CHAPTER

Ghosts of Liberalism Past:

Authoritarianism and Nationalism in
the Liberal Tradition 
Anatol Lieven

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.5
Published: 23 January 2024

Abstract
A systematic intellectual and political campaign is
now under way to portray a clear-cut divide between
“liberal democracy” and the mingled forces of
authoritarianism and nationalism. As a picture of the
longue durée of the past two and a half centuries,
this portrait is largely false; and even today, it
obscures as much as it illuminates. As a reformist
ideology dedicated to smashing inherited traditions
and institutions in the name of progress, liberalism
has long been highly dependent not just on existing
state powers but often on greatly expanded and widened
state authority. Liberal programs also depended on the
expanded powers of new national states, which in turn
depended on nationalism for their legitimacy and mass
support. For much of the twentieth century, the
linkages between liberalism, authoritarianism, and
nationalism were in abeyance in the West; in recent
decades, however, these linkages have re-emerged and
are likely to grow stronger.

Keywords: liberalism, authoritarianism, nationalism,

democracy, globalization
Subject: Comparative Politics, Political Theory, Political
Institutions, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
 A ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted
in the use of any expedients that will attain an end,
perhaps otherwise unattainable.

John Stuart Mill

To the Happy Few

Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), dedication of his novels.

Democracy and liberalism have often slept together, but due

to a fundamental difference in their characters they have
never really been married. Strictly speaking, “liberal
democracy” is an oxymoron. Democracy is in the end what
the name says it is: the domination of the masses both
politically (of course mediated through representatives)
and culturally, whether or not their political culture is
liberal.
Liberalism for its part has always been to a considerable
extent an innately elitist faith dedicated to bringing
about progress, to improving the masses through education
and influence, and to acting on behalf of what liberals
take to be the real long-term interests of the masses,
whether the masses like it or not—by authoritarian means
1
if absolutely necessary. Liberalism is rooted in a belief
in individualism and individual rights; however, for most
of modern history, this has meant rights, protections, and
equal status under the law, but not necessarily the right
to a share of political power. Liberalism opposed the old
medieval formal and legal division of rights according to
inherited status or “estate,” not divisions of rights
based on personal property and education. Like any
ideology, liberalism has also generally had its strongest
base in one economic and social class, the educated upper-
middle classes, whose economic interests may or may not
overlap with those of the rest of the population and may
need, in the last resort, to be advanced or defended by
2
authoritarian means or even force of arms.
Contemporary understanding of these issues in the United
States has been mightily confused by the specifically
American (and even in this case, only relatively recent)
use of the term “liberal” to describe groups and ideas
that elsewhere in the world are called socialist or social-
democratic. In economic terms, the overwhelming majority of
the Republican Party and a majority of the Democrats are in
fact some species of traditional liberal.
In terms of culture, however, and especially regarding
attitudes around gender and sexuality, a large gap has
developed since the 1960s between American liberals and
conservatives—or at least religiously inspired
conservatives. For conservative religion, with its claim to
dominate culture and shape society, really is largely
incompatible with liberalism and always has been (though
the two managed to coexist in the United States for a long
time due to the absence of a state church and the presence
of a large number of rival religious groups, which diluted
religious influence). For liberalism, though not a
religion, certainly claims to represent a monolithic
3
civilization impervious to outside forces.
Thus, in most of Catholic Europe at the start of the
nineteenth century, conservatives and liberals who were in
basic agreement in their economic, social, and nationalist
policies (and in their opposition to socialism) remained
bitterly divided in their attitudes regarding the role of
the Church, especially in education. Faced with Catholic
opponents who were themselves determined to reimpose
complete control of education and culture, nineteenth-
century liberals most certainly did not stick to
Voltaire’s dictum about defending to the death his
opponents’ rights to express their opinion—any more than
American liberals do today (Brenan 1943). Liberals in
early-nineteenth-century Spain directly inherited the
anticlericalism of the later Bourbon monarchs (Brenan 1943,
42). Liberals in united Germany after 1871 enthusiastically
supported Bismarck’s authoritarian Kulturkampf against the
Catholic Church (Blackbourn 2002). A willingness to repress
and persecute religious and national minorities in the name
of national security goes back, of course, to liberalism’s
founding father, John Locke (Locke 1993).
It is particularly important at present to develop a more
nuanced understanding of “liberal democracy,” because a
systematic campaign is now underway in the West to
conceptualize a deep and clear-cut opposition between
“liberal democracy,” on the one hand, and the mingled
forces of authoritarianism and nationalism, on the other.
This campaign is intended to consolidate liberal hegemony
both within Western societies and in the world as a whole.
The latter goal is to be achieved through the
“democratic” Western alliance (together with Japan,
India, and some other Asian states), under US leadership
and in the service of US geopolitical agendas directed
against China, Russia, and Iran—states that supposedly
constitute an opposing “authoritarian axis” (Biden 2021;
Myers 2022). This US-inspired program has the potential to
destroy the open world economy that liberals have done so
much to promote, and even, in the last resort, to help
bring about a world war that would echo the catastrophe of
1914 in ruining liberal civilization itself, and indeed
civilization tout court.
Historically speaking, as a picture of the longue durée of
the past two and a half centuries, this portrait is also
false; and even today, it obscures as much as it
illuminates. India is not liberal; the European Union as
such is not a democracy, though its members are supposed to
be; the United States is divided culturally between liberal
and illiberal forces, though the two overlap economically.
Across the entire span of modern history, democratic
elections have thrown up profoundly anti-liberal forces,
liberals (partly in response) have resorted to
authoritarianism, and authoritarian regimes (or oligarchies
operating behind a democratic façade) have adopted liberal
economic policies (Philip 1993). In the words of Atilio
Borón (1981) about Latin America,

The historical drama of Latin America teaches us that

the praxis of liberalism has become entangled in an
insoluble dilemma: the adoption of liberal-type
economic policies presupposes a political order in
which the State, assuming the unmistakable outline of
Hobbes’s apocalyptic sovereign, enjoys an oppressive
concentration of power that enables it to command
unlimited obedience from the population. (1981)
Moreover, the construction of a supposed “civilizational
struggle” between liberal democracies and authoritarian
systems encourages domestic alliances in the West between
liberalism and nationalism, or even chauvinism. As I shall
show later in this chapter, the alliance between liberalism
and nationalism is not merely old but foundational for the
liberal tradition. However, the fruits of this alliance
have sometimes in the past been very bitter ones, and it is
not necessarily a relationship that we should wish to see
revived.
Liberal and totalitarian systems are indeed fundamentally
incompatible; but liberal regimes have frequently sought to
bring change through authoritarian methods, and liberalism
has been not just compatible but identical with certain
forms of nationalism. As a reformist, chiefly middle-class
ideology dedicated to destroying inherited traditions and
institutions in the name of progress and especially
economic development, liberalism (in its central economic
aspect) for much of its history has been highly dependent
not just on existing state powers, but often on greatly
expanded and widened state authority and its rigorous
employment against liberalism’s enemies. According to
Immanuel Wallerstein (2011), “Liberalism has always been
in the end the ideology of the strong state in the sheep’s
clothing of individualism; or to be more precise, the
ideology of the strong state as the only sure ultimate
guarantor of liberalism” (9).
Almost every nineteenth-century liberal regime aimed to,
among other things, centralize power in the hands of a
national government, regarding local autonomy both as a
haven of conservatism and as an obstacle to the uniform tax
and regulatory system that were regarded as essential for
the development of capitalism. In Spain in the first half
of the nineteenth century, liberals declared that
“centralization is nothing more nor less than liberty
itself.” The greater the degree of economic
underdevelopment and social “backwardness” (especially
when the masses were of a different race), the stronger the
impetus to use authoritarian means for economic reform
(Carr 1970, 64; Borón 1981).
Gerald Brenan (1943) described how this fused with the old
centralizing ambitions of Castile, and of eighteenth-
century royal enlightened despotism:

Liberalism … was accepted by the Castilians when they

saw what use they could make of it. They found that it
not only strengthened the Castilian bourgeoisie by
handing them over the Church lands and common lands
free of all feudal embarrassments, but that it
provided them with an instrument of government of
strongly centralizing tendencies. (xi)

