Samuel Moyn, the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, joins us to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, its role in international relations, and the possibility of a multipolar liberal order emerging in a period of U.S. decline. *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Samuel Moyn, the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, joins us to discuss the philosophical underpinnings of liberalism, its role in international relations, and the possibility of a multipolar liberal order emerging in a period of U.S. decline.
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*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
In this show, guests from across the political spectrum and from every corner of the globe share their views in their own voice. While the Stimson Center seeks to provide access to a wide variety of perspectives, it does not endorse any particular position. We leave it to the listeners to judge the validity and value of the views expressed by the guests. I hope you enjoy the podcast.
My guest today is Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. Sam is one of the world's great intellectual historians and one of my advisors in graduate school. In his most recent books, Sam has examined the histories of human rights, the laws of war, and liberalism.
Sam, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:14] Sam Moyn: Oh, thanks for having me, Peter.
[00:01:16] Peter Slezkine: So, let's start by taking a look at liberalism, which you've written quite a bit about. Liberalism and the so-called liberal order seemed to be on the defensive, perhaps, in retreat. The question is why. And let me start by giving you two possible explanations, and then you can react. So, the first is that liberalism is, perhaps, being outcompeted by rival ideologies or finely succumbing to some of its own internal contradictions. The second is that liberalism is losing its luster because the American empire has entered a period of relative decline. And I suppose a third possibility is that there's nothing much to see here. Liberalism has been crying about crises for the past century, and this is just how things work, and nothing much has changed. So, which of these explanations do you think works best?
[00:02:06] Sam Moyn: I don't know. I mean, I think there could be an element of truth in all three, but I think the second one is most plausible to me. I mean, to step back, I generally take the position that Mohandas Gandhi took about Western civilization. When he was asked what he thought of it, he said, "It sounds like it would be a good idea." And we can talk about what liberalism was or is, but I don't think there was ever a liberal international order. There was a free trade order pursued by the successive Anglo empires, Britain and the United States. And it's certainly true that the United States is in some kind of long retreat from… And it kind of had to be from the significance it once possessed and the economic significance, and also military power.
I don't know. I mean, I would be for having a liberal order finally. It's just that neither of these hegemons has really sponsored that, except when it comes to free trade or, kind of, economic liberalism. And we might need a post-imperial multilateral order to actually finally have a liberal order in the international sphere. But, I mean, maybe we should talk about what the details are, because if we're talking about, like, Donald Trump's tariffs interfering with free trade, then that's clearly a departure from decades of policymaking. If we're talking about liberalism more generally or, like, the liberal international order, we have to get clear on what the terms mean.
[00:03:48] Peter Slezkine: Well, so, let's define terms. So, it's interesting to me that you seem to be identifying liberalism with free trade, at least in its international expressions, because it seems like human rights, for example, which you've written about, are a version of liberalism for export that the Anglo empires, the British and the American, totally have transformed the societies which they have incorporated or influenced in ways that are profoundly ideological and that go beyond just accessing markets.
[00:04:24] Sam Moyn: Yeah, totally. I mean, so when we look back, here, I would distinguish between the Brits and the Americans in the 19th century through the early 20th. The Brits, like the Americans later, are primarily pursuing a free trade order, and they're, in a sense, reducing liberalism to economic liberalism. They don't really have a human rights project. They definitely have some humanitarian intervention, which is mostly pretextual. And, like, there are some idealists, like John Stuart Mill, who doesn't believe in something called human rights, but does believe that liberals are the ones who will bring emancipation and progress. Of course, he's deeply confused about what they're actually doing, which is mainly economic liberalism and then, like, a lot of brutality and repression.
Okay. And then the Americans take over. And we've both written about this era in certain respects. Like, there's tons of ideological justification of American Empire in terms of the free world, and whatnot. Much later, there are these universalistic norms.
I guess I would still say, though, that, even though Americans end up talking a lot about human rights after the 1970s and say their foreign policy is advancing it, they're still most committed to the free trade order. One criticism could be that they're so selective in their human rights policy. Another could be that they really don't ever take it that seriously, compared to the economic liberalism they mainly promote. So, I look back and I see that since the '70s, America has mainly been the neoliberal power. That's its main project in international affairs. It's not like human rights were negligible, but they just weren't as important in comparison.
And so, my ultimate conclusion is not that Americans were too liberal but they weren't liberal enough because they still, like the Brits, reduced their internationalism too much to a, kind of, economic project — neoliberalism.
[00:06:37] Peter Slezkine: Is there a liberalism that exists as a positive project beyond the bounds of the nation state? Or is it then inevitably reduced to some lowest common denominator, human rights value system or an economic project?
[00:06:56] Sam Moyn: I mean, I think that that's why I start with Gandhi, that, like, it would be nice to imagine and see such a thing, but we haven't yet. I don't want to rule out the possibility because liberalism has meant something beyond economic liberalism domestically, rarely in some places.
