Present-day Syria, as bad as it is, is not the most afflicted place in the world. For a long time that title possibly belonged to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A civil war has been raging there on and off for nearly two decades (currently more off than on). The Syrian civil war has confounded the international community, which has not known what to do to stop it. But at least it has been thinking about it; occasionally it has been thinking about little else. The war in the DRC rarely got international attention, and almost no one was thinking about how to stop it. Few people outside the country were thinking about it at all. Like Syria, the DRC is a past victim of imperial exploitation. But nothing that happened in Syria can compare to the horrors inflicted on the Belgian Congo at the end of the nineteenth century. The country was pillaged for its rich supply of natural resources (above all, rubber), and its native population was brutally worked to extract the wealth for their imperial masters. Many millions died as a result. The Congolese have been the victims of genocide and persistent exploitation. The country remains impoverished and divided. Life expectancy is currently around forty-five, not very much higher than it was in England in Hobbes’s time. Per capita GDP is $300 per year. This is more than ten times lower than Syria. It is more than one hundred times lower than Denmark.
These aren’t God-given facts. They don’t reflect racial differences. This is a man-made catastrophe. We did it. So why don’t we do more to fix it? The people of Europe, only a few thousand miles to the north, lead lives that are entirely remote from those experienced by the inhabitants of central Africa. This is one reason why they don’t do anything about the gulf between them: it doesn’t impinge. But that is no justification for doing nothing. The gulf is real, and it is grotesque. It raises an obvious question: how can it possibly be fair? Why should one group of people, simply because of an accident of birth, have the chance to lead comfortable and secure lives while others have little chance, through no fault of their own? The population of the DRC is close to 80 million, roughly the same as the population of Germany. The number of people in Africa who live on less than $1.25 (or 1 Euro) a day is nearly equivalent to the total population of Western Europe. One planet: two worlds.
Of course, it would be a mistake to paint the DRC as nothing but horror. The West of the country is much more stable than the East. Congolese society contains pockets of prosperity, just as prosperous societies contain pockets of misery. Moreover, happiness is not just a material concept. Even the very poorest people can experience it: it’s horribly patronising to assume otherwise. Nor are the grimmest parts of the DRC representative of much of the rest of Africa, where relative political stability, alongside the resources freed up by the new technology, is spurring economic growth and dragging millions of people out of the worst sort of poverty (as many as 100 million in the last ten years alone). Nevertheless, the widespread poverty that persists is an enduring calamity. Having to scrape an existence on less than a Euro a day is no way to live. The miserable burden often falls on women, whose lives are blighted by extreme poverty in countless different ways, ranging from the absence of educational opportunities to the lack of basic healthcare to the persistent threat of violence. Anyone from the developed world would find it an intolerable existence. So why do we tolerate it for others?
Politics can make the difference between heaven and hell on earth. But politics seems remarkably indifferent to closing the gap between them. Previous chapters were about the importance of politics and its scope. This chapter is about its limits. Where we most need politics to help – where the need for help is most obvious – is often where politics fails to deliver.
Calling the recent plight of the DRC a civil war can make it sound more organised than it really is. Some areas of the country have effectively been reduced to a condition of anarchy, not far off a Hobbesian state of nature. The same is true of its smaller northern neighbour the Central African Republic, which has been described by its own prime minister as ‘an anarchy, a non-state’. There is no order and no security: armed gangs rule, the basic institutions of civil society have ceased to function, life is precarious and horribly unpredictable. In a civil war people are afraid of the other side winning. In parts of central Africa it can be hard to know how anyone could win. In these circumstances, it makes sense to be afraid of everyone. But if this is the Hobbesian nightmare, Hobbes is little help in showing how to get out of it. That’s because his thought experiment wasn’t designed for people in a state of nature. It was designed for people who have a functioning politics to warn them not to dabble with the alternatives. Hobbes explains why we need to escape the state of nature. He doesn’t explain how to escape if you’re stuck there.
The answer may seem obvious: these countries require a functioning state. They need to choose politics. But which politics? There are by now lots of alternatives to choose from. The best would probably be something like Denmark. But it seems absurd to say the DRC should strive to be more like Denmark, given the vast gulf that separates them. The stability of Danish politics is a product of Denmark’s own particular history and geography, and it has multiple interlocking causes: the Protestant Reformation and the spread of literacy; the rise of organised farming and labour movements in the nineteenth century; the end of military conflict and the stabilisation of Scandinavian borders; the free exchange of ideas and goods with the rest of Europe. You can hardly take this package and transplant it to twenty-first-century Africa. But nor is it clear that you can cherry-pick bits of it to see if they can work their magic independently. Yes, the DRC could do with organised farmers and labour movements, peaceful relations with its neighbours, greater access to international trade. But how do you achieve these things in isolation from each other? How do you get to be Denmark without being Denmark?
Denmark is far from the only model available. There are plenty of other political options between chaos and peaceful security. The world is full of countries that are better off in political terms than the DRC but worse off than Denmark. There are authoritarian technocracies like China (on the largest scale) and Singapore (on the smallest), populist democracies like Venezuela, semi-constitutional theocracies like Iran, semi-militarised democracies like Sri Lanka and semi-democratic oligarchies like Russia. Political scientists call these ‘hybrid’ regimes: they are a mish-mash of different elements, often combining bits of democratic practice with elements of authoritarianism. All of these regime types have plenty of things wrong with them, including varying levels of corruption and abuse of power by their rulers. But they all have functioning states and a degree of political stability. So did Syria until very recently. At present its politics has broken down, but just a few years ago it was a relatively stable regime, if a very unpleasant one: a repressive one-party state. Should the DRC at least try to become more like pre-war Syria, which worked in part, before it thinks about becoming Denmark, which works in full? Again, the proposition seems absurd. No one should wish the politics of Syria on any other nation. Nor would it be any easier to make the transition. Syrian politics is a product of its own particular history and geography. You can’t get to Denmark via Syria.
Hobbes thought it was a bad idea to compare regime types because it breeds resentment and wishful thinking. People will want something better than what they’ve got, imagining that the grass is always greener. Yet once there is clear evidence that some regime types do work better than others, it is very hard not to compare and, if you are in one of the ones that doesn’t work, wish for something better. What happens if the grass really is greener? When we are able to see the difference successful states can make, it is reasonable to want to know how they did it. The problem is knowing what to do with that knowledge. Seeing how they did it doesn’t tell you how to do it yourself.