In the nineteenth century, the great majority of liberals

were clear that theirs was not a democratic ideology, since
it frequently meant imposing changes that were deeply
unpopular with the mass of the populations concerned.
Liberals have justified their elitism to themselves and the
world through the belief that they are better people; they
represent education and higher intelligence and morality.
Going back to the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688,
for Whig/Liberal elites, parliaments elected on a limited
suffrage have acted as a check both on monarchical power
and on that of the masses (Selinger 2019).
In recent years, interest in authoritarian liberalism has
been reawakened by the example of the European Union’s
unelected institutions seeking to further European
integration by bureaucratic fiat, without reference to
electorates and elected parliaments, and imposing austerity
on EU member states against the will of their populations
and elected representatives (Bruff 2014).
In the United States, the Biden administration has been
accused of using government security agencies in
collaboration with Internet corporations to target critics
on the Internet; of working with newspapers to suppress
leaks in the public interest; and of using the CIA and FBI
as a tool against Donald Trump and the Republicans (Taibbi
2023; Carden 2023; Marcetic 2023). Faced with moves like
Brexit, some of the arguments—and still more the public
sentiments—of pro-EU liberals have also become explicitly
elitist in a way that was entirely characteristic of
nineteenth-century liberals, but had been sensibly veiled
by later-twentieth-century liberals after the introduction
of universal suffrage: for it is hardly politically wise
openly to insult your electorate.
The research of Michael A. Wilkinson (2021) and Grégoire
Chamayou (2021) into authoritarian liberalism and the EU
has been especially notable in this regard. However, this
research into the intellectual origins of authoritarian
liberalism goes no further back than the Weimar Republic of
the 1920s and early 1930s. Fully to understand the
connections between liberalism, authoritarianism, and
nationalism, it is necessary to go much further back, to
the nineteenth century and beyond that, to the French
Revolution and the Enlightenment. On the basis of this
history, it appears that the suggestion of liberal
authoritarianism as a betrayal of core liberal ideals is
mistaken; this potential existed in the very origins and
basis of those ideals.
The partial break between research into nineteenth- and
twentieth-century liberalism has been caused in part by the
question of the relationship between liberalism and
nationalism. For most of the nineteenth century in Europe
and Latin America, liberalism was an explicitly nationalist
faith; indeed, in England in the 1820s and 1830s,
“patriot” was used virtually as a synonym for European
and South American liberals. In the twentieth century, as a
result of the role of nationalism in the genesis of World
Wars I and II and of Nazism, liberals turned strongly
against nationalism, or appeared to do so. This shift too,
however, embodied certain deep ambiguities, to which I will
return later in this chapter.

Authoritarian Liberalism

Liberalism’s origins lie in the Enlightenment of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Like the
Enlightenment, liberalism has always been a teaching
project—and teaching is to some extent an inherently
authoritarian exercise. One way to understand the renewal
of elitist and antidemocratic strains in liberalism in our
own time is as reflecting a loss of faith in public
education as a force for the enlightenment of the masses.
Belief in such enlightenment was critical to the acceptance
by liberals of democracy and universal suffrage. In the
words of the British Liberal politician Robert Lowe, “We
must educate our masters.” This civilizing project was,
however, doomed by television and the Internet, with its
failure symbolized by the rise of Fox News and the election
to government of two figures from the gutters of
television, Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump.
Education is also an exercise that inevitably inspires a
4
degree of resistance from its objects, or victims. As
Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”) once remarked, the only
children who don’t resist being educated are the ones who
are too stupid to understand what is being done to them.
Then again, all cultures have believed that some degree of
education of children is indeed necessary.
The Enlightenment was by its very nature elitist,
representing the claim of new would-be elites with new
ideas to spread those ideas in the population. As such, it
was also revolutionary in intellectual and cultural terms,
and potentially revolutionary in political terms; and
revolutions usually have to be defended from
counterrevolution by authoritarian and military means. In
Britain and Scandinavia, extreme violence was rendered
unnecessary by the incremental progress of constitutional
reform; but across the continents of Europe and Latin
America, liberal revolution was the norm, usually in
alliance with national “liberation.” In Spain and several
Latin American countries, “the pronunciamento [officers’
revolt] was the instrument of liberal revolution in the
19th [c]entury” (Carr 1970, 124; Isabella 2023, 87–138).
The United States of the nineteenth century, as remarked by
many writers from Tocqueville on, was an exceptional case,
because in this new settler society there was no ancien
régime, established church, or legally privileged nobility
to displace and from which to fear counterrevolution.
Liberalism therefore did not require authoritarian means—
except in the seizure of the lands of the Native Americans,
something that in certain respects replicated, on an
immensely larger scale, the seizure of Church and common
peasant lands in Europe (and the landlord-driven Enclosure
movement in Britain, supported by Locke) to drive economic
growth while enriching the new elites (Milbank and Pabst
2016).
In America, the hegemony of the middle classes and their
Protestantoid liberal culture and ideology was secure. Only
in the South (and only because of slavery and secession
even there) did a landowning aristocracy have to be smashed
(Moore 1966). Nor has there been an established church
whose grip on the state and culture had to be abolished.
However, with the transformation of America by economic,
cultural, and demographic change, the certainties and
security that underlay Tocqueville’s consensual liberal
democracy have largely vanished, and cultural gaps have
opened up that are in some respects reminiscent of the
conflict between nineteenth-century Liberalism and
Catholicism (Lieven 2020).
The nineteenth-century continental European pattern was set
by the French Revolution, which had to deploy massive
violence to displace the old monarchical, noble, and
clerical order, smash local autonomous institutions, and
defend the new order against rural Catholic
counterrevolution and “White Terror” (this included a
counterinsurgency campaign in the Vendée that today would
probably be dubbed “genocidal”) (Villemain 2020).
Having appealed to the urban masses to overthrow the ancien
régime, liberals then had to crush the “Jacobin” leaders
of those masses when they attempted to advance a radical
program that threatened the domination (and, explicitly or
implicitly, the property) of the liberal middle classes.
“Active citizenship” was then restricted across liberal
Europe to the property-owning and tax-paying classes (a
principle endorsed by John Stuart Mill). The rest enjoyed
only “passive citizenship”—equal protection from the
law, but no right to vote or participate in politics.
This pattern was to repeat itself in Paris in 1848–1849
and 1870–1871 (Mulholland 2012). The combination of a
genuine belief in progress toward democracy—but only when
liberals judged the masses capable of this—and fear of
mass unrest is exemplified by the work and the policies of
one of the greatest of all liberal thinkers, Alexis de
Tocqueville. He supported the rebellion of 1848 against the
monarchy of Louis-Philippe, but, as foreign minister in the
resulting Republican government, eventually—if reluctantly
—endorsed military repression when the proletariat of
Paris attempted to turn this into a socialist revolution
(Jardin 1988, 416–417).
Nationalism was central to the new hegemony of bourgeois
liberal culture, and to the reconciliation of the masses to
the new order. Most obviously in Italy, but also in more
complex and ambiguous ways in Spain, Latin America,
Germany, and Eastern Europe, liberal revolution and
national liberation and unification went hand in hand. But
an appeal to nationalism, though critical, was rarely
enough, if only because across large areas, much of the
population (and especially the peasantry) did not in fact
share the national identity set out by the liberals. Hence
the famous comment by liberal nationalist Prime Minister
Massimo d’Azeglio after Italian unification that “We have
made Italy. Now it is necessary to make Italians.” The
liberal project therefore also required both the compulsory
cultural transformation of the masses and a capacity for
armed repression and the will to employ it.
Legitimacy for this project was derived from the sense of
educated middle-class superiority to the masses; and—as
today—where the liberal program met strong resistance,
this sense of superiority could easily turn to hatred and
contempt. In imperial Germany, Max Weber’s The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, rather than being a
neutral piece of analysis, is in part a liberal political
and cultural polemic justifying the continued domination of
liberal capitalist elites in Germany against the rise of
political Catholicism (Weber [1905] 2010). The famous
Munich-based liberal illustrated magazine Simplicissimus,
famous for its witty and biting critiques of the fatuities
of Wilhelmine militarism and authoritarianism, was equally
searing in its contempt for the Catholic peasantry who at
the time made up a majority of Bavaria’s population
(Klimmt and Zimmermann 2018).
These feelings were strengthened on the periphery of
Europe, in Latin America, and in Russia in the 1990s by
fears that the backward masses were discrediting the entire
nation in the eyes of more developed nations in the
European heartland and preventing the nation from achieving
its “rightful place” at the heart of Western
civilization. These feelings achieved quasi-racist
dimensions (which linger to this day) in the attitudes of
northern Italian liberals to the rural peasantry of the
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, unwillingly incorporated into
united Italy by a combination of Napoleon III, the Kingdom
of Piedmont, and Garibaldi:

It does not take much intelligence or insight to

understand that a people that is profoundly degraded
and filled with misconceptions and gross prejudices,
that believes in the evil eye, in spiritual
possession, magic and magicians, dreams, the
liquefaction of St Gennaro’s blood, hair miraculously
growing on the crucifix, and a thousand other crazy
and absurd things, cannot think seriously about
freedom, cannot understand it, want it, die for it.