[00:07:17] Peter Slezkine: In what places, and when?
[00:07:19] Sam Moyn: Well, I think that lots of places in the North Atlantic have, of course, been capitalist societies, but they've provided, at least, some people with the means of pursuing the goal of something beyond just making money. And it's the liberal promise, as I understand it, beyond the, kind of, economic growth was always the chance to make your life what you want in some creative way. And that could take an economic form, but also other forms. And John Stuart Mill, his main idea was not human rights, it was human individuality. And that's what he wanted to see promoted. It's just that he never thought that would happen internationally for a very long time. And we've never picked up that idea. But I think a lot of us have the idea that we want to live in a society where we are free agents who get to decide who we want to be. And then we get into a debate, "Well, is that even possible under capitalism, or whatever you want to call it? Do we have to radically rethink markets?" And liberals are not revolutionaries of that kind. They've tweaked markets, especially domestically, but they still think that, in some places, they thought that there was more to liberalism than mere economic liberalism.
[00:08:52] Peter Slezkine: Well, so, let's get back to international relations since it seems that you believe that modernity overall in liberalism as, perhaps, its principal ideological component, continues to contain positive possibilities. But in the middle of the 20th century, the United States assumed leadership of a massive empire called the free world. It fashioned this free world leadership role around some conception of liberalism, which you have critiqued at length, and which depended on the assumption that it was under mortal threat from the outside. So, what is wrong with that? And are we still living through the final stages of this period? What is the role of Russia and China here? Is it the same as always?
[00:09:43] Sam Moyn: So, some people, and you're one of them, and I agree with this, you know, would say what went wrong in the Cold War with liberalism is that it became belligerent, and that's true.
[00:09:56] Peter Slezkine: Not just belligerent, but defensive, because the Brits were planning belligerent but doing it with a degree of self-confidence. Whereas, the American version posited some extraordinary external monster.
[00:10:10] Sam Moyn: Of course.
[00:10:10] Peter Slezkine: And it created the most powerful empire in the history of the world as a defensive project, which is, sort of, an ironic logic.
[00:10:15] Sam Moyn: Okay. So, absolutely. So, the best defense is a good offense. And I mean, I still think there are, like, major differences between what goes on in the '40s and what happens in the '60s and the name of rollback and the Domino Theory and the Vietnam War. But whatever, there's some, like, grotesque story to tell about American belligerency, and liberalism is part of that story.
But I've tried to argue that there's, in a way, this adverse story, which is that liberalism becomes much less ambitious as a creed. And so, because I care about the globalization someday of what was worth having about liberalism in the first place, which was, for a long time, just a domestic project, I'm concerned about, like, what liberals beginning in the '40s say the point of liberalism is, and whether it's domestic or international.
And so, alongside the belligerency waxing and waning, basically supporting an economic project, along with tons of military power and its consequences, there's a story about how liberals basically turn their back on emancipation and progress. And they say, "All we can do now is defend humanity against the worst." Of course, incarnated ultimately by the Soviet Union.
What is staggering to me, and I try to show this in this recent book, Liberalism Against Itself, is that a lot of liberals basically say, "Okay, let's let the commies stand for emancipation science and progress. Let's just let them have all of that." And the trouble with those ideas, which we used to own, relative to, like, the Catholic church or religion, generally, is that they're very alluring ideas and they will lead enthusiasts to side against America with the commies. And so, we'll just, like, give up all of that and say...
[00:12:26] Peter Slezkine: Wait, how did they give up on all that? Just to explain, because that's not an obvious idea.
[00:12:30] Sam Moyn: I'm an intellectual historian, so the people I'm talking about are just writers who say, "Here's what liberalism should become. Here's what it should look like. Here's what it should do." They're not like Paul Nitze or people like that. They're, like, English professors. And they say things like...
[00:12:49] Peter Slezkine: But no less influential with that?
[00:12:52] Sam Moyn: Well, I would think so. I think intellectuals are important, but, you know, there's a little bit of narcissism in that. And, of course, you can always say, "No. What really matters is dollars and cents, or who has guns, or the right ones are enough." But at any rate, these intellectuals…
[00:13:08] Peter Slezkine: So, at what point do these intellectuals give up on the ambitious project of liberalism? And in what ways do they give it away to the rival ideology that they claim to oppose?
[00:13:19] Sam Moyn: So, I focus heavily just on this crucial moment between the 1930s and the early 1950s, and especially on the later 1940s, when some folks, whom I select out, say, "Look, we just need to take care not to lose liberals, especially young people to the enemy." That happened in the '30s, when a lot of us, and they're talking about New York, Jewish intellectuals for the most part, kind of, thought that the revolution was coming to America and that it would replace all the mendacity of liberalism with a communist utopia.