This puzzle was apparent within a century of Hobbes writing Leviathan. The founding father of modern comparative politics was a French aristocrat, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, whose great work The Spirit of the Laws was published in 1748. By this point Hobbes’s argument about Lucca being no better than Constantinople seemed very out of date. It had been overtaken by events. Now there was something that clearly worked better than either: the revised British constitution, which had emerged from the revolution of 1688. Under this system power was divided between king and parliament, and between the two houses of parliament – Lords and Commons – allowing each to act as a check on the other. This was much preferable to any political system that concentrated power in the hands of a single ruler. Montesquieu certainly preferred it. ‘In Turkey,’ he wrote, ‘where these powers are united in the Sultan’s person, the subjects groan under the most dreadful oppression.’ Italian city-states were just as unsatisfactory. Their constitutions concentrated power in the hands of their republican rulers, so that ‘the government is obliged to have recourse to as violent methods for its support as even that of the Turks.’ No one benefits from a regime of violence and fear. Stable politics requires restraint. A constitution on the British model could provide it.
However, Britain could not serve as a reliable model for other places wanting to know how to acquire such a constitution. There were two reasons for this. First, every country’s political system was a product of its particular circumstances. Montesquieu was adamant that geography, history, climate, culture and custom all went together to make up a nation’s politics. The British constitution did not emerge ready-made out of the revolution of 1688. It was also a result of the long history that preceded the revolution, and it drew on all sorts of influences, from ancient republicanism through medieval folklore to memories of the civil war, twisted and adapted to suit the needs of the modern age. A country’s constitution was not simply a legal arrangement. It was more like a physiological condition: the thing that makes the body politic tick. Each country had its own. They might superficially resemble each other – various northern European countries in Montesquieu’s time had features in common with England – but they all had their own individual character. Because these constitutions do not emerge out of thin air, they can never be transplanted ready-made to somewhere else.
Second, Britain’s constitution worked because it was complex. What Montesquieu called ‘constitutional monarchy’ was preferable to more straightforward systems, whether straight monarchy or straight democracy. These suffered from the disadvantage of their simplicity: when something went wrong, there was nothing to stop everything from running out of control. Under a constitution like the British one the different parts of the political system restrained each other, moderating excesses and limiting expectations. The interplay was the essence of the system. So although the difference between a good constitution and a bad one was easy to summarise – just as a healthy person is easy to tell apart from a sick one – a good constitution could never in itself be easily summarised. Indeed, if you could sum it up in a few sentences, it almost certainly wouldn’t work. The American constitution, which was influenced by some of Montesquieu’s ideas, is sometimes assumed to be a simple document, because it is relatively short by modern standards. But it is far from simple. If it were, it could hardly have lasted so long. Americans have spent more than two hundred years mining its depths, and they are nowhere near finished.
As the US example shows, we have come a long way from the eighteenth-century British version of constitutional monarchy (which was effectively the system the American revolutionaries rejected, though the influence of Montesquieu shows they were pretty conflicted about it). In different places and at different times, countries have democratised their constitutions without relapsing into crude and fearful politics. Elected heads of state have replaced kings and queens (except in places like Britain and its former dependencies, or the Scandinavian countries, where kings and queens have simply been deprived of all their powers). The franchise has gradually been extended to include those categories of adults who were previously excluded (in Montesquieu’s time the British electorate constituted just 2 per cent of the total population, all of them propertied, Anglican men). British Catholics, Jews and working men were enfranchised during the course of the nineteenth century. Women did not get the vote until the second decade of the twentieth century, and not on the same terms as men until 1928. The voting age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen in 1969. Now there is talk of lowering it to sixteen. The European Court of Human Rights has recently ruled to extend the franchise to serving prisoners, though the current British government is resisting.
Other countries have followed a similar pattern of slow and choppy progress towards greater democracy, some considerably slower and choppier than others. (French women did not get the vote until 1945, more than 150 years after the men; in Switzerland women did not get the vote until 1971; the country that moved to universal suffrage for men and women earliest was New Zealand, in 1893.) Elsewhere the change has often been quicker. Many countries have democratised rapidly, some, such as Japan, in the aftermath of the Second World War and others, such as Poland, following the end of the Cold War. Modern democratic citizens have now acquired an extensive portfolio of rights backed up by increasingly elaborate systems of law. Discrimination on the grounds of gender, sexual orientation, race or religion, though it has hardly been abolished, has been greatly curtailed. The direction of change is not all one way. In the United States the Supreme Court recently ruled invalid key parts of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, paving the way for renewed discretion on the part of individual states to disenfranchise individual voters. Democratic progress can never be taken for granted. Nevertheless, the evolution and the spread of the politics of constitutional restraint since Montesquieu wrote have been remarkable.
Yet in one respect the situation remains unchanged. In their best-selling 2012 book Why Nations Fail the political economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson set out to explain the fundamental difference between good and bad politics. Their explanation is very simple (or, as they call it, ‘parsimonious’). Politics works when it is ‘inclusive’: i.e., when people with power still have good reasons to take account of what others want. Politics does not work when it is ‘extractive’: i.e., when people with power see it as an opportunity to take what they can get while they have the chance. (In the jargon of political science this is called ‘rentseeking’, meaning that political office is treated as a means of extracting rent.) In inclusive states, rival groups realise that they are better off taking turns to pursue their goals, because the alternative of pursuing them regardless would be worse for everyone. Under extractive regimes, rival groups do not think it is worth waiting. Politics becomes now or never. So extractive politics is essentially a failure of trust: a politics of ‘diffidence’, as Hobbes would call it, leading to endless preemptive strikes. The key to achieving lasting stability and prosperity is to move from an extractive regime to an inclusive one. On this account, Britain’s constitutional revolution in 1688 remains a pivotal moment in modern history. Every state, if it is to be successful, needs something similar.
Acemoglu and Robinson insist that there is nothing deterministic about their account of political success. Their aim is to show that the plight of impoverished nations is not predetermined by climate, or geography, or culture, or religion. No nation is fated to fail. They point to the case of North and South Korea: essentially the same country, with the same geography, made up of the same people. But the divergent political paths the two states have followed since 1953 has made one among the wealthiest nations in the world and the other among the poorest. The difference inclusive politics makes could hardly be starker.