(Francesco Trinchera; quoted in Moe 2002, 145)

Thus, in the Middle East today, there is nothing at all

contradictory about contemporary Arab liberals supporting
authoritarian regimes like that of Egypt out of hostility
to the conservative Muslim majorities of their own
populations (Judis 2013; Kirkpatrick 2013).
This elitist authoritarian strain was much in evidence in
Russia in the 1990s. While parading to Western audiences
their commitment to “democracy,” the liberal
intelligentsia of Moscow and St. Petersburg were entirely
open in their contempt for ordinary Russians. They called
them, in almost racial terms, “Homo Sovieticus,” and such
attitudes did indeed resemble the racist attitudes of the
northern Italian elites toward the conservative southern
Italian peasantry after Italian unification, or of the
white Latin American elites toward the darker-skinned
masses in their countries (Lieven 1999; Moe 2002, 145;;
5
Chua 2003). In Latin America, as in Russia in the 1990s,
the contempt of liberal elites for the masses (coupled with
cultural and institutional legacies of authoritarianism)
underlay the liberals’ willingness to adopt authoritarian
means to maintain their rule (Negretto and Aguilar-Rivera
2000).
In recent years, such antidemocratic attitudes have
resurfaced among liberals in Europe and North America—very
much along nineteenth-century liberal lines—in reaction to
illiberal tendencies like the Brexit vote and the mass
movement in support of Donald Trump (Furedi 2022a, 2022b;
Mazzarella 2019). As in Russia in the 1990s, liberals were
even reckless enough to display this contempt publicly
while asking the masses for their votes (as did Hillary
Clinton with her talk of “deplorables”) (Chua 2018, 161–
173; Mounk 2018, 10).
In Latin America, where the mass of the population actually
was of largely non-European (albeit mostly mixed) ancestry,
liberal attitudes frequently became explicitly racist. An
irony of the “Bolivarian” nationalist and socialist
ideology of President Hugo Chávez and his followers in
Venezuela is that their ancestors were precisely not the
white criollo elites who supported the campaign for
independence from Spain led by Simón Bolívar, but the
impoverished mixed-race pardos and dispossessed Indios of
the interior who—largely out of hatred for the criollo
elites—rallied to the royal banner of Spain under the
leadership of the bandit chieftain José Tomás Boves. A
similar pattern emerged in the war of independence in
Mexico (Poinsett [1825] 2015, 239).
As in the time of the Covid pandemic, nineteenth-century
tensions between the liberal elitist impulse to reform and
improvement and mass resistance often came to a head over
issues of vaccination and sanitation. A notable example was
the long-running struggle over pigs in New York in the
first half of the nineteenth century, between, on the one
hand, a liberal middle class anxious to ban pigs in order
to improve both the appearance and the health of the
enormously growing city, and, on the other, the poor who
frequently depended on their pigs for their livelihood and
even physical survival. Class, religion, and ethnicity
played a part, given that an increasing proportion of the
poor were Irish immigrants from peasant backgrounds,
regarded with utter disdain by the urban Protestant middle
class (McNeur 2014).
At the same time, it is necessary to remember that in the
war of the hogs (and other nineteenth-century sanitation
campaigns), after all, the liberals were right. Whatever
the short-term suffering of the masses, it would not have
been to the long-term benefit of their descendants to share
New York with millions of pigs.
Another iconic moment of liberal reform—but this time
directed at the old hereditary patriciate and its
institutions—was the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892,
which led to the abrogation of the oligarchical Hamburg
constitution passed down from the Middle Ages. Examining
the foul and insanitary conditions of unreformed Hamburg
that spread the epidemic, the medical reformer Robert Koch
helped doom the old system with one devastating phrase:
“Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe.” The phrase was
devastating because it equated the patriciate of Hamburg
with non-European cultures to which Europe was supposedly
immeasurably superior (Evans 1987). So, however infuriating
in its arrogant assumption of superiority and contempt for
those who disagreed, the liberal program of urban reform
genuinely represented a form of civilizing mission.
In America, the rural masses lacked a traditional noble and
clerical anti-liberal leadership, while the new immigrant
industrial proletariat could be held down by private
capitalist militias. In Europe, however, it was necessary
to maintain the potential for armed state repression in
order to preserve both the political gains of the national
revolution and middle-class private property—often a new
form of private property created by the seizure of Church
and communal land by liberal land reforms, not recognized
as truly legitimate by much of the population (Smith 1968,
371–394; Moe 2002, 126–183).
Across most of Europe and Latin America (and in the United
States until the 1830s for whites and the 1960s for non-
whites), liberal rule was maintained by a highly limited
franchise. In Italy, universal male suffrage was only
introduced as a result of World War I—with the immediate
result that Socialists and Catholic populists, now with
mass electoral support, turned on the liberal elites and
were only crushed by the Fascists, who saved the liberal
traditions of private property and nationalism at the cost
of the liberal traditions of free speech and the
(qualified) rule of law. The first major European country
to introduce universal suffrage for men was imperial
Germany—and Bismarck’s intention was precisely to appeal
to the conservative, obedient, and monarchist instincts of
the masses in order to limit the power of the liberals
(Steinberg 2011).
But the conservative rural world to which Bismarck appealed
was being destroyed by the liberal capitalist revolution
with which he allied, and whose industrial might brought
Prussia victory in 1866 and 1870 and came close to bringing
imperial Germany victory in 1914–1918. A combination of
Germany’s military and economic success with nationalism,
hostility to Catholicism, and fear of socialism then
consolidated the alliance between Prussian conservatism and
the wealthy establishment “National Liberals” that was to
endure until the Empire’s fall.
The threat to liberal order was increased by the fact that
this liberal capitalist revolution would turn out to be a
permanent cultural revolution, with a deeply and
continually unsettling effect on social stability and
social relations (Pabst 2019). In the words of the
Communist Manifesto,

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly

revolutionizing the instruments of production, and
thereby the relations of production, and with them the
whole relations of society. Conservation of the old
modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the
contrary, the first condition of existence for all
earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing
of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation,
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are
swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated
6
before they can ossify.

The liberal need for the support of both nationalism and

repression was therefore increased by the acutely painful
and disruptive nature of many liberal reforms and of early
industrial capitalist change, as far as most ordinary
people were concerned—disruptive morally, as well as
economically and socially. Entirely characteristic in this
regard was the repeated use of troops by liberal regimes to
suppress first peasant uprisings and then protests and
strikes by urban workers—goals that were obviously greatly
aided by the ability to appeal to the army in terms of
nationalism. In Italy a similar pattern was set by
Garibaldi’s own use of force against peasant protesters on
the estate of the Duke of Bronte in Sicily in 1860 (Riall
7
2013).
The attack on the property of the Catholic Church also
involved the destruction of traditional charitable
institutions, and while this was sometimes only the
byproduct of liberal anticlericalism and belief in free-
market progress, sometimes there was an explicit intention
to use hunger to drive the poor into new industries. In the
Spanish liberal phrase, “One of the greatest obstacles to
the establishment of factories is the soup of the
convents” (Carr 1970, 70, fn. 1).
The combination of liberal state building and industrial
revolution in nineteenth-century Europe imposed great
physical hardships on the masses, who were expected to pay
higher taxes in order to build modern infrastructure, to
accept conscription into new mass armies, and to submit to
being driven from their farms into urban slums to make way
for a new international commercial agriculture. The moral,
political, social, and economic sacrifices involved were
colossal. Not surprisingly, therefore, these reforms met
bitter resistance; and not surprisingly, across most of
Asia they failed. As Tom Nairn (1998) writes of the
European nineteenth century, in words that are equally
applicable to the great waves of capitalist social change
sweeping Asia today:

