A new day has dawned, has it not? Understanding our post-liberal age with Mark Leonard

We never truly know if the times we live in are to be remembered, whether today's events mark the end of one era or the dawn of a new one. Historians wait to judge, yet it’s hard not to feel like we’re in a defining period when the old dies and the new is born.

I was born in 1989 when one such a ‘defining moment’ was declared. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the birth of personal computing were all spoken of as a new dawn - yet now that age, at least for those in the West, seemed like a continuation of the post-war Liberal order.

Again, following the millennium, the attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent wars seemed to usher in a new age. Yet now, these events seem strikingly in tune with the old era of liberal nations seeking to close down illiberal forms of violence.

Those events and the 2008 financial crisis now seem to foreshadow our own age - one in which the liberal principles of the post-war period are called into question.

Today, we can view Donald Trump’s first presidential term not as a pause before a return to the liberal order, but as a break with that order. It was a proper rupture in established politics, which, like the Brexit referendum in the UK, cannot be simply ‘undone’. The presidency of Joe Biden is now no longer seen as the return of an age of liberal technocracy, but as a passing moment. However remarkable Biden’s domestic achievements, his Presidency will now always be seen as a footnote to the Presidency of Donald Trump.

Mark Leonard, Founding Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, is grappling with his new world. He is fresh from spending six months in the US, meeting with those shaping the Trump movement and working to understand how politics can respond to our changing age.

When I speak with him at his offices in London, Leonard is clear that we must recognise this moment as a genuine rupture, when the foundations of our political and economic lives are altered.

“I think there's a bigger global story within which the psychodrama in the US and the UK is taking place, and that bigger story is one where many of our universal assumptions are fundamentally challenged.”

Leonard refers back to those early false dawns before optimism hadn’t been tarnished by burnt-out land rovers in dusty deserts or faded names of regional bank shop fronts with billion-dollar bailouts.

“In the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, until at least the global financial crisis, there was a lot of optimism and a sense that the world was moving together and that globalisation would start in the economic realm but would spread to the political realm, and you'd have all these new sorts of institutions.”

Yet now we can see the illusion of this future. A vision of the world that was leading to some predestined liberal order. A misguided belief that we’d hacked history and ended humanity's capacity for conflict, for boom and bust.

“Many people in the West confused soft and hard power - they still do. They overlooked the hard power roots of their soft power, so they thought that lots of people were buying into these norms and institutions because they were fantastic, to think this was the inevitable direction of history”.

In the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, China’s decoupling of economic power from democratic openness, and now the return of America First, we see a very old form of hard power - one in which the cruel logic of might rules. It’s hard not to flinch at this image of the world - it’s perhaps why so many, be they from the left or right, have failed to grapple with its implications. Preferring instead to take heart from apparent reversals to the norm, be it Biden in the US or centre-left victories in Europe. 

Yet Leonard believes politicians must confront this new reality and work to save what they truly value from the old system and work to build new structures.

To truly understand it, Leonard says, we must recognise the forces that delivered us into today’s world. Leonard argues that this comes down not only to economic forces but also human responses to global events, with geopolitics impacting the hyper-local and personal.

 "Over the last 15 years, the light in the room has changed. Many things that people felt very optimistic and hopeful about and saw as sources of opportunity are being reconceived as vulnerabilities and threats.

“The metaphor I use is that geopolitics is like a marriage which is going wrong, but where the couple can't get divorced - all things that brought the couple together in the good times become the ways they hurt each other in the bad times. In a marriage, it's the holiday home, the pet dog, and above all the children that the couple use to hurt each other - and in globalisation, it's all of the ties that bind us together, which are now being reinvented as not things which create cooperation and common feeling towards one another, but have become weapons to hurt one another, or tools to punish one another.”

The list of painful examples is long. Whether it’s the weaponisation of migration or the return of trade wars, our interconnected world is being exploited by those who recognise its inherent weaknesses.

What runs through all these issues is the creation of a deep sense of anxiety—a whirring hum that many find exhausting. The arrival of the smartphone and the social networks it delivers creates a new source of human anxiety in our connected world, a neural network that delivers the threats and challenges of the world into our pockets.