But though it is easy to summarise what makes the difference, it is very hard to know how to make it happen. The problem is that the move to inclusive political institutions is always highly contingent: it is a consequence of the complicated interplay between chance historical events and deeprooted social forces. It is impossible to stage-manage. You can’t ‘do’ 1688–89 anywhere except in Britain in 1688–89, and even then the leading actors were hardly in control of what they were doing. It was a complex, haphazard, fractious process. Stable political outcomes are too dependent on conditional political choices to be readily translatable from one setting to another. Context trumps everything. The crucial feature of inclusivity is that it is internal to the state in question: the various actors come to see their choices as framed by the choices of other members of the state.
Attempting to impose inclusivity on states from the outside won’t work. It would mean treating inclusive politics as though it were extractive: i.e., as an outcome you can force on people. Extractive politics, by contrast, can be imposed from the outside, because it is by definition a kind of imposition. Bad politics translates from one place to another much more readily than good politics. It only requires ruthlessness. Tolstoy says at the beginning of Anna Karenina that all happy families are alike, whereas every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way. In politics it’s the other way round. Unhappy states are relatively alike: they are all places where the same sorts of exploitative behaviour recur. Happy states have to learn how to be happy in their own particular way.
There is another big difficulty with thinking that inclusivity is the solution to the problem of political failure. Inclusive states are also extractive. They take advantage of their relative stability and prosperity to exploit nations less fortunate than themselves. States exist in competition with other states and often ensnare them in lasting relations of exploitation and domination. Parsimonious theories of politics tend to ignore this. (It is one of the gaps in Hobbes’s account that he neglects the role of economic competition between states, preferring to think of stable states as economically self-sufficient.) The 1688 revolution in Britain set this country on the path to democracy, but it also set many other countries around the world on the path to domination by Britain. The move by Britain towards stable parliamentary government before anyone else produced, among other things, the British Empire, which was a highly extractive regime, whatever its current defenders may say. The British did not take turns with their colonies.
The hideous treatment of the Congo in the late nineteenth century – one of the worst examples of extractive politics in all history – was also undertaken by an inclusive state. Late nineteenth-century Belgium was a constitutional monarchy which, despite being riven by deep social, cultural and ethnic divisions (workers vs. capitalists, Catholics vs. liberals, Flemings vs. Walloons), had found a way to hold itself together. This relative political stability enabled its rulers to build themselves an empire: tiny Belgium got to plunder the heart of Africa. The ability to build an empire enabled Belgium’s rulers to offset some of the risks of domestic political instability. It was a poisonous compact. Acemoglu and Robinson are right to say that nothing in politics is inevitable: bad political outcomes are no more predetermined than good ones. Inclusive states don’t have to export violence and exploitation. However, the historical record shows that they often do.
Inclusivity is no sort of political panacea. It is hard to achieve. It is hard to translate. Sometimes it is hard even to identify. Though the difference between inclusive and extractive states is often clear (South vs. North Korea), it can be very difficult to know where to classify individual states (just as it can be hard to say whether an individual person is healthy or not). Which, for instance, is contemporary South Africa? Apartheid South Africa was self-evidently an extractive regime. But since 1991 South Africa has mixed constitutional reform with continuing economic exclusion. For an ostensibly inclusive state the country has yet to extend the advantages of its political transformation to large numbers of its citizens, who remain very disadvantaged. Poor, black South Africans are both better off than they have ever been and no better off than they have ever been. By contrast, the present Chinese state is essentially an extractive regime – the Chinese Communist Party does not take it in turns to rule and is plagued with corruption as a result – yet its rulers have tried to include as many Chinese as possible in the benefits of the country’s growing prosperity. China is currently investing heavily in Africa, including in the DRC, which has seen significant improvements to parts of its infrastructure. (China is certainly putting much more money into the rest of Africa than the South African government is.) At the same time China is extracting large amounts of Africa’s natural resources for its own domestic use. The Chinese are playing a double game in Africa. It will take a long time to know who the winners and the losers are.
There is nothing straightforward about political success and political failure, however stark the difference between them. Getting politics right remains a fearsomely difficult business.
However, at some moments in history this gets quickly forgotten. One such moment occurred in 1989. The end of the Cold War was so sudden and so welcome that it was tempting to read it as a morality tale. Democracy had won. Communism had lost, confirming the final defeat of totalitarianism over the course of the twentieth century. The difference between good politics and bad politics looked glaringly obvious. History seemed to have given its answer to the problem of politics. The answer was Western liberal democracy.
The person who often gets blamed for pushing this simplistic view is Francis Fukuyama, thanks to an article he published in the summer of 1989 (a few months before the Berlin Wall came down), which he called ‘The End of History’. Blaming Fukuyama for over-egging the events of 1989 is not really fair. He did not argue that history was coming to an end in that year. His article merely claimed that over the course of modern political history the advantages of liberal democracy had become increasingly apparent, to the point that it was hard to come up with any viable alternatives. It didn’t follow that democracy was about to triumph everywhere, or that the existing democracies were going to have it all their own way. Fukuyama thought plenty could still go wrong. He was worried that, without plausible alternatives, Western democracy was liable to become stale and unimaginative. Just as Hobbes has an undeserved reputation as a pessimist, Fukuyama has an undeserved reputation as an optimist. He felt the coming ascendancy of democracy ought to be approached with considerable trepidation.
Fukuyama was right to be worried. But he was worrying about the wrong thing. Victory in the Cold War did not leave Western democracy flat and lifeless. It made it reckless and cavalier. The democracies went wrong because they got carried away with their success. They mistook it for a positive achievement. It wasn’t. The triumph of democracy during the twentieth century had essentially been a negative one. Democracy didn’t come out on top because of all the good it did, but rather because of all the bad it avoided. Churchill was speaking the truth when in 1947 he called democracy ‘the worst system of government apart from all the others that have been tried from time to time’.
Modern democracy remains at root a politics of restraint. It is a good way to stop the worst from happening. This can make an enormous practical difference. As the Indian economist Amartya Sen has shown, democracies do not suffer from famines, because the potential victims can let their governments know what is happening in time to prevent it. The historical record indicates that democracies do not go to war with each other. Democracies allow individual citizens the opportunity to register discontent with their politicians. Fukuyama thought the recognition of personal dissatisfaction was a key reason for the general satisfaction with democracy, because it confers dignity on the individual citizen. Democracy lets people let off steam, which stops them boiling over. Nonetheless, these remain negative achievements. They are not sufficient to count as an answer to the problems of politics.
