The Graduate Institute inaugurates a series of interviews between faculty members and visiting professors or guests, beginning with this interview of Stephen Holmes by Shalini Randeria (ANSO). Stephen Holmes, Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law at New York University and an expert on the evolution of liberalism and antiliberalism in Europe, gave a speech on 9 March titled “How Democracies Die” to mark the launch of the Institute’s Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. Professor Shalini Randeria, Director of the new centre, discusses with him why political liberalism faces such serious challenges today.
I’d like to begin with a historical question given your work on the history of liberal thought. How do you see the relation between the current audacious assault on liberal values and institutions and the antiliberalism of the 1930s?
This is a big question. Many of the slogans of the 1930s are repeated today, such as “America first”, “rootless cosmopolitanism” or “national greatness”. One interesting aspect of this relates to our friend and hero Albert Hirschman and his first book, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945). It was about the way an underregulated international trading system, which was based on bilateral bullying and desire for domination, created pressure within states that fomented anti-liberal politics. That’s a very interesting connection: we’re drifting towards a new dismantling of the international trading system that Albert Hirschman had helped create and that was created in a way to overcome a last bout of anti-liberal politics. Yet the situation is different from that of the 1930s because there’s so much more economical prosperity today than there was then in Germany, in France, everywhere. We’re so much richer. Nonetheless, the kind of insecurity, the sense of not understanding where we’re headed, and of course the real or imagined threat of having our cultures overrun by immigrants are producing some of the same pressures. The last time we had a big opening to the world, before World War I, created war! So this is a big shock that’s happening to the system. That doesn’t exactly answer your question but you’re right: this isn’t the first time that we’ve experienced illiberalism. Anti-liberalism has been with us practically since the advent of liberalism, at least since the early nineteenth century, so there is a cultural tendency – and Albert Hirschman would have understood that very well – to react to the dominant ideology with a counter-ideology. And there are moments when the counter-ideology – in this case antiliberalism – threatens to become dominant itself.
Does liberalism really ignore the need for national identities and for political leadership? What are the weaknesses of liberalism today?
I do think that a word that younger people do not feel as being as toxic or radioactive as we might is the word “leader” translated into German… but of course we have had great leaders. Churchill and Roosevelt were liberal leaders. There is a cliché that liberalism promotes a society based on a network of consumers and producers, that there is the market, the rule of law, and no leadership. If you think about the European Union, the criticism has a certain relevance: Where is the leadership? Who can make a strong decision? Who can respond to a crisis? The sense that the European Union has trapped the European states in a situation where leadership is a scarce resource is a fairly plausible charge, but many accusations against liberalism are not true, and liberal societies are nationalistic, are bounded, and have laws against open immigration, and these are all compatible.
However, liberalism has a hard time justifying either borders or membership rules, and this is one of its weaknesses, that the arguments that liberals can give against the free movement of capital are very plausible but their argument against the free movement of people is not that obvious. I think the reason right-wing and populist parties are doing so well is that they have a much clearer argument than the liberals do about borders, boundaries or identities. They have a stronger argument because if you are a cosmopolitan, a multiculturalist, a universalist, you basically have a very practical argument for boundaries: it’s the only way you can organise things that makes sense. But you don’t say, as an ethnonationalist would say, that a tragedy where hundreds of American children die in a bus accident is morally worse than if it were Indian children. That’s absurd from a liberal point of view, and all we have to say is that we have a more practical responsibility; it’s a weaker connection. So when ethnonationalists or nativist forces ask, “So you want to invite all of Africa in Europe?”, you do say no, but you don’t have such a good reason as they do. They say, “We’re protecting our culture”; we say, “We have to protect our liberal values”, but still, it’s a weaker argument.