And yet crucial to our understanding of how to respond is the recognition that this new interconnected world is having very different effects on individuals and communities, a kind of inequality of anxiety.

“This anxiety is not equally distributed. What you're seeing is that some things that have happened over the last period have been seen as opportunities to some people, and mainly as threat to others.

“The example that I use, because it was the most searing personal example for me, was the Brexit debate in the UK. The vast majority of people who have university degrees in the UK, who live in big cities, saw the European Union as an unbelievably fantastic project which gave them new opportunities in their personal lives, professional lives, culinary life, and cultural life. And a lot of people who didn't have university degrees saw it as a source of anxiety”.

Leonard argues that established politics' response was initially economic, with industrial or social policy programmes simply aiming to offset the harm. This was the initial shift in our politics.

“Politics post Brexit has very much defined by an attempt to, at the very least, look at the endogenous problems that liberalism creates and the faults in a liberal system and to find ways of correcting them - giving people a sense of control, and rediscovering things like borders, and thinking much more about inequality and identity and place, and a lot of the things which felt quite old fashioned beforehand. A lot of politics has been post-liberal in that sense”.

On top of this, Leonard explores how movements such as Brexit and Trump successfully embraced the language of anti-imperialism, with strange echoes from thinkers such as Franz Fanon.

“It's very interesting that you have a lot of the same tropes there the whole idea of anti-colonial movements was that you had foreign elites who were undermining the indigenous people, imposing foreign ideas on the decisions that got made in your locality, were made because of the interests of foreign capital a very long way away, which didn't actually have any kind of domestic roots. That's exactly what the Brexiteers were saying, it is exactly what Trump is saying”.

“In the end, they are speaking the language of defending ‘indigenous’ people from these foreign forces and taking on those elites”.

But Leonard argues that economics and geopolitics only go part way to explaining this sense of anger and anxiety. We must all look at status and culture.

“It's also taking their cultural concerns and taking identity more seriously, which doesn't come naturally to the left. Orwell once famously said that the left embraces everyone's nationalism but their own. There's considerable sympathy for everyone else's independence but quite a lot of contempt for identities within our societies”.

“I think people on the left are instinctively internationalists, and they believe in cooperation and working together. But in order to do that, you need to make ordinary people feel safe. You need to take people's identity seriously and their problems seriously and have a much more granular idea of what people's problems are and of what you're trying to deliver, which is relayed to the people's lived experience - rather than these much more abstract ideas or aggregated ideas which leftwing parties were focused on, until quite recently, certainly throughout the whole 1990s and early noughties”.

Although Leonard’s most recent book, The Age of Unpeace How Connectivity Causes Conflict, explores geopolitics and its connection to domestic politics, he is no stranger to thinking about cultural memory and national storytelling.

Bursting into politics as a fresh-faced thinker with BritainTM: Renewing our Identity - the bible for New Labours’ Cool Britannia, his birthing of the last iteration of centre-left national identity gives him more capacity than most to recognise the need for new stories.

“Back in 97, I went through this process of exploring our old stories and came out with an identity which was more civic than ethnic, which was celebrating British connections with the world and connectivity”.

Leonard rattles through the changing Zeitgeist of those New Labour years, Salmon Rushdie binding English literature with emerging cultural movements, major companies dropping British from their branding (think BP, BT), out with the flag and in with the graphic concept - all fuelled by espresso and fusion cooking.

For Leonard and many of his generation, it was an exciting and bold new world in which new stories could be told. Yet, as Leonard points out, it also displaced other identities and crowded out other stories.

“I think in many ways that process of trying to develop a more inclusive, forward-looking civic version of the identity is both very empowering for a lot of people (particularly young people who lived in big cities, people who from ethnic minorities, from Scotland and Wales and places who had felt they weren't part of the old stories of Britishness)”.

Yet Leonard has seen the inbuilt flaws in these new national myths.