Urbanisation is the smooth-sounding, impersonal term

for what was often an agonising process: the fearful
undertow of modernity. During it, rural emigrants look
backwards as much as forwards, and pass from the
 remembrance to the often elaborate reinvention of the
worlds that they have lost. (108)
As modernization and urbanization progressed, the old
liberal elite’s fears of the reactionary peasant horde and
the revolutionary urban proletarian mob were joined by a
new fear: that of the “mass man” spawned by modern
society, who would reject liberal values in favor of mass
pseudo-culture, and—in his ignorance, conformism,
atomization, deracination, and alienation—might prove
fatally susceptible to the lures of what would later be
called totalitarianism.
First sketched (with singular prescience) by Tocqueville in
Democracy in America, this fear found its most memorable
intellectual expression a century later in José Ortega y
Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses (1932), with its vision of
“vertical barbarians” destroying civilization not by
invasion from without but by takeover from within. The idea
of totalitarianism and chauvinism being generated from
below by a debased anti-intellectual popular culture was
given iconic form in a number of famous fantasy works,
including Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the account of
the ant city in T. H. White’s Once and Future King
(Bradbury 1999; White [1958] 2015, 111–119).
Despite these liberal fears of the masses, the
authoritarian streak in liberalism went into abeyance in
Europe in the decades after World War II. Marxian critics
like Wilkinson (2021) have portrayed the postwar German
ideological system of “Ordo-liberalism” as inherently
authoritarian and directly descended from the authoritarian
aspects of Weimar Germany—which were, it should be
remembered, not just a legacy of imperial Germany but also
a response to the very real threats to Weimar democracy
from right and left (Wilkinson 2021, 66; Lottholz 2021).
This analysis, however, downplays the essential identity
between Ordo-liberalism and the social market economy,
which was the product not of rigid liberal free-market
capitalist orthodoxy but of a compromise (driven by the
terrible lessons of previous decades) between capitalism
and social democracy, whereby capitalism agreed to accept
strong limits on its behavior and strong elements of
redistribution through taxes and state services—anathema
to the German liberals of the 1920s.
The Social Democrats for their part formally abandoned the
rhetorical commitments to the abolition of private property
and public religion that had helped undermine political
compromise in the 1920s. The liberals became largely social
democratic, the social democrats largely liberal. The
conservatives, with their old rural, noble, peasant, and
religious base shattered, had become Christian Democrats
(Christian Democratic ideology being also in effect a form
of liberalism); so a modified liberal ideological hegemony
appeared complete. Thus, not only was authoritarian
repression unnecessary (except to the degree necessary to
exclude and suppress Communists and neo-Nazis), but liberal
parties as such could be allowed to shrink radically.
This benevolent consensus, however, depended heavily on the
trente glorieuses, the three decades of continual economic
expansion that followed World War II. From the economic
crises of the 1970s, the declining profits of industry
directed large parts of Western capitalism into financial
services; and this, together with the apparent failure of
“Keynesian” social market economics, helped to
reintroduce the radical free-market economics of the
nineteenth century, formerly abandoned because of its
disastrous contribution to the rise of communism and
Nazism.
The result was an enormous new surge in socioeconomic
inequality and capitalist irresponsibility, with distinctly
nineteenth-century overtones. The harbinger of this was
Thatcherism in England—an ideology that, while calling
itself Conservative, was in fact nineteenth-century liberal
to the core, both in its free-market economics and in its
willingness to use authoritarian means to defeat opponents
and eliminate traditional autonomous institutions
(including the London County Council) that stood in the way
of liberal reform (Gamble 1994). Thanks to the Falklands
War, this program was also enabled in part through
thoroughly nineteenth-century liberal nationalist appeals
to military glory and restored national greatness.
No traditional conservative—but many traditional liberals
—would have declared, like Thatcher, that “there is no
such thing as society.” The preaching of Friedrich Hayek
and Milton Friedman that the only moral responsibility of
the directors of corporations is to their shareholders, and
that profit should be wholly divorced from questions of
morality, points right back to nineteenth-century arguments
against the abolition of child labor or even the slave
8
trade.
In a most unfortunate (and not, in my view, foreordained)
conjuncture, the radical free-market ideology of the
“Washington Consensus” then became mixed up with the
greatest of all liberal internationalist projects: the
attempt to expand the European Union while also
transforming it into a form of European transnational
9
state. This project would appear to mark a total break
between the nationalism of nineteenth-century liberals and
the internationalism of their late-twentieth-century and
early-twenty-first-century descendants. The real story is
rather more complicated.

Liberalism and Nationalism

The murder of liberal elite culture by the modern ethnic

nationalist mass man was a form of parricide; for modern
mass culture was itself the product of the economic and
social changes that liberalism had fostered, while
nationalism was both essential to the creation of modern
states as the basis for capitalist development and liberal
progress, and the one force that could bind enough of the
population to the liberals in support of liberal capitalist
reforms.
The identity of liberal constitutional government with
nationalism was stated in a founding liberal document, the
French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and
the Citizen: “The principle of sovereignty resides
essentially in the Nation; no body of men, no individual,
can exercise authority that does not emanate expressly from
it.”
In the two centuries following the French Revolution and
the extension of its basic principles of liberal state-
building by the armies of the Revolution and Napoleon,
nation states and nationalisms became the frames of
modernity, first in Europe and the United States, then in
much of the rest of the world: in the words of Kymlicka,
“Modern political life has an inescapably national
dimension to it” (1997, 57). This link between nationalism
and modernity is in fact the thesis of the
“constructivist” theory of nationalism, even if its
proponents differ on the dates and the precise
socioeconomic configurations that produced modern
nationalisms.
But as Tom Nairn and others have pointed out, the members
of this school have shied away from considering the logical
corollary of this view—namely, that nationalism and the
nation-state have been, and remain, the “constitutive
principle of modernity” (Greenfeld 1993, 491); that if
religiously sanctioned monarchical rule over fractured
territories was no longer a viable state form politically
or economically, then the only alternative is a polity
based on the sovereignty of a bounded national citizenry
over a bounded territory, held together by common national
sentiment. This is also the only form in which effective
democracy can be organized (Nairn 1997, 65–67; Manent
2006, 51–59).
The link between nationalism and modernity is equally clear
in reforms instituted by Asian countries, which in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to modernize in
order to defend themselves against the Western imperial
powers and gain for themselves an active rather than
passive role in capitalist globalization.
It can be confidently stated that the only countries where
these reforms succeeded were those where the state was able
to mobilize a strong sense of united nationalism as a
justification for the sacrifices involved. These sacrifices
were presented, with conviction, as necessary in order to
strengthen the nation against the threat of alien conquest
or domination. Japan is the preeminent example of this
successful strategy in Asia, as is Kemal Atatürk’s Turkey
in the Muslim world. Throughout most of the anti-colonial
and postcolonial world, the strength of traditional
resistance and the weakness of states and economies meant
that liberal reformers very often adopted authoritarian
means and military dictatorship as the first rather than
the last resort.
Liberal capitalist programs of economic, political, and
cultural reform in nineteenth-century Europe depended on
the expanded powers of new national states, and these
states in turn depended largely on nationalism for their
legitimacy and whatever mass support they could gather
(Sheehan 1982, 274–283; Benner 2013). Nationalism also
helped consolidate the loyalty of national armies, whose
true chief purpose was often domestic repression and
victory in civil war rather than national defense.
The connection between liberalism and nationalism was
largely shaped by the French Revolution and the spread of
its influence, but it also drew on other traditions: the
self-identification of various nations with Protestant
civilizational ideals, including not only religious belief
but civic and economic rectitude and reform, as well as
attempts by eighteenth-century hereditary autocrats, such
as Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great, and Joseph II,
to reform their states and societies, partly in order to
make them more efficient in war. This connection also
reflects the role of the nation-state as the essential
frame of modern society and of classical modernity itself.
In the words of Heinz Ziegler (1931),

The idea of the nation forms the philosophical

foundation for the legitimacy of bourgeois society. It
guarantees … the legitimacy of modern structures of
government. It implies the consent of the masses to
the new state, and is one of the basic factors
governing the process whereby the masses are
incorporated into the political constellation. (33)

In early and mid-nineteenth-century Europe, liberalism was

intimately associated with movements of national
“liberation” and/or reform for the sake of national
strength in the face of imperial domination or other
states. Indeed, it was this association of liberalism with
nationalism, more than the liberal reform agendas in
themselves, which often provided the chief source of
legitimacy for liberal regimes; and as the Socialist
challenge grew toward the end of the nineteenth century,
parties like the National Liberals in Germany came to rely
more and more on nationalism for support.
As emphasized by Ernest Gellner (2006) and others, the
creation of cohesive national states with single sets of
enforceable laws and regulations, speaking and writing in
the same language, was both an essential base for
capitalist modernization and heavily dependent on it.
British liberals in the nineteenth century were entirely
clear in their belief in the link between cohesive national
identity and liberal political progress (Gellner 2006). In
the words of John Stuart Mill (1972),