What has happened since Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history shows that the politics of restraint cannot do everything. Big mistakes are made when we assume it can. Democracy has not, for instance, solved the problem of inequality. Since the mid-1970s, and more rapidly since the end of the Cold War, the Western world has seen inequality widen. This has been most noticeable in the United States. The rich have got much richer over recent decades. Economic gains have been largely confined to the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, and even within that group it is those at the very top who have seen the biggest advances in their net worth. The richest 0.01 per cent, or just 16,000 households, now own nearly 5 per cent of America’s total wealth (for an average of $23,000,000 each), a proportion of the spoils not seen for more than a century, since the last age of the robber barons. At the same time the poor are not much better off than they were a generation ago. Many of the middle classes are significantly worse off. Wages have stagnated while investment income has boomed.
It looks like a politically toxic combination: to those who have shall be given more, while to those who are struggling shall be given nothing at all. Why do the not-so-rich put up with it? Why don’t they use the political system to redress the balance? After all, the 99 per cent could easily outvote the 1 per cent. The US is meant to be a democracy. But American democracy was not designed to allow largescale redistributions of income at the behest of the voters. If anything, it was designed to prevent it. The founders of the American republic were worried that the democratic majority might use its power to take money from the wealthy minority. (Their most acute fear was that the poor would vote for a cancellation of all debts.) So they organised a complicated political system intended to make it difficult for the majority to get its way, or even to know what its way is. The politics of restraint stops politicians from taking things that don’t belong to them. It protects people from the abuse of political power. It doesn’t empower politics to protect them from economic injustice.
The result is that liberal democracies can allow large structural inequalities to build up over time. Modern democratic citizens have plenty of ways to complain about politics, but they often lack the resources to turn their personal dissatisfactions into collective action. It usually takes a disaster to trigger structural change. The United States only moved to a welfare system that could provide for its poorest citizens after the Great Depression, which threatened the country with collapse. Europe only moved to its relatively egalitarian welfare states following the calamity of the Second World War. Without a disaster, liberal democracies have a tendency to drift towards unfairness. Citizens who are protected from political concentrations of power are left exposed to economic concentrations of power. This is what happened in an accelerated fashion after 1989. The absence of any serious threats to democracy allowed the democracies to slide into a new gilded age.
What can we do about this? One option, though not a very attractive one, is to hope for a fresh disaster to shake up the system. The crash of 2008 was bad, but so far not bad enough to bring about structural change. (In 2013 the megarich are relatively even better off than they were in 2007.) So we would need something worse. Something worse than 2008 would have to be very bad indeed. Who wants another global depression or a world war? Nothing seems worth that. We need to consider alternative remedies.
Since the 1970s, two possible answers to the problem of inequality have presented themselves. The first comes from political philosophy. In recent decades philosophers have devoted extraordinary amounts of time and energy to thinking up schemes of justice that might be consistent with liberal democracy but able to plug its gaping holes of unfairness. The best-known of these schemes is the one associated with the philosopher John Rawls, who argued that in a democracy everyone should be able to recognise the essential fairness of a broadly redistributive economic system – one that works, as he put it, to the advantage of the least advantaged. Rawls constructed a thought experiment to make his case. Imagine if you didn’t know if you were rich or poor. What political system would you want? Rawls thought we would all choose to insure against being very poor, even if it cost us the chance to be very rich. The point of this thought experiment was to get people to think about democratic justice in impersonal terms. The problem is that it was only a thought experiment. Actually existing democracies encourage people to think about justice in highly personal terms: personal abuses, personal complaints, personal remedies. That’s why it can be so hard to get even the most disadvantaged citizens to see their predicament in the round.
Rawls published his best-known book, A Theory of Justice, in 1971. It has dominated American political philosophy ever since. Yet over the same period American democracy has moved in the opposite direction to the one he proposed. When Rawls died in 2002, some of the tributes noted that his ideas were finally being picked up in the speeches and writings of an American president. Unfortunately that president was not George W. Bush, who was then in the White House. It was Josiah Bartlet, the Nobel-prizewinning economist and all-round good guy who occupied the make-believe White House in The West Wing. Rawls’s ideas are powerful philosophy. The danger is that they turn into fantasy politics.
More recently a different philosophical approach to the problem of structural injustice has emerged. If modern democracy results in a thin and essentially negative conception of politics, why not try to beef it up by reconnecting it with its republican roots? The core idea of classical republicanism is that people need power, not just protection. They require this power to resist the power of the rich to exploit their material advantages to dominate public life. A neutral politics of fairness is not enough to remedy the imbalance. Republican justice requires an active politics of redress. The inspiration for this idea is often Machiavelli, who has been resuscitated by contemporary political philosophers in an attempt to break free from the long shadow of Hobbes.
Although Machiavelli is essentially a pre-modern thinker, his version of republicanism has all sorts of possible modern uses. It can apply wherever one group is dominated by another: the poor by the rich, women by men, children by adults, patients by doctors, even animals by humans. The ideal of non-domination implies that politics has to provide a meaningful corrective for every such relationship: it needs to give anyone who is on the receiving end of unequal treatment the means to fight back. These tools will inevitably go beyond conventional political rights, such as the right to vote. That is never going to be enough on its own. (Certainly it won’t work for animals.) Non-domination requires material help. The disadvantaged need ready access to information, communication, education and representation. This means prioritising social institutions such as trade unions and welfare schemes like universal health-care and free childcare. It also takes money. If every adult was paid a living wage by the state, no woman need find herself economically trapped in an abusive relationship. She could always afford to get out. That’s not the republicanism Machiavelli had in mind, but it’s a plausible extension of his confrontational view of politics.
Contemporary republican philosophers don’t want to go back to seventeenth-century Lucca: there wasn’t much healthcare there, universal or otherwise. Rather, they want to build on modern democracy to enable it to reach its full potential. Non-domination is a negative idea, but it’s a much richer negative idea than the rival liberal democratic idea of being left alone. Yet, precisely because we have got so used to being left alone, republicanism is a hard sell in modern democracies. It makes heavy political demands on us and places a high premium on full political participation (a far higher premium than Constant did, and even he was asking for a lot). It is a more robust political philosophy than Rawls’s, because it takes power seriously. Nonetheless it does not fit neatly with liberal democracy, no matter how well the two can be made to complement each other on paper. Tackling structural inequality often goes against the grain of the politics of restraint.
