The Globalization Backlash by Colin Crouch

Author:Colin Crouch [Crouch, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509533794
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2018-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

The return of eighteenth-century conflicts

To understand what is happening, we need to turn back again to the eighteenth century and its conflicts, not between empires and nations, but between the ancien régime and the Enlightenment (Aufklärung), a confrontation that has had a complex relationship to the former conflict. Stated very crudely, the Enlightenment, as represented in particular by Immanuel Kant, stood for the growth of rationalism and universalism – universalism implying a kind of equality among people, however narrowly and variously this was originally conceived. In the long run, rationalism also implied willingness to change and innovate, to re-evaluate goals and the means to achieve them – a mentality that found its purest expression in the science of classical economics. The ancien régime, conservatism, stood for tradition, stability, unchallenged religious belief, a general abstention from questioning hierarchies and inequalities that were sanctified by time. Seen from a conservative point of view, Enlightenment values were cold, disruptive and unsettling, accessible only to the educated; those of the ancien régime were accessible through familiarity and endurance. As the twentieth-century English Conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott expressed it, the conservative does not say, with Goethe’s Faust, ‘Verweile doch, du bist so schön’ (Stay a while, you are so beautiful), but ‘Stay, you are familiar to me.’3 Liberals and social democrats who marvel at the willingness over the decades of millions of relatively poor people to vote for parties that seek to maintain a social order that keeps them poor need to view conservatism from Oakeshott’s perspective: poor people often crave stability and familiarity, and are likely to see change as threatening the little they do have.

This perspective also helps us explain the current puzzle that many of the leaders of the new conservative movements, outstandingly Donald Trump, claim to speak for the marginalized and downtrodden, while boasting of their own wealth and pursuing economic policies that favour the rich even further. Conservatism does not offer security through redistribution, but through the assertion of values, old certainties and power exercised by admired rulers. The adjective ‘liberal’ is always attached to the elites they criticize; they have no objections to elites in general. And the main offence committed against conservative values by liberal elites is that they support various ethnic, sexual and cultural minorities, disturbing an earlier, ostensibly more comfortable world.

As noted, nationalism was originally part of struggles for liberation from autocratic rule, and to the extent that autocracy based its authority on the sanctity of tradition and even divine right, nationalist criticisms joined with Enlightenment rationalism. But the logic of rationalism was universalist; the French Revolution declared les droits de l’homme, not ‘… des français’. This was rapidly rationalized (or betrayed) through the Napoleonic formula that declared the French nation to be the bearers of this universalism, which it would bring to other nations through military conquest. A similar betrayal of universalism, and indeed rationalism, took place in the European nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the African, Arab, Latin American and other nationalisms of the mid twentieth.

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