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country

made up of different nationalities. Among a people
without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and
speak different languages, the united public opinion,
necessary to the working of representative government,
cannot exist. (47)

More recently, Dankwart Rustow (1970) argued for national

unity as a key precondition of successful transitions to
democracy.
Nationalism was at the heart of what Antonio Gramsci later
called the “hegemony” of bourgeois liberal ideas in late-
nineteenth-century Italy: the acceptance of such ideas by
much of the population as a form of “common sense,”
usually leading to the consent of a majority of the
population to elite rule and elite policies. However, just
as elite rule rests on the ever-present possibility of
intermittent coercion as well as the regular pattern of
mass consent, so that consent is liable to be interrupted
by periodical protests and upheavals (Gramsci [1947] 2011;
Anastasiou, 2022; Anderson 2017). As described by Eugen
Weber (1977), Barrington Moore (1966), and others,
nationalism was inculcated in the masses above all through
newly created state school systems:

Still another aspect of the rationalization of the

political order has to do with the making of citizens
in a new type of society. Literacy and rudimentary
 technical skills are necessary for the masses. Setting
up a national system of education is very likely to
bring on a conflict with religious authorities.
Loyalty to a new abstraction, the state, must also
replace religious loyalties if they transcend national
boundaries or compete with each other so vigorously as
to destroy internal peace…. In overcoming such
difficulties, the existence of a foreign enemy can be
quite useful.

10
(Moore 1966, 493)
Moving beyond Europe, Meiji Japan is the arch-example of
the association of nationalism with radical reform, and the
dependence of both on already existing national identities
and allegiances—the relative absence of which terribly
complicated and weakened contemporaneous state-led efforts
of reform elsewhere. The astonishingly radical reforms
carried out under the Meiji regime in Japan from the 1860s
on were explicitly justified and legitimized by the need to
strengthen the nation and avoid the fate of other Asian
countries at the hands of European imperialism (Ravina
2017).

Each modernization effort was clearly related to the

central problem of increasing the wealth and power of
the [Japanese] nation, and almost every major move was
initiated and pushed by the national state in order to
serve clearly defined national aims.

(Brown 1955, 91)

At the core of these reforms and their legitimization was

the spread of a new Japanese nationalism through a new
mass-education system (Moore 1966, 246). As a Japanese
liberal reformer of the 1880s wrote, “The one object of my
life is to extend Japan’s national power. Compared with
considerations of the country’s strength, the matter of
internal government and into whose hands it falls is of no
importance at all” (Fukuzawa Yukichi; quoted in Beasley
1973, 377). The legitimacy of the new regime and its
reforms was then cemented by military victory over China in
1894 and Russia in 1904–1905.
Japan also illustrates the profoundly Janus-faced aspect of
modern nationalism. For of course the intense nationalism
of the new Japan created in the Meiji era later led Japan
to catastrophe in World War II, just as the European
nationalisms that consolidated successful states in the
nineteenth century also contributed critically to the
disasters of 1914 and 1939. Yet at the same time, the
capacity of both the Japanese and West German economies and
societies to recover with such extraordinary speed and
success from their defeat was also chiefly due to the way
in which they had previously been consolidated as modern
nations.
In the Middle East, the presence or absence of a strong
nationalism has been critical to the success or failure of
modernizing reform. In Turkey, only the power of Turkish
nationalism allowed Kemal Atatürk’s regime to impose
radical reforms, thereby laying the basis for Turkey’s
success relative to the states of the Arab world.
Ideologically, Kemalism built on several generations of
Westernizing reform under the Ottomans.
The difference in terms of both radicalism and success
between Turkey and other Middle Eastern states can be
explained by the fact that in Turkey the series of wars
from 1911 on—and the loss of territory, colossal refugee
movements, and social upheaval that they produced—had led
to a spread of nationalism from the elites to the masses,
and that, unlike the later Ottomans, Kemal had achieved
military victories over Turkey’s enemies: the Armenians,
Greeks, and French. These nationalist victories gave
Kemalist nationalism its prestige, its legitimacy, and its
consequent ability to establish hegemony in Turkish
society. It is precisely such victory that has been denied
to modernizing nationalist forces in the Arab world,
because of dependence on or defeat by the United States,
11
and previously by Britain, France, and Israel.
In the Middle East, there has thus always been an inherent
contradiction between the imperial projects of Britain and
the United States and the quasi-liberal regimes and
programs that they have ostensibly been committed to
promoting in the region as part of their missions
civilisatrices. The British and French imperial projects
shattered the religious basis of legitimacy for the new
states that they created, leaving a vacuum of legitimacy
that in most countries has never really been filled. In the
words of David Fromkin (2001),

The European powers at that time believed that they

could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of
its political existence, and in their attempt to do so
introduced an artificial state system into the Middle
East that made it a region of countries that have not
become nations even today. The basis of political life
in the Middle East—religion—was called into question
by the Russians, who proposed communism, and by the
British, who proposed nationalism or dynastic loyalty,
in its place. (17)

But the very nature of British—or any other—imperial

domination meant that it was in practice impossible for the
British to promote nationalism, or to allow their client
regimes to establish real nationalist legitimacy, since
legitimacy could only have come from nationalist defiance
of the British. The British and French (as later the
Americans) therefore deprived their client states of the
nationalist legitimacy that they needed to place themselves
and their modernizing programs on a secure footing (Lieven
2017).
To put it another way, European liberalism during its
period of decisive struggle was an ideology of military and
economic victory. No ideology can be expected to retain its
prestige in the face of repeated defeat and humiliation.
Open subjugation to British imperial goals was to hollow
out the monarchies and regimes in both Egypt and Iraq and
lead to their fall once British power declined after World
12
War II.
The example of Iran is a counterpoint to both the Arab
countries and Turkey, and illustrates how, despite an
exceptionally ancient and powerful state tradition, the
attempts of the Pahlavi dynasty to implement successful
reform and consolidate its own rule were crippled by its
open dependence on the British and American empires, and by
the national humiliations of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of
1941 and the US-inspired overthrow of Prime Minister
Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953.
In Europe, the identification of liberalism and nationalism
in 1914 became a blood wedding, in which across the
continent liberals of the opposing countries declared
passionately for war and flung themselves into the ranks
(while in Russia still pursuing a program of liberal
revolution through national war). This was the “betrayal”
of liberal cosmopolitanism denounced by Julien Benda
([1927] 2021) in his Treason of the Intellectuals. Yet, as
I have tried to bring out, this was not really a betrayal,
because liberalism and militant nationalism had been allied
since their very birth as virtual Siamese twins.
A fictional but more accurate portrayal is given by Thomas
Mann ([1924] 1996) in his creation, in The Magic Mountain,
of the partly admirable, partly absurd, Professor Ludovico
Settembrini, the Italian liberal humanitarian nationalist,
on the eve of World War I:

His voice was weak, but he spoke with conviction, at

length and beautifully, upon the self-perfecting of
the human spirit through social betterment. Softly, as
though on the wings of doves, came the words of Herr
Ludovico. Yet when he came to speak of the unification
and universal well-being of the liberated peoples,
there mingled a sound—he neither knew nor willed it
of course—as of the rushing pinions of eagles. That
was the political key, the grandfatherly inheritance
that united in him with the humanistic gifts of the
father, to make up the litterateur—precisely as
humanism and politics united in the lofty ideal of
civilisation, an ideal wherein were blended the
mildness of doves and the boldness of eagles…. Yes,
here seemed to sound two voices, with differing
counsels. For Herr Settembrini was a humanitarian, yet
at the same time, half explicitly, he was warlike too.
(709–710)

At the end of the novel, Mann writes the suicide note of

nineteenth-century European liberalism, when Settembrini,
dying of tuberculosis, bids farewell to his young German
intellectual protégé (or victim), Hans Castorp, as Hans
takes the train from Switzerland to volunteer for the
German army in August 1914, while Settembrini himself vows
to struggle to bring Italy into the war against Germany and
Austria-Hungary:

“Go then, it is your blood that calls, go and fight

bravely. More than that can no man. But forgive me if
I devote the remnant of my powers to incite my country
to fight where the Spirit and sacro egoismo point the
way. Addio!” (712)

“Sacred Egoism” meant that liberal Italy, while

continuing to preach the “liberation” of subject peoples
from Austrian rule, in fact would later enter the war
(urged on by liberals like Settembrini) to seize not only
the German-speaking South Tyrol but Slavic Istria and
Dalmatia from Austria—with no reference at all to the will
of the local populations. After the Italian liberal state
had been discredited and Italian society radicalized by the
defeats and suffering of World War I, this contradiction
was to be resolved by Fascism, a reincarnation of
Garibaldian revolutionary nationalism in totalitarian form,
led by former soldiers, and preaching the reconciliation of
heroic revolutionary elites with the “mass man.” Fascism
was to lead Italy into the still greater catastrophe of
World War II.

