofthe previous political order. It grew out of the lessons learnedfrom the brittleness of interwar democracy and the legacies ofsome of the nondemocratic interwar movements. It was helped,moreover, by the urgency and cohesion supplied by the broaderCold War environment.

As Mller tells it, the weakness of the post-1918 Europeandemocratic regimes derived primarily from the reordering causedby World War I. By suddenly bringing about the collapse of fourempires (the Hapsburg, the German, the Russian, and the Ot-

toman), most of which were multiethnic, the conflict tore down awell-established conservative and hierarchical order and replacedit with a series of weak republican regimes. Many of these regimeswere based on the principle of national self-determination, but at

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the same time, they were burdened with serious ethnic minorityproblems, irredentist movements, and contested borders.

Germanys Weimar Republic, created in 1919, was the prime

example of such a troubled republic, and given his German back-ground and the countrys centrality in Europe, Mller naturallydevotes significant space to it. Here was a defeated country that,having lost significant territories in the west and the east, adoptedan extremely liberal democratic constitution, only to have itselitesbureaucratic, military, ecclesiastical, and academicviewthe republican regime as illegitimate. Mller explores Weimar

Germany through the prism of the thinking of the sociologist MaxWeber, showing how now canonical and seemingly timeless works,such as the essay Politics as a Vocation, were actually producedin response to the challenges of a unique political and historicalcontextthe legitimacy crisis facing the Weimar Republic after1919, exacerbated by violent left-wing revolutionary attempts, suchas those in Bavaria.

At the time, Germany, like several other countries, was rapidlyembracing a democratic ethos, just as the Great War and its after-math had centralized much of the economy, expanded votingrights, and fostered Wilsonian ideas of national self-determina-tion. It should have been no surprise that the newly establisheddemocracies would have so much difficulty juggling these contra-dictory realities and principles. Mller explains how under suchconditions, ideologiesespecially redemptive and totalistic ones,such as fascism and communismcould for the first time tran-scend merely intellectual discourse and capture the imagination ofthe masses, who thought the formalistic democratic structuresfailed to respond to their needs and aspirations.

In contrast to his respectful treatment of Webers measuredattempt to combine order, legitimacy, and representation in his the-ory of a modern nation-state, Mller offers a not very complimentary,

but fascinating, characterization of the Hungarian philosopherGyrgy Lukcs. Mller credits Lukcs with an insightful and so-phisticated reading of Karl Marx, which made him the preeminentMarxist philosopher of the interwar period, but also exposes his

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salaries and wages. Unelected constitutional courts acted as anelitist brake on the majoritarian vox populi, protecting human rightsfrom unbridled populism. Last but not least, these constrained

democracies adopted a modified Keynesian approach to stateintervention in the economy, which added an element of securityto the political structuresomething that Europe had lackedbefore 1939.

In this context, Mller helps readers understand postwarEurope by highlighting the enormous contribution made byChristian Democrats. Italys Alcide De Gasperi, Germanys Konrad

Adenauer, and Frances Robert Schuman transformed their partiesfrom enemies of democracy into crucial pillars of it. Before 1939,many Christian parties had allied themselves with antidemocraticforces, and only the horrors of World War II and the Holocaustconvinced them that such complicity with fascism ran contrary totheir religious principles. Here, the writings of the FrenchCatholic philosopher Jacques Maritain were crucial in reorienting

Christian parties toward democratic liberalism. By joining withliberal and social democratic parties to embrace and even help leadthe new order, Christian Democrats gave the system the sort ofcross-class support of broad public majorities that the interwarrepublics had never had.

marxisms turnOne of the most surprising twists in Europes political evolutionis the reversal of fortunes that has befallen Marxism, a school ofthought that once seemed a formidable ideological contender.Hobsbawms latest book, How to Change the World, chronicles itsinfluence over the twentieth century and tries to make a case forits contemporary relevance. Hobsbawm is one of the giants of thehistorical profession and the author of an impressive list of mag-

isterial studies. Even those who disagree with his Marxist outlookknow that his sophisticated use of Marxist theory has greatly en-riched the study of industrialization, the modern working class,various revolutionary movements, and the emergence of empire.

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No doubt his cosmopolitan backgroundfrom Alexandria throughVienna and Berlin to Londonunderpinned by his breadth ofknowledge, generosity of spirit, and mastery of languages and

topics, has helped him avoid the narrow and doctrinaire approachso common among lesser Marxist historians.

Yet as in the case of Goethes Faust, there are, alas, two soulsdwelling in his breast. There is Dr. Hobsbawm, the towering his-torian, using the tools of the Marxist tradition to explore history,and there is Comrade Eric, the revolutionary, who, despite dis-tancing himself from debilitating party orthodoxies, is still captive

to ideology. How to Change the World, which includes more than adozen essays written between 1956 and 2009, some published herefor the first time in English, brings out this duality. Although thevolumes title is slightly misleadingthis is not a compendium forrevolutionary praxisthe book is one of the best accounts show-ing how Marxs thought did in fact change the world.

Hobsbawm traces Marxs influence on everything from politics

to art in several countries from the late nineteenth century to thepresent. He shows how, despite Marxisms aversion to nationalism,Marxist analysis helped develop and sustain nationalist movementsamong some oppressed peoples. And his chapter on AntonioGramsci will make this influential Italian Marxist thinker seemless esoteric and enigmatic to the English reading public.