That is the lesson of the other possible remedy for rising inequality: democratic populism. The countries that have made the biggest strides in reducing the gap between the very rich and the very poor have also ridden roughshod over many liberal democratic safeguards. Venezuela under Hugo Chávez had, on his death in 2012, the lowest measure for inequality anywhere in Latin America. At the same time, his years in power had been marked by ruthless power grabs, regular abuses of constitutional propriety and naked appeals to popular anger. Many individuals, particularly among the propertied classes, found themselves squeezed with no way out. Chávez held elections and he won them, by hook or by crook. His country had oil, and he spent the proceeds. Venezuela became a more equal society and a more arbitrary state under his rule. He offered one sort of justice – the redistributive kind – at the expense of the other sort – the procedural kind. Democratic populism Chávez-style indicates that they don’t go easily together.
Contemporary India suggests a similar lesson in reverse. Indian democracy has survived more or less intact since its birth in 1947 (minus a brief autocratic interlude under Indira Gandhi in the mid-1970s). Its constitution, inspired by Western models, was designed to protect the state from rampant populism. It is complex, intricate and rife with overlapping jurisdictions. Local politics competes with national politics, politicians with bureaucrats, populist democracy with the rule of law. The result has been a massive, clumsy, inefficient yet lasting politics of restraint. India continues to function as a constitutional democracy, which has brought many benefits (including the end of famine). But it has failed to solve the problem of inequality. India’s recent economic growth has been very unevenly distributed. The middle class has rapidly expanded, and there has been a vast accumulation of wealth among the super-rich elite. Meanwhile the majority of Indians still live in poverty. Although almost no one starves to death, millions of Indian children continue to suffer from malnutrition and many of them die as a result. Indian democracy has not redressed the balance of structural injustice.
Amartya Sen, in conjunction with the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, argues that it does not have to be like this. Conventional liberal democracy on their account is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for political justice. You can’t bypass it and expect the results to be anything but unjust in the long run. But nor can you rely on it. Instead, you have to expand it to include a wide range of political functions (or, as they call them, ‘capabilities’), which include access to education, to healthcare and to equal opportunities for women, along with respect for emotional well-being. The negative politics of restraint needs to be extended until it becomes a positive politics of fulfilment. That’s the aim. As Sen and Nussbaum are the first to admit, it hasn’t happened yet.
How to turn a negative into a positive remains the unresolved moral challenge of modern politics. So far, the best answers – from neo-republicanism to Sen and Nussbaum’s capabilities theory – remain answers on paper only. Recent history has not backed them up. We have had few practical lessons in how to do it in the period since Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history, which means that history is a long way from having come to an end. However, we have had one clear lesson in how not to do it. Among the negative achievements of democracy that I listed above is what has become known as ‘democratic peace theory’. This is the idea that where you have widespread democracy you don’t have war, because democracies won’t fight each other. It is a view that can be traced back to the late eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that the path to ‘perpetual peace’ lay through the global expansion of republican politics: i.e., a politics of constitutional restraint. When citizens can restrain the bellicose instincts of their governments – above all, when the people who have to pay for wars through their taxes are in a position to prevent them – good sense will prevail. Kant was no blind optimist: he thought the path to peace would be a long and winding road. But it had to pass through what we now call democracy.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century some Western politicians, led by George W. Bush, wanted to find a short cut. If democracy equals the absence of war, then why not export democracy by force of arms in order to multiply its benefits? Wars to spread democracy could be viewed as an investment in the future peace of the world: abracadabra, a negative turned into a positive. In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, democratic peace theory got annexed to the war on terror, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. These wars had a dual purpose: to combat terrorism and to plant democracy in parts of the world where it was missing. Their aims were supposed to be mutually supportive. They turned out to be mutually destructive. The war on terror did not help to implant democracy, which is proving vulnerable in all those places to which it has been spread by force of arms since 2001. The attempt to implant democracy has not helped in the fight against terror, which has proliferated in many of the places where democracy has spread (above all, in Afghanistan and Iraq). To his credit, Fukuyama was one of those who warned what could go wrong. In 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, he broke with the boosters of democratic peace theory to argue that wars for peace are playing with fire. Politics is far too complex for such straightforward solutions. Fukuyama insisted that the institutional arrangements that constrain violence – from the rule of law to economic prosperity to democratic elections – are many and overlapping; they take time to work their magic together. Forcing it usually means wrecking it.
Democratic peace theory is a good example of the perilous gap that often separates knowing that in politics from knowing how. We know that democracies don’t go to war together. But we don’t know how to make it happen. We can’t even be sure why it happens. Though Kant is often treated as a forerunner of contemporary liberal democracy, he is just as plausibly seen as a successor to Hobbes. In the field of international relations ‘Hobbesian’ is invariably translated as ‘anarchic’, since Hobbes said that states could do whatever they liked to defend themselves. It is assumed that means they will behave like individuals in the state of nature: by being fearful, mistrustful and trigger-happy. This is another misreading of Hobbes. The lawlessness of international politics does not have to result in a war of all against all. That’s because there is a crucial difference between states and individuals: well-organised states are very hard to kill. You can’t take them out when their backs are turned. Their backs are never turned: a state, unlike an individual, never switches off. States are not like people. They are like machines.
The vast, powerful, artificial entities created by modern politics have no real incentive to attack each other pre-emptively. The more powerful they are, the less incentive they have. The most powerful states of the modern age have been democracies (or ‘republics’, in Kant’s terms), the United States being the most powerful of all. States like this have an excellent/terrifying record in war, depending on your point of view. They are hard to rouse but fearsomely difficult to defeat once roused and brutal in their willingness to deploy excessive force. Democracies may not fight each other, but they rarely lose the wars they do fight against non-democracies. (Their success rate in these contests is around 80 per cent.) So it is possible that one reason democracies don’t fight each other is that they know better than to take on something so frightful. The democratic peace may not be proof of how nice democracies are. It may be evidence of how nasty they can be.
This is the most negative version of democratic peace theory. There are less negative versions, which suggest that liberal democracies encourage peace by facilitating free trade and the free movements of peoples among themselves. On this account, the European Union serves as an exemplification of what Kant had in mind. Yet even on this account, it is very hard to see how there could be any short cuts to peace, any more than there are currently short cuts to EU membership. (Turkey has been waiting for more than two decades now.) The problem remains that, outside of the magic circle of perpetual peace, its benefits are extremely unevenly distributed: democracies that exchange goods and people freely with each other can be very reluctant to extend those courtesies to anyone else. It is almost impossible to imagine the circumstances that would provoke the democracies of Western Europe to start fighting each other again. France is not going to resume its war with Germany any time soon. But it is not so hard to imagine the EU using force against some external enemy, if sufficiently alarmed and sufficiently confident of its ability to prevail. A future conflict with Africa – perhaps over mass migration – in which the Europeans deploy excessive force to get their way is still perfectly possible. What price perpetual peace then?