Liberal Imperialism and Civilizational

Nationalism

In the countries of the former Soviet bloc after the fall

of communism, populist nationalism now dominates the
politics of Poland, Hungary, and the Baltic States and is
13
rising elsewhere. In fact, however, it never went away;
though most of the Western analysis of the desire of
Central and Eastern European populations to join NATO and
the European Union emphasized the role of democratic and
economic motivations, it completely ignored the role of
nationalism in impelling them to escape from the threat of
Russian influence (Auer 2004).
It was only this nationalist impulse which persuaded large
parts of these populations to accept—for a while—the
radical economic and cultural changes associated with the
processes of accession to the EU and NATO, as part of the
price to be paid for escape from Russia (Krastev and Holmes
2020, 75). Now that they are safely in NATO, the
conservative nationalist traditions of these countries are
reasserting themselves. The refusal of Western analysts to
recognize the role of nationalism in enabling Westernizing
reforms led them greatly to exaggerate the level of public
support for these reforms as such, and indeed for the EU as
an end in itself rather than as a means to national ends.
This also contributed to the extreme cultural and
intellectual arrogance with which Western liberal elites
approached the populations of Eastern Europe after the fall
of communism—an arrogance, however, that was very much
part of liberalism’s civilizing tradition. As with
nineteenth-century liberalism, this attitude was combined
with economic policies, which, while proclaimed in the name
of universal progress (and which did indeed lead to overall
economic growth in some countries), also served the corrupt
interests of particular elites and led to rampant social
and economic inequality—as well as the dispossession of
native peoples and the plundering of the rest of the world
by Western empires.
Privatization in the former Communist world (and indeed in
the West too) can be seen as a latter-day version of the
liberal seizure of Church and common lands in the
nineteenth century, which in many areas only increased
inequality and mass misery, and did so much to discredit
the liberal project in the eyes of the peasantry (Lieven
1999):

Once again, this legislation [the disentailing of

noble estates and the confiscation and sale of church
and common lands] professed to encourage the emergence
of a new race of peasant proprietors; but without
credit facilities, as some Democrats saw, the need for
 even a small down payment in cash excluded the poorer
peasants from the public auctions.

(Carr 1970, 255–256)

The younger and more dynamic members of the former
Communist-elites-turned-liberal-“reformers” in the 1990s
might well have taken as their watchword the famous motto
of the perceptive and opportunistic young liberal
aristocrat Prince Tancredi in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s Il
Gattopardo (The Leopard): “To change everything in order
to change nothing.” In other words, to preserve the power
and dominance of our class, we have to adopt a completely
new ideology and form of political control. Il Gattopardo
is a searing account of how this process left the masses of
Sicily not only excluded, alienated, and impoverished, but
in effect disenfranchised, with consequences that linger to
this day (Lampedusa [1958] 1991).
The EU is now making demands of its Eastern European
members—especially when it comes to accepting Muslim
refugees—which go so clearly against the fundamental
nationalist agendas of these countries that they may well
drive them out of the EU and contribute to the failure of
the EU as a whole. There is certainly a case to be made
that, for the EU to survive, it will have to be able to
portray itself much more convincingly as the useful servant
of the national interests of its members rather than as
their master—a return to something like de Gaulle’s idea
of a “Europe des patries.”
In America, the great majority of mainstream liberals (as
opposed to socialists) continued to be fervently devoted to
American civic nationalism, based on the liberal principles
14
of what has been called the “American Creed.” This is
an assimilatory (and today, strongly multiracial)
nationalism, opposed to the quasi-ethnic chauvinist
nationalism represented by Donald Trump but nonetheless
nationalist, just as French Republican nationalism was
never called anything else but nationalist (Kohn 1957; Hunt
2009; Hartz [1955] 1991; Woodward 1968; Lieven 2011). The
conflation of idealistic American civic nationalism with
chauvinism and imperialism was especially striking in the
response of the Bush administration to 9/11, and of the
“Global War on Terror” with its “Freedom Agenda”
(Lieven, 2011; Boot 2004; Frum and Perle 2003). In the
words of the US National Security Strategy of 2002:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between

liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive
victory for the forces of freedom—and a single
sustainable model for national success: freedom,
democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first
century, only nations that share a commitment to
protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing
political and economic freedom will be able to unleash
the potential of their people and assure their future
prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak
freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they
please; educate their children—male and female; own
property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These
values of freedom are right and true for every person,
in every society—and the duty of protecting these
values against their enemies is the common calling of
freedom-loving people across the globe and across the
ages.

(NSS 2002)