Of greatest contemporary interest is the opening essay, MarxToday, in which Hobsbawm brings his acute mind to bear on thepostCold War era. He claims that the demise of Soviet-styleMarxism has paradoxically made the study of Marx more relevant,liberating Marxism from the straitjacket imposed on it by its statusas the official ideology of a repressive regime. Yet he also concedesthat Marxs vision of the proletariat expropriating the expropriatorsis irrelevant today (although he contends that Marxs understand-ing of the dynamism of capitalist society is helpful in addressing

capitalisms crises, such as the current global economic recession).Hobsbawm is determined not just to salvage Marx from the de-tritus of the Soviet catastrophe but also to help him regain his placein the pantheon of modern thinkers able to develop comprehensive


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and adaptive understandings of human affairs. Perhaps because hedoes not want to sound doctrinaire or old-fashioned, Hobsbawmrefrains from calling this unique quality of Marxs thought dialec-

tical, but this is precisely its chief characteristic.Still, as masterful as his analyses are, Hobsbawm remains un-

willing to address certain problematic facts. Take ethnicity.Given his Jewish background, Hobsbawm is rightly sensitive to therole of Jewish intellectuals in various Marxist movements, focus-ing in particular on those in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Hetersely castigates most non-Jewish intellectuals in Germany

after unification, in 1871, for being profoundly committed to theWilhelmine Empire. This allegiance left the German social de-mocratic movement bereft of intellectual leadership and thusthrust such Jews as Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, and RosaLuxemburg into leadership positions. Similarly, the emergenceof various nationalist movements within the Austro-HungarianEmpire in the late nineteenth century drove many Jewish intel-

lectuals to socialism or Zionism, the only places where they couldfeel at home.Hobsbawm describes all this with acuity but does not really

grapple with the problem it poses for his broader framework. Ac-cording to Marxist theory, class background should determinewhere people end up politically. But it was the Jewish backgroundof these activists, not their identity as bourgeois intellectuals, thatbrought them to the shores of Marxism. This suggests that all his-tory is not class history (as Marx would have had it), that national,ethnic, and religious affiliations matter, too. But if Hobsbawmadmitted that, he would have to reject a major facet of theoreticalMarxism, something he is unwilling to do.

A more serious omission concerns the Soviet elephant in theroom. Hobsbawms 2002 autobiography dealt with his chang-ing attitudes toward the Soviet Union over the years, and in

many cases, he acknowledged the inner tensions of his rela-tionship to the Soviet experience and the havoc that experiencecreated among Western Communists. But he shied away fromgrappling with the fundamental question: Did Russias 1917

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Leninist coup lead inexorably to Soviet tyranny, and was theattempt to force a socialist vision on a preindustrial society doomedfrom the very beginning? Readers will not find a definitive answer

to this question in any of Hobsbawms past work, nor in thisvolume, either.

This elephant casts other shadows. Hobsbawm discussesMarxist intellectuals in the 1930s without mentioning their re-actions to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, between the SovietUnion and Nazi Germany. In his autobiography, Hobsbawmcame to terms with the fact that he himself justified the pact at

the time, with the usual language then prevalent among Com-munists. But he does not mention the pact here, and ignoringsuch an episode in a historical account of Marxism in the 1930sis simply inexcusable.

On a certain level, one can commiserate with Hobsbawm, aprominent member of the mainly (although of course not exclu-sively) Jewish interwar intelligentsia that believed in the redemp-

tive vision of Marxism. The Soviet Union became a beacon ofhope for this group after the slaughters of World War I and thecollapse of European democracies and economies in the 1920sand 1930s. The tendency to close ones eyes at first to blemishesin the Soviet system was understandable. But this pose becamean intellectual and moral prison when what initially could havebeen viewed as childhood illnesses of the revolution transmogri-fied into the hideous crimes of Stalinism. Some had the courage toliberate themselves; others clung to their hopes even as darknessdescended at noon.

Hobsbawm tried to maintain both his integrity as a historianand his beliefs. He should be thanked for the historical gifts he hasbestowed on his readers. But at the end of the day, he never ade-quately addresses the fact that Marxism failed utterly as a revolu-tionary movement, not once but three timesin the West, where

no proletarian revolution occurred; in the East, where what wassupposed to be an emancipatory redemption ended up as a hellishnightmare; and in the developing world, where communistregimes brought misery wherever they gained power.


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the crisis this timeThe recent global financial crisis has once again shaken peoples

faith in the ability of capitalism to provide a sustainable flow ofbroad-based economic benefits to the public at large. It serves asa reminder of the fragility of the postWorld War II orderMller describes. Recent demonstrations in Europe and theUnited States, meanwhile, attest to the failures of democraticgovernments to respond adequately to the crisis or satisfy publicdemands for action. Mller is aware that the hard-won postwar

equilibrium should not be taken for granted, and he holds up thecrisis of 1968 as an indication of its brittleness.Todays economic crisis is also a reminder of the contemporary

relevance of the issues that Marx and his disciples, includingHobsbawm, have agonized over. Dialectically (if one is still allowedto use the term), Hobsbawms suggestions for how elements ofMarxist thinking can inform solutions to the crisis might still

rescue the approach from total relegation to the dustbin of history.As the crisis has made clear, market fundamentalism, radical pri-vatization, and a universal fear of state power are overly simplisticanswers to the question of how to sustain a modern, globalizedeconomic order. One way of looking at Marx, after all, has alwaysbeen to see him in the context of the Enlightenment project andthe German tradition ofBildung, as a thinker who, when facedwith the horrors of early industrial capitalism, tried to bring abouta world of universal justice, solidarity, fairness, and humanity. Inhis own way, Hobsbawm continues to speak to that dream.

The two books are helpful in unsettling the ideological com-placency of contemporary neoliberalism, which helped pave theway for the crisis even as it never imagined such a thing couldhappen. As both Mller and Hobsbawm show, the triumph ofliberal democracy was made up of many ingredients, and neglecting

any one of them is an invitation to trouble.

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