The truth is that we don’t know how to fight wars for peace. We don’t know how to turn democratic negatives into democratic positives. We don’t know how to spread the benefits of politics to the people who need it most. We only know that we could do it better.
So far in this chapter I have been talking about the difficulties of doing good through politics. If it is so hard, why not bypass the politics altogether and simply focus on the need to do good? There are two reasons for thinking this might be the way to go. The first is practical: there are lots of ways to do good without relying on politics. We may not know how to export democracy, but plenty of other things are much easier to export. One is money: these days you just have to press a button and it zips wherever you want it to go. Food is another: people who are starving can be helped directly by being provided with the thing they immediately require. Many parts of the world, including Europe, have much more food than they know what to do with. Other parts have nowhere near enough. So move it!
The second reason to focus on the need to do good is that global inequality constitutes a moral failure as much as a political one. Allowing so many human beings to face a constrained and perilous existence when we have the resources to alleviate it can be viewed as a form of wickedness. That is how it has been painted by the moral philosopher Peter Singer, in a famous argument that draws an analogy with how we would behave if we encountered a drowning child. Imagine you pass a pond and you see a child about to go under. Would you dive in to help, if nothing was preventing you? Of course you would. No one would think twice, even if it were a serious inconvenience. Yes, your clothes will get wet, and yes, you might end up late for whatever you were on your way to do. So what? It would be unconscionable to walk on by. Now what if the child is thousands of miles away rather than right in front of your eyes, and starving or dying of a preventable disease rather than drowning? You still have the power to rescue the situation by extending your help: you can send money to stop it from happening. How can it be acceptable to walk on by in this case and not in the other? Why should mere physical distance make all the moral difference? Singer says that it can’t. If you have the capacity to prevent a death and choose not to exercise it, your behaviour is morally indefensible, regardless of where the disaster is taking place. Pleading inconvenience – the money you spend to save a life is money you would rather have spent to make your own life a little more comfortable – is no excuse.
Singer argues that anyone in the West who has reached a comfortable level of affluence, beyond which any extra income is merely convenient rather than essential, has a moral obligation to give the surplus away to the planet’s drowning children. What’s the cut-off point? No one can say exactly, but another moral philosopher, Toby Ord, founder of the charity Giving What We Can, hit the news in 2009 by suggesting that an income of £30,000 a year was more than enough, and he would make do with £20,000. This made headlines because it is so rare to hear of people taking Singer’s argument literally. Other moral philosophers have tried to pick holes in Singer’s case, indicating that he has missed crucial features of our obligations to people with whom we have direct contact. Certainly the position Singer adopts is intensely morally demanding. But that’s not the problem. Morality is meant to be demanding, otherwise what’s the point of it? The real problem is politics. No matter how compelling Singer’s argument is in moral terms, politics gets in the way.
Politics intrudes from two directions. First of all, it makes the inhabitants of stable, prosperous states – the ones with the power to help – insular and self-regarding. Inclusive political systems have unavoidably shrunken horizons because their attention is invariably directed inwards. There is persistent evidence that the inhabitants of modern democracies think that their governments are giving far more money away in foreign aid than they actually are. A 2013 poll in the United States revealed that Americans on average thought that overseas aid accounted for 25 per cent of the federal budget, when the true figure is around 1 per cent. Because of this misapprehension, nearly half of respondents listed cutting aid as their number one priority for reducing the budget deficit. Democratic politics doesn’t necessarily make people selfish. But it does make them myopic. Citizens get used to referring their political choices to each other, not to anyone else. Moral philosophy might insist that physical distance does not matter. But inclusive politics reinforces the message that it does.
So the politics of successful states is one problem. The other is the politics of failed states. Telling individuals to bypass their governments and give money directly to the people who need it would be a more powerful message if potential donors could be sure their money would reach the people for whom it is intended. There is a big difference between rescuing a child with your bare hands and spending money to achieve the same result: in the second case you have to trust someone else to do it for you. Many of us do not have that trust. In the parts of the world where direct aid is most needed it is often impossible to ensure it gets through, because political instability and the threat of violence see much of it siphoned off by corrupt officials and predatory warlords. In the West, aid is associated with fuelling bad politics rather than bypassing it. Aid agencies do what they can to correct this impression, but it is an uphill struggle. The evidence is at best mixed. The moral clarity of the argument about rescuing drowning children is unavoidably diluted by the real-world messiness of providing practical help. Would we mind getting our clothes wet if what looked like a drowning child turned out to be a plastic bag someone has chucked away? We shouldn’t, but we do.
Taken separately, these problems need not be an insuperable barrier to increasing transfers of resources from the global rich to the global poor (and, as Ord points out, an income of £30,000 puts anyone in the top 1 per cent of global earners). If affluent citizens remained myopic but aid always had glaringly beneficial results, the myopia would probably ease over time as people were able to see the good their generosity could do. If failed states remained an obstruction but democratic citizens were more expansive in their sympathies, then over time the consistent inflow of resources would create the conditions to remedy state failure. But, taken together, rich-world insularity and poor-world instability are a deadly combination. The result is that the crusade against global poverty increasingly tries to bypass both, focusing instead on micro-initiatives and technocratic fixes. Significant progress has been made with these methods, and there is growing evidence that extreme poverty is being reduced by the smart application of help to the places where it can do most good. But technocratic fixes do nothing to remedy the indifference of the global rich to the plight of the global poor. If anything, they reinforce it. That’s the trouble with technocracy: it indicates that the problem is too complicated for us to solve. Someone else needs to take care of it.
A similar difficulty applies to the extension of our help to another group of people who might need it: the unborn. The gloomiest prognostications for the likely effects of continued climate change is that there will eventually be a lot more drowning children. As temperatures rise and sea levels rise with them, huge numbers of people are going to be exposed to catastrophic environmental hazards. The worst-affected areas will be among the poorest parts of the planet, in Asia and Africa. The rich countries of the North may end up better off. Global warming looks like a good deal for Canadians and a very bad one for the Congolese. Wealthy nations have the option to spend resources now to try to alleviate the coming threat: not vast outlays, but significant ones. (The Stern report indicates that 1–2 per cent of global GDP would be needed to make a difference.) But so far we have done next to nothing. Why? Because the people with the resources are not the ones who are most at risk. Because we don’t believe that the money we allocate would be spent efficiently. And because people alive now don’t seem unduly concerned about the plight of people not yet born. The time horizons of successful democracies tend to be as shrunken as their geographical ones.