As exemplified by the Bush administration (and indeed in a

softer form by the Clinton, Obama, and Biden
administrations) and as in the nationalism initiated by the
French Revolution, this American civic nationalism contains
a very strong element of liberal imperialism: a conjoined
belief in American geopolitical and military power and in
America’s right and duty to bring the rest of the world
into accordance with the values of the American Creed
(Fulbright 1967; Niebuhr 1952). In the words of President
Woodrow Wilson, “You are Americans, and are meant to carry
liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever
you go” (quoted in Krastev and Holmes 2020, x).
In Europe, the turn against nationalism by later-twentieth-
century liberalism appears much clearer. Across Europe,
liberalism has become deeply attached to the European
Union, a project explicitly directed against the power of
national states—but with an extremely strong sense of its
“civilizing mission,” to take a term used by liberal
imperialists of the nineteenth century about their
individual countries’ imperial projects.
An intriguing intellectual bridge between nineteenth-
century nationalism and the EU is provided by the thought
of the Italian liberal nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini.
Mazzini, who preached nationalist revolution not only in
Italy but in all the “subject nations” of Europe, has
been much mocked by both right and left for his belief that
a Europe of fully independent republican nation-states
would then come together in peaceful coexistence or even
confederation, as envisaged by Immanuel Kant in his Project
for Perpetual Peace (Isabella 2008; Recchia and Urbinati
2009). As has been pointed out with good reason, Mazzini
completely ignored the role of irredentism and clashing
ethno-nationalist claims to areas like Alsace, Istria,
Silesia, and South Tyrol.
However, it can be argued that the surrender of national
powers to the European Union was only possible because the
previous consolidation of national states meant that they
had real powers to share and were also self-confident
enough to share them—whereas, for example, the fragile,
multiethnic, and relatively new postcolonial states of
Southeast Asia are neither strong nor self-confident enough
to give up any real powers to ASEAN.
On the other hand, it must also be acknowledged that the
creation of the European Union and its predecessors was due
above all to effects of the “European civil war” of
1914–45, in which some 40 million Europeans died and every
European nation-state was to a greater or lesser extent
defeated, in conflict due to a very considerable extent to
the ethno-linguistic nationalism preached by Mazzini.
Where contemporary Western liberalism differs most clearly
from its nineteenth-century liberal imperialist ancestors
is in its explicit anti-racism and its genuine
multiracialism (something that, with local qualifications,
is as true of British “conservative” liberals as it is of
American leftist “liberals”—witness the composition of
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s cabinet). This, however, does
not mean the abandonment of nationalism. Rather, what we
have seen is a transition within “civilizational
nationalism.” The way was prepared for this by the fact
that European liberal nationalists always endorsed
recruitment to their nations from people of other European
ethnicities. Though it would be hard to deny Napoleon’s
French nationalism, he himself was a Corsican and his
elites were drawn from most Western European nationalities.
However, while contemporary liberal opposition to racism in
the sense of discrimination and hatred based on color of
skin is perfectly sincere and consistent, things are much
more complicated when it comes to attitudes toward
different cultures. Here, respect for others is often
extremely superficial. The language of pluralism masks a
Western liberal ideological reality in which adherents of
other cultures are allowed and praised for certain outward
features of dress, music, religion, and so on, but when it
comes to the most important aspects of their morals,
beliefs, and behavior they are expected to conform strictly
to Western liberal norms. This becomes most evident when
the countries concerned are seen as geopolitical rivals of
the West. Although the West did not openly use the language
of “civilization” about the mission to expand NATO and
the European Union into the former Communist bloc after the
end of the Cold War, East European and ex-Soviet liberals
were explicit in their statements that their countries
needed to “join the civilized world” and that this
required the unconditional and unquestioning acceptance not
just of Western economic, social, and cultural policies but
of US geopolitical hegemony.
As noted, all the great Western European liberal movements
of the nineteenth century embodied a belief in their
superior civilization, which they had the right and duty to
spread through conversion, pressure, and force both within
their own populations and to other benighted peoples around
the world (Anderson 2023). Tocqueville was notoriously an
ardent supporter of the French conquest and colonization of
Algeria (Jardin 1988, 316–342). John Stuart Mill’s father
was a senior official of the East India Company who helped
drive forward laws increasing the power of British
officials and eliminating Indian languages from higher
education.
All the Western European empires (like the United States in
its origins) were sea empires, which conquered far-off
peoples with very different cultures and of course very
different skin colors. The results were empires of racial
domination and stratification. The settler colonies such as
America and Australia eventually became democracies, but
they were Herrenvolk (master-race) democracies—though here
too one should not underestimate the strains to be endured
and the prejudices to be overcome in accepting Irish and
Italian Catholics into what had been an overwhelmingly
“Anglo-Saxon” and Protestant white America.
In recent decades, immigration and the assimilation of many
immigrants (especially, of course, their elites) to Western
liberal culture has produced Western societies that are in
a sense “Eurasian” and closer in spirit to the great land
empires of the past: Chinese, Roman, Islamic, and
15
Russian. For these land empires, while absolutely
convinced of the superiority of their civilizations, were
not—and by nature could not be—based on strict racial
separation (Kappeler 2001). After all, converting
“barbarian peoples” to the values of Romanità—or, in the
Chinese formulation, transforming them from raw to cooked—
was essential both to the Empire’s self-image and to its
strategy of expansion and integration (Fiskesjö 1999).
Thus, under China’s Tang dynasty, both the chief minister
(and later leader of a great revolt) An Lushan and the
great poet Li Bai (Li Po) were of Turkic origin.
Populations had intermingled for centuries or millennia,
just as “indigenous” populations and descendants of
immigrants are beginning to do in the West. Local elites
that were prepared to accept imperial rule and the imperial
culture had to be given a share of power. Indeed, the
empires themselves were often ruled by dynasties of
“barbarian origin.” (Or, as a Russian friend to whom I
explained the infamous US “one drop of blood” racist
principle memorably exclaimed, “But that’s ridiculous! By
that standard every Russian is actually a Mongolian!”) Sea
empires divided people according to color of skin; land
empires divided people by culture and by whether they were
16
friends or enemies.
As with the Roman or Chinese empires, however, the growing
multiracialism of Western liberal culture does not in any
way diminish its sense of civilizational superiority and
mission; indeed, it confirms that sense and is integral to
it. In the United States, a belief in America as a
multiracial state has become central to American liberals’
civic nationalism, and therefore to the belief in
America’s superiority over other countries and its right
to export its system to them. In contemporary Europe,
liberals have shifted this mission from the national to the
European level, without however modifying either its
assumption of superiority or its dependence on power
(though now US military power, backed by European economic
and cultural power). Liberals no longer talk openly in
terms of civilizational superiority (and indeed do not
recognize it in themselves), and they denounce right-wing
populists for doing so (Brubaker 2017). Nonetheless, it
underlies their entire attitude toward the world (Anderson
2023).
For the United States is indeed a civilizational nation;
and it has been characteristic of every civilization in
history to see itself not merely as a civilization, but as
civilization per se, rooted in something fundamental to
human culture (Lerner 1957). Hence Tony Blair’s
(historically ludicrous) statement that “Ours are not
Western values, they are universal values of the human
spirit; and anywhere, anytime that ordinary people are
given the chance to choose, the choice is the same:
freedom, not tyranny” (Blair 2003). This is the spirit
that underlay the fatuous question often asked by Western
analysts and journalists after the end of the Cold War:
“When is Russia going to become a normal country?” (my
italics).

Conclusions

As stated, the softening of Western liberalism’s harder

edges in the second half of the twentieth century was due
to the harsh lessons of the first half of that century, but
also to liberalism’s apparent triumph across the West.
With the fall of Soviet communism and the Soviet Union
itself in 1989−1991, the triumph of Western liberalism
appeared both final and universal—a belief summed up in
Fukuyama’s The End of History. And victors can afford to
be relaxed and generous.
Liberal political parties went into eclipse. But from the
point of view of their core constituencies this did not
really matter, because the great parties of the center left
and center right had themselves become overwhelmingly
liberal in all their basic attitudes.
Globalization too was acceptable because it appeared to
mean globalization dominated not just by America and Europe
—the West—but specifically by the Western liberal elites
(of all races) or others around the world who deferred to
them and identified unconditionally with them.
As it has become apparent that globalization would be
shared and shaped by China and other non-Western and non-
liberal states and forces, so belief in globalization has
declined, to be replaced by moves toward economic blocs
that America can continue to dominate. Thus, the anti-
Chinese economic policies initiated in a chaotic way by the
Trump administration have been pursued much more forcefully
and systematically by that of Biden, with increasing
support from “Atlanticist” elements in Europe. Liberal
fear of authoritarian rivals abroad is matched by fear of
populist right-wing rivals at home; and as with nineteenth-
century liberal nationalism, there is an increasing
tendency (with some basis in truth, but colossally
exaggerated) to tie the domestic and international
opposition to liberalism together—something that has the
additional advantage of allowing domestic opponents to be
portrayed as traitors in the service of enemy powers and
alien ideologies. This approach was very marked in the
(almost completelyfake) Democrat attempts to portray Donald
Trump as a Russian agent, and the 2016 elections as somehow
stolen with Russian help—a strategy which helped set a
precedent for Trump’s own later attempt to portray
Biden’s election in 2020 as stolen.
European examples include the attempts by the British
“Remain” camp in the Brexit debate to suggest that
Russian covert support was important to the victory of
their opponents, and the claim that Russian funding and
propaganda have been crucial to the rise of right-wing
populism across Europe. Such support does indeed exist; but
it should be obvious that it cannot compare in importance
with the social, cultural, economic, and demographic causes
of the populists’ success, which liberals would be deeply
unwise to neglect.
Thus, the Hungarian populist and nationalist leader Viktor
Orbán has been rightly accused of sympathizing with Russia;
but this accusation can hardly be leveled at the equally
populist and nationalist government of Poland, which is at
the same time the most bitterly anti-Russian regime in
Europe. Moreover, accusing your political opponents of
being in effect traitors hardly comports well with
professed liberal commitments to free and open political
debate. In the United States, for liberals to foster
domestic fears of a “fifth column” risks reawakening the
syndrome analyzed by Louis Hartz ([1955] 1991) in the wake
of McCarthyism, of domestic repression and mass chauvinist
hysteria justified in the name of defending democracy:

Here is a doctrine which everywhere in the West has

been a glorious symbol of individual liberty, yet in
America its compulsive power has been so great that it
has posed a threat to liberty itself. Actually Locke
has a hidden conformitarian germ to begin with, since
natural law tells equal people equal things, but when
this germ is fed by the explosive power of modern
nationalism, it mushrooms into something pretty
remarkable. (11)