“It was disempowering for the minority that thought of itself as a majority, who found their status being shifted. I think in some ways Brexit was the revenge of the people who felt that they were becoming strangers in their own country because the national story had been changed. In the new, you know, institutions, they could see their public institutions had adopted a version of the national story that they didn't like and that they felt was threatening to them”.

Leonard recognises that pain and anxiety are central to managing the political impacts because the interconnectedness and the cultural challenge pose a kind of crisis for liberalism, which has not gone unnoticed by the right.

“The New Right project, led by people like JD Vance, is about finding a new social base for Republicanism - the old-fashioned Republicanism was country club Republicanism, whereas now what they wanted was a working-class Republicanism, and they talk about the working class and workers all the time.”

Although many will point to Biden’s policies as helping the working class, the story and sense of connection don’t match the technocratic details of the centre-left policies.

“Voters view the Democrats now as the party of elites, that party of Wall Street and of Hollywood and of all of the different liberal professions”.

Fundamentally, for Leonard and many like him, this requires Democrats and centre-left politicians to take on the vested interests and institutions in both the public and private spheres. A failure to do so, Leonard argues, risks allowing the New Right to be the one who stands up for the ordinary worker.

What’s worse, centre-left parties could come to not only represent the elites but also to represent a failing status quo.

“I think that it is dangerous to become the champions of the world of yesterday and to try and uphold institutions which have lost their legitimacy, which can't deliver and are not respected by other powers.”

“Rather than obsessing about order and how to preserve the old order, we need to wake up to the fact that reality over the next few decades will be profound disorder”.

For Leonard, this isn’t about simply giving up on our values; it’s about understanding that we need new ways of expressing them and building solidarity.

“It's about organising ourselves so that the losers from connectivity and interdependence, that their losses are visible to the state and politics, and that pain is recognised and respected”.

Ultimately, our whirring, technicolour, interconnected world will not slow down. Culture, money and people will continue to flow, yet the anxieties and anger this world creates will also grow. How we manage and recognise these anxieties will be crucial.

Speaking to Leonard, it is clear that we’re called on to manage the pinch points of our interconnected world, be it migration or culture, and create new shared stories that allow us to navigate them.

In 2005, Tony Blair told the Labour conference ‘I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer. They're not debating it in China and India’. In the end, Blair was right - globalisation is here, and in fact, technology means it won't go away.

And yet, its impact on us as humans and communities requires our politics to build new ways to ease its effects - not only economic but cultural. To speak to Leonard is to recognise the value we hold in the deep sense of knowing one another and the calm that comes from the strength of a shared endeavour.

The issues we face will be both geopolitical and local. At a global level, Leonard urges nations such as the UK to get used to dealing with nations that don’t operate under the old liberal order and the challenges that come with this. While at home, creating a politics that can withstand a more turbulent world.

Part of it concerns buildings and understanding ecosystems that navigate and create answers. Listening to Leonard, we see how failure to do so risks allowing new undemocratic forces own the disenchantment and anger that flow from the anxieties of our interconnected world.

And although this new era will come with new dangers and anxieties - it will also come with those vast majorities yearning for a sense of connection and a place of safety. I am reminded of a recent review of the neurologist and author Oliver Sachs's letters when Sacks wrote to Bob Rodman, a psychiatrist who had been a close friend since university.

Rodman’s wife, Maria – only 38 years old – had been diagnosed with a mysterious illness that would eventually prove fatal; Rodman wrote to Sacks of his shock, his despair; suicide, he wrote was a “luxury” since the couple had two young daughters.

Sacks’s response is, like so much in this extraordinary volume, a model of honest compassion which powerfully acknowledges the pain and challenge of grief. “I wish I had not been so blind before,” he writes, apologising for a delay in answering. “I did see that you were in the throes of crisis, but I failed to see the real and agonising events behind it.” He offers his own experience, not as distraction, but as means of connection: “I know very well those forces which shut one up and in, which confine one in an extra hell, when one most needs to reach out towards others, towards one another.

Erica Wagner, Oliver Sacks’s letters from a beautiful mind, New Statesman

How we reach out to one another and build a politics that allows for meaningful connection and how we create communities of belonging, safety, and care will be one of the great callings of our new age.