There is a tempting analogy here with Singer’s argument about drowning children. Would you save a child who was going to die in the next few minutes? Yes. Then presumably you feel the same about a child who would die in the next few days without your immediate intervention (perhaps a few more minutes in the water would result in lingering hypothermia). And if a few days doesn’t make a difference, why should a few years? Indeed, why should the life of a child now be worth more than the life of a child at any point in the future, even if that child does not yet exist? One day, a hundred days, one year, a hundred years: it’s all the same if you have the power to prevent the disaster. Distance in time is no more morally significant than distance in space. An avoidable death is still an avoidable death.
Yet the moral force of this argument quickly gets diluted by political realities. The uncertainties created by physical distance are exacerbated in the case of time. How can we be sure that future people really need our help, or that the help we provide will eventually reach them? Given the pace of technological change, fifty or a hundred years in the future can seem impossibly remote. Life will be so different then that our help may turn out to be wasted because we have targeted it at the wrong thing. Perhaps future generations will be better placed to deal with the problems of global warming than we are, in which case we should concentrate on safeguarding technological innovation instead of worrying about distributive justice between the living and the unborn. This argument gains force if you think about what might have happened if people a hundred years ago had decided to husband their resources so as to pass them on to us. We would now be worse off, because their selflessness would have stifled innovation and economic growth. Spending in the present is an investment in the future. Saving for the future can be a waste of present resources.
Environmental sceptics (or ‘realists’, as they like to call themselves) often point out that we’ve been here many times before. Modern history is full of panics about impending catastrophe: the food is running out! (the 1790s); the coal is running out! (1860s); the oil is running out! (1920s); the planet is getting colder! (1960s); the population is going to explode! (1970s); and so on. If each of these warnings had been taken literally at the time and everyone had pulled in their horns simultaneously, then the problem might never have got fixed, because what fixed it was innovation, not retrenchment. Yet there is a serious danger to this kind of techno-optimism. It is possible that some of our present actions may produce runaway future effects that cannot be controlled. Consumption in the present doesn’t just make productive use of our current resources. It can also store up long-term harms that will be felt only by people not yet born. The time delay is what matters here. The assumption that technological advance will enable future generations to solve their problems when they need to depends on the problems revealing themselves in a timely manner. What if the damage only becomes visible when it is too late to do anything to prevent it? If people alive one hundred years ago had done something terrible to the environment whose effects were only being experienced now, we would still have the right to feel aggrieved. The fact that they also bequeathed us the internet would be little consolation.
One way to negotiate these problems is with the principle known as discounting, which says that, although we must consider the future impact of our actions, we can discount some of it because of uncertainty about what additional resources future generations will possess. If you spend a dollar today to help someone who in fifty years’ time might be ten times richer than you, then it’s the equivalent of spending 10 dollars on them. The discounting principle says that under those circumstances you only need to spend 10 cents to treat them fairly. Yet even a heavily discounted view of the future can be too much for modern democracies, where any long-term thinking tends to get drowned out by the short-term demands of the electoral cycle.
At present democratic politics in the West is heavily skewed in favour of the interests of the old over those of the young. Currently existing pensioners get far more attention than future pensioners; students get squeezed in favour of retirees; old-age benefits are often the last to go when cuts must be made. This is because old people vote more regularly than young people and democratic politicians are never far away from the next election. If the young people who could vote but don’t barely get a look in, what hope for children and the unborn, who don’t get to vote at all? Some political philosophers say the only solution is to enfranchise children of all ages and to give the unborn representatives who can speak for them in parliament. Debates could then include arguments that begin: ‘On behalf of the seven-year olds who sent me here …’ or ‘Speaking as the MP for the year 2050 …’. But this is fantasy politics. Actually existing voters – including the old – are never going to allow it.
The direct transfer of resources from those who have them to those who really need them is a moral imperative and a practical nightmare. Politics keeps getting in the way.
So here’s a final solution: instead of trying to bypass politics, why don’t we scale it up to match the size of the problem? Voters in rich states have got used to letting their governments take some of their income and having it redirected towards needier fellow citizens. Why not try it on an international level? Though inequality has been growing in the United States, it is nothing like the gulf that exists between the US and the poorest parts of Africa. If a world government could redistribute global resources on the same scale that the federal US government redistributes between, say, New York and Louisiana, the results would be transformative. (Poorer US states get significant transfers from wealthier parts of the Union, amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars a year.) All it takes is a central authority with the coercive power to levy taxes and then decide how they should get spent. No such authority presently exists at the global level. Perhaps it is time to make one.
The dream of a world state has been around for about as long as there have been nation-states competing and squabbling over the planet’s resources. It can seem like a nobrainer: if states have the power to enforce agreement but can’t agree among themselves, don’t you need a super-state to enforce agreement between states? Kant considered this option when he discussed the idea of perpetual peace at the end of the eighteenth century. But he decided it would be a bad idea. The reason he gave was the obvious one. Such a super-state would be too big. A world government would be too cumbersome and too remote from the lives of the individuals who had to live under it. Kant thought that, whatever new connections are made by advances in global communications and the spread of international trade, there is still too much global diversity to be accommodated within a single political structure. A state large enough to find room for everyone on the planet would end up hopelessly distant from the actual political experiences of many of its citizens. That argument still looks compelling today. World government remains a bad idea. As always in politics, it’s worth thinking about the worst that could happen. The worst that could happen with a global state would be a global civil war.
Sometimes it is assumed that Hobbes’s view of politics points in the direction of a world state. If individuals in the state of nature can see that they need to stop fighting and hand over power to a higher authority, why don’t sovereign states agree to the same thing? The answer, as I have already indicated, is that states are not like natural human beings. They are far harder to kill. Many states – and not just the most powerful ones – will choose to take their chances on violence. This means that it is very difficult to engineer the circumstances in which all states feel as afraid of each other as individuals feel in the state of nature. There would have to be some truly cataclysmic collective threat to get the United States, Russia and China to think they were all so vulnerable that they had no option but to pool their separate right to defend themselves. Perhaps an asteroid on collision course with earth would do it, or an invasion from outer space. These are the scenarios that really excite Hollywood producers (which is why it’s usually the US president who ends up taking charge). Until something like that actually happens, we are still in the realm of fantasy politics.