One of these remarkable episodes, documented in the new

book American Midnight by Adam Hochschild (2022), was the
anti-German hysteria that accompanied America’s entry into
World War I and that morphed into censorship and repression
(often violent) of opponents of the war and the left in
general, both by the police and by state-encouraged or
state-tolerated vigilantes. The remarkable thing about this
repression was that it took place during the administration
of Woodrow Wilson, the president who (as quoted above) has
been identified more than others with the ideology of
spreading democracy and liberty in the world through US
military power. To a considerable extent, indeed, the
repression took place with his sanction. For as Hochschild
writes, when Wilson called on Congress to declare war on
Germany, “A particularly vociferous outburst [of cheering]
greeted the President’s declaration,” reported the
Associated Press, that “if there should be disloyalty, it
will be dealt with by a firm hand of stern repression”
(33).
Liberal nationalism is now once again in full flower,
directed both against foreign enemies and supposed domestic
traitors; and domestic reform is also being justified in
part by nationalist appeals to the need to strengthen
Western nations against their “authoritarian” enemies.
Indeed, the attempts by Western liberal intellectuals like
Timothy Snyder and Anne Applebaum to revivify Western
liberalism through struggle with and self-definition
against the supposed “authoritarian axis” of Russia,
China, and Iran seem to correspond rather closely to the
dictum of Carl Schmitt: “Tell me who your enemy is, and I
will tell you who you are” (Applebaum, Harari, and Snyder
2022; Schmitt [1963] 2007).
A liberal precedent worth studying (and fearing) is that of
the American “neoconservatives” from the 1960s on and the
disasters to which their policies led. For in historical
terms there has never been anything remotely conservative
about this movement. Its political founding father, Senator
Henry Jackson, was a Democrat, and neoconservatism is
nineteenth-century liberal imperialist to the core—
including the liberal imperialists’ traditional distrust
of the ignorance and insufficient will to empire of the
democratic majority (Boot 2003). In reaction to Donald
Trump’s isolationism, the neoconservatives of today
(Robert Kagan, Max Boot, David Frum, and their ilk) have
returned to their original political home by abandoning the
Republican Party and joining the Democrats—but the
Democrats as represented by Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and
Tony Blinken, emphatically not those of Bernie Sanders and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Boot 2018).
Like chauvinist liberalism today, neoconservatism emerged
in response to a combination of international and domestic
threats to liberalism: abroad, defeat in the Vietnam War
and the apparently growing menace of the Soviet Union and
communism; at home, the peace movement, which was seen as
having weakened America in Vietnam, and which was linked to
a countercultural revolt that traditional liberals saw as
threatening their most cherished civilized values; and
spanning both, unconditional support for Israel against its
enemies and critics at home and abroad (Kristol 1999;
Kristol and Kagan 1996; Muravchik 1991; Murray 2006; Vaisse
2010; Drolet 2011).
The neoconservatives, however, proved a disaster for
America and American liberalism. In foreign and security
policy, they fostered a culture of paranoia, militarism,
American civilizational arrogance, and allegiance to Israel
that was to yield dreadful results after the end of the
Cold War and especially in the US response to 9/11. At
home, blind faith in the superiority of the American model
came to mean blind support for the “Washington Consensus”
and unrestrained free-market capitalism that shattered the
New Deal social market consensus on which American social
and political harmony had rested (Lieven, 2011).
By generating the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the great
recession of 2008, the Washington Consensus did much to
discredit the whole Western model and strengthen anti-
liberal ideologies around the world. In Russia and Ukraine
in the 1990s, radical free-market dogma contributed to the
economic disaster of that time and also provided
ideological cover for the looting of these countries by
their own elites and the laundering of the proceeds by
Western banks.
A particularly dangerous aspect of neoconservatism, which
overlaps with liberalism more broadly and traces its
origins back to Kant and the French Revolution, is the
belief that only certain forms of state (Kant and the
French revolutionaries said “republics”; American
liberals today call them “democratic,” at least when they
are obedient to America) enjoy full rights and protections
under international law. The rest are basically
illegitimate, their rights can be disregarded, and it is
almost a duty to try to subvert them. As Elie Kedourie
(1960) pointed out, this stance is a threat to all
international order and at the present time virtually
ensures coalitions of enemies against the United States
(15–19).
In this way, the neoconservatives replicated many of the
features of nineteenth-century liberalism and liberal
imperialism that had helped lead to the catastrophes of
World War I, communism, and fascism. The fact that they
have been welcomed back with open arms by the American
liberal establishment is a truly worrying sign of that
establishment’s historical amnesia and of the degree to
which it shares their tendencies to chauvinism, militarism,
and imperialism.
To draw attention to the darker sides of the liberal
tradition is not to condemn that tradition as a whole. The
monopoly of the Church on education did have to be broken;
the pigs did have to be driven from New York; the struggle
of contemporary liberals against racism is admirable. But
as the world returns in certain respects to the sort of
great-power competition that existed before 1914, it is
important to remember the degree to which nineteenth-
century liberalism itself contributed to liberalism’s—and
Europe’s—catastrophe in the first half of the twentieth
century.

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Notes

1 By “authoritarian” in this context I mean not formal adherence to

authoritarian or autocratic ideologies, but a belief in strong
centralized power and a willingness when necessary to (1) limit,
suspend, or rig the voting rights of sections of the population, (2)
suspend or distort the normal operations of the law in defense of
government and “order,” (3) exclude particular individuals, media,
and segments of the population from the normal protections of the
law, and (4) use the secret services and armed forces for domestic
political purposes.
2 By “liberal” here, I mean not membership in a liberal party but
agreement to the following general principles, held by liberals but
not in the nineteenth century by conservatives or socialists: the
supremacy of individual rights over traditional loyalties and
collective identities; equality of citizens under the law (but not
always in voting rights); the pursuit of individual happiness as the
supreme good; secularism; private property and more-or-less
regulated capitalism; and a belief in the supreme value of liberal
political systems, which the entire world should move toward
adopting. This is often linked to a teleological view of history,
whereby their innate and obvious superiority means that over time
the world is indeed naturally moving toward these systems.
3 For more on religion, see the chapters by Hennig, Camus, and
Sibgatullina in this volume.
4 As Giuseppe di Lampedusa makes his protagonist Prince Fabrizio
say of Garibaldi’s North Italian nationalist volunteers in the Sicilian
expedition, “They have come to teach us good manners,” adding
“But they won’t succeed, for we are gods”—with the childlike self-
obsession and anarchism of the Olympian gods ([1958] 1991).
5 For the attitude of Russian liberals to the masses in the 1990s, see
Lieven (1999, 153–155). For the racial aspect to liberalism and anti-
liberalism in Venezuela, see Chua, Amy “Power to the Privileged”,
New York Times January 7 2003. See also Webber, Jeffery R. 2017.
“Contemporary Latin American Inequality: Class Struggle,
Decolonization, and the Limits of Liberal Citizenship.” Latin
American Research Review 58, no. 1: 281–299.
6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto,
translated Samuel Morse (republished Penguin Books, London,
1967), pp.222–223.
7 For the authoritarian and military character of Italian liberalism
after unification, see Moe (2002, 126–183) and Smith (1968, 371–
394). For the Bronte revolt and its suppression, see Lucy Riall
(2013).
8 For the classic account of liberal capitalism’s incapacity for self-
regulation, see Karl Polanyi (2001).
9 For more on the “Washington Consensus,” see the chapter by Maria
Snegovaya in this volume.
10 See also Eugen Weber (1977).
11 As with many such nationalist triumphs, this came at immense
cost. The Turkish republic was in many ways a magnificently
successful creation, but establishing it involved the massacre or
deportation of the Christian (and later Jewish) minorities of
Constantinople, the Aegean and Pontic provinces, and Anatolia,
and the systematic suppression of any claims to ethnic identity of
the Kurds and other Muslim minorities.
12 In a very belated recognition of the importance of nationalism as a
check to Islamism, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote in
February 2015 that “Young Arab men are not going to walk away
from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They
will walk away when they can devote themselves to a revived
Egyptian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, Syrian nationalism,
some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and
democracy and transcends a lifetime” (Brooks 2015). He did not,
however, acknowledge that it has been above all US and Israeli
actions that have shattered the nationalist legitimacy of Arab
states.
13 By “nationalism” in this context I mean the belief that absolute,
unchanging, and supreme political, cultural, and human values are
embodied in your one’s own nation; that your one’s nation should
be the primary focus of your one’s loyalty and commitment; and
that your one’s nation must be as powerful as possible, not only for
its own sake but for the good of humanity in general. This form of
American civic nationalism is deeply held by American liberals like
Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Blinken, and Joe
Biden. As with the US foreign and security establishment in
general, their commitment to American global hegemony is
absolute (Clinton 2014; Biden 2021; Clinton 2014; Lieven 2011;
Niebuhr 1952; Lieven 2011). In effect, they have tacitly adopted the
“Wolfowitz Doctrine,” set out by Paul Wolfowitz and “Scooter”
Libby in the Defense Planning Guidance memo of 1992, whereby
the United States must be the sole hegemon in every region of the
world, with the sole right of international intervention, and should
also have the right to reshape the internal politics of other states
according to US ideology and interests (Wolfowitz 1992).
14 For the American Creed, see Gunnar Myrdal (1944, 1–25). For the
original use of the term “American Creed,” see G. K. Chesterton as
quoted in Seymour Martin Lipset (1976, 31).
15 For an earlier version of this argument, see Lieven (2012, 47–80).
16 For elite and popular Russian understandings of Russia as a
civilizational state, see Henry E. Hale and Marlene Laruelle (2020).