However, the practical difficulties in the way of creating a truly global politics have not stopped people from trying. Modern political history is punctuated by repeated attempts to establish an institutional framework for nation-states to come together to settle their differences. These enterprises usually gain momentum in the aftermath of disastrous international conflicts. The First World War spawned the League of Nations. The Second World War gave birth to its successor, the United Nations. These organisations fall some way short of what would be required for a world state: they possess parliaments but not an army, and they lack tax-raising powers. They have also done as much to reinforce existing power differentials between states as to correct for them.
The League of Nations was the brainchild of British and American statesmen who wanted to cement their respective nations’ grip on global politics. They never really agreed on how this could be done in a way that could satisfy both. (One reason members of the US Senate ultimately refused to sanction American participation in the League was that the end-product looked to some of them like an extension of the British Empire.) The constitution of the UN equally reflects the realities of post-war imperial power politics. The Security Council provides the big beasts of the international scene – the US, Russia and now China – with a veto over anything decided by the small fry. It also provides them with a veto to use against each other. This is enough to prevent the UN from morphing into a world government. It still seems likely that the only way for that to happen would be for one global empire to conquer the rest.
A world state is a pipe dream. But there are lots of international organisations that stand somewhere between the politics of individual nation-states and the ideal of a single government for everyone. The UN has multiple subsidiary agencies, in its various guises as peacekeeper, mediator, promoter of health and education and defender of human rights (you can find a list of them at http://www.un.org/en/aboutun/structure/). Then there are the continental unions, of which the EU is one. The African Union has grown in strength during the decade and a bit of its existence, reflecting the growing economic prosperity of some African states. There are trade zones such as NAFTA, sporting bodies like FIFA, scientific organisations like the WHO. There is the World Bank and the International Criminal Court. There is the G8 and the G20. There are numerous charitable NGOs of wide international reach. The list could go on and on. Finally it would have to include the many multinational corporations that operate in almost every national jurisdiction in the world. Some of these perform roles and provide benefits that we might normally associate with government: education, training, welfare, security. If you get a job with Google, no matter where you are, you are going to be very well looked after. The distribution of these benefits is extremely patchy, and a lot depends on finding yourself in the right place at the right time. (It’s incredibly hard to get a job with Google.) But in some places the same is true of government.
Nonetheless, despite this mind-boggling proliferation of international organisations, there are really just two basic models for international politics outside of a world state. One is the technocratic model. Here politics is understood as something that can be rationalised and improved by being parcelled out into narrow areas of technical expertise. The underlying idea is pragmatic: international co-operation functions best when it devolves onto specialists who know how to make things work. This model often relies on the ever-growing body of international law to regulate governments and to reconcile conflicts. It suffers from the failing of all technocratic models of politics: it is insufficiently political. It assumes that non-experts will put up with being told what to do by experts so long as the expertise continues to deliver benefits. That won’t happen. First, people get tired of being told what to do by experts. They will eventually want more input themselves. Second, even experts can’t keep delivering the benefits. Sooner or later they will screw up. When that happens, the international technocratic order won’t be able to handle the fall out. Politics will erupt.
The alternative model sees international politics as an extension of the modern state rather than as a limitation on it. There are ways to scale up without going all the way to world government. Take the EU. At present it is sliding towards technocracy. Bankers and lawyers, regulators and bureaucrats all tiptoe around national politicians, trying to find a way to keep the benefits going without upsetting anyone too much. Any push towards a federal European state is very muted. Germans don’t want to give their money to Greeks because they don’t see them as fellow citizens. For now no one wants to force the issue. But a genuine European state, or its equivalent in other parts of the world – a West African state, a pan-Pacific state, a Central American state – is the only plausible rival to creeping technocracy. It would require a radical change of course. In the EU it would mean European-wide political parties, fielding candidates in European-wide elections, standing on European-wide platforms. Real politics, real choices, real conflicts, and at the end of it all someone with the power to pool the resources of an entire continent if the situation demanded it. How big a change would this be? Imagine the British electorate, currently flirting with UKIP and tempted by a referendum that will offer the chance to leave the EU altogether, instead voting for a Polish or a Spanish or a Danish politician to be president of Europe and accepting the result as legitimate. Then the victorious politician using his or her legitimacy to levy taxes on British citizens at rates that served the wider interests of the European Union. And British citizens feeling that they had no choice but to pay. That big a change.
Scaling up would have to go along with some scaling down. Large political organisations, covering diverse populations and extensive territories, need to leave plenty of room for local politics. New technology could help to make a revival of local politics possible. To take one, seemingly banal example: the advent of 3-D printing could soon empower individuals and local communities to take charge for themselves of the physical production of the goods they need. It will become less and less necessary for vast quantities of these goods to be moved around the world. But this new localism will not work on its own. It will take political protection and political organisation to maintain it in the face of the forces of global capitalism, which will continue to sweep around the world, hoovering up money and resources. International politics needs to be big if it is to preserve the small. 3-D printers can’t do the political work, any more than mobile phones can.
The problem with big-scale solutions is that they are too political. Someone would have to force the issue. Nation-states are not incentivised to pool their resources in this way. The softly, softly technocratic approach is easier because so much can be done by stealth. Getting people – politicians as well as ordinary citizens – to sign up for a new kind of politics almost always takes a shock to the system. The traditional form this shock takes is war. The original EEC (the forerunner of the EU) was made possible only by the catastrophe of the Second World War and the looming disaster of the Cold War, which finally succeeded in banging French and German heads together. It is hard to see how a step-change to the next level of European federation – banging German and Greek heads together – will be possible in the absence of something similar. The US federal government is a product of two wars: the War of Independence from Britain, which produced a national government, and the Civil War, which finally gave that government the power to extend its coercive authority across the whole continent. Civil war looks very remote in Europe today because we are no longer interested in that sort of step-change. Reviving the prospect of war in order to achieve it seems a very high price to pay.
Peace promotes easy options. Easy options encourage bad politics. Bad politics threatens disaster. Disaster invites political salvation. It is a precarious business. Given time, and luck, we may get there without anything too terrible happening. The questions are: will we have the luck? And do we have the time?