Now that we've seen what that really means, which is brutality and terror, the show trials, blah, blah, blah, we have to guard against that eventuality. And liberals really need to become defensive, not always offensive, just they need to say, "We're not offering a lot. People are evil. When they dream big, it's likely they're about to kill you. Let's let the Soviets be the utopian ones, and we'll stand for tragedy." Now, of course, they have to give that up, and people like Walt Rostow, Walt Whitman Rostow, is ambitious and emancipatory, and he thinks liberalism should be about redeeming humanity. He brings the TVA to the Mekong Delta and so forth and so on.
[00:14:52] Peter Slezkine: They are talking about JFK's advisor-
[00:14:55] Sam Moyn: Yeah. So, that's later.
[00:14:55] Peter Slezkine: ... who created his own version of development theory, mimicking the Marxist approach.
[00:15:01] Sam Moyn: Absolutely, a non-communist manifesto, meaning, "I'm going to give you an ideology of liberation and progress, and the Soviets need to be called out for not providing the goods." But in the '40s, there are tons of people who say, "No. Let's let the Soviets claim to bring a new era, a new man. And we'll show what that really means is brutality and terror." And liberals won't promise that stuff anymore because they're the ones in the know, they're the cynics.
And so, my thought is that this was damaging because liberals had stood for something worthwhile, which was emancipation — emancipation in the name of creativity at every level, like we were discussing before. And so, somehow, that critique, I think, needs to coexist with the critique of the belligerency and the militarism and the liberals' own brutality and terror, which continues in our day.
[00:16:04] Peter Slezkine: But so, the liberals who lived through the difficulties of the Interwar period, the horrors of Nazism, and then the terrible seeming menace of communism created a more limited version of liberalism that was less ambitious, more defensive, and that claimed to protect the population against the horrors of revolution and utopianism. At what point does this lead to neoconservatism? Because that last generation of Cold Warrior does seem to be fairly ambitious in the transformative potential of liberalism. Democracy promotion is their great project. So, is that, sort of, a version of the same thing just evolved in different circumstances, or do they take a different approach entirely and actually do believe that they can remake the world in their own image?
[00:16:58] Sam Moyn: I think neoconservatism has different forms and, therefore, different roots and sources. The main claim I make in the book is actually about how these depressed Cold Warriors end up aiding and abetting the neoliberal project. But it's also true that I have a chapter on the person I regard as the founding mother of neoconservatism. That's Gertrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol's wife and William Kristol's mother.
And to understand that claim, I think we have to remember that neoconservatism emerges as a domestic policy project, and it really is about going back to the 19th century, but a different non-emancipatory liberalism from then, which was recessive, I think, in that era. And they say things like, "Well, we can't reinvent society. We can't liberate Black people." That's the main argument that, kind of, drives the invention of neoconservatism at first when it's a domestic policy idea. And they say, "What we need is to accept limits to how much justice we can bring. We need to lean into religion and virtue, as like what will allow Black families not to break down and cause crime waves and so forth?" They don't talk at all about de-industrialization and its consequences for African Americans.
Now, then, there's this other thing that happens, which is the invention of foreign policy, neoconservatism. And this is absolutely, like, more a successor if you like Walt Rostow. It's like a missionary democracy promoting ideology, sometimes, invoking human rights as part of the package or the justification.
I'd argue that the folks that I'm concerned about are, in foreign policy, in what I've written, are not so much the neoconservatives who have these very interesting liberal roots, in a sense, ambitious liberal roots. But folks like Michael Ignatieff, who was not a neoconservative but wrapped himself in the, kind of, legacy of the Cold War liberals and said, "Look, the world's a veil of tears. It's just a place where torture takes place. We need to use the military. The neocons are right about that, but it's not to spread emancipatory democracy everywhere. It's just to keep torture from happening.” That's the argument he makes famously to join the neocons at the time of the Iraq war.
And so, I'm just focused on, like, some different folks and different problems. If you want to tell a story where these belligerent liberals and then their successors, the neoconservatives, on the world scale, really need hate, I'm down. I mean, there's no doubt about that, if that story's really important. I'm interested in a different group of people who, in a sense, join the reinvention of the imperial cause, but it's from this totally different perspective, which is that liberals need to fear horror and terror. And it's on that very ground that they might need to, like, engage in some seemingly imperialist acts. Now, Ignatieff ends up arguing himself into basically neoconservative policies, but it's not from the neoconservatives kind of ideological justification.
[00:20:44] Peter Slezkine: I mean, we don't have to push this too far, but it seems like there is an overlap that both sides… imagine that the world is a veil of tears, that there are monsters, or maybe one monolithic monster outside, and that this is a political project of protecting the population from these horrors, which can be imagined in various ways, but generally go back to some interwar World War II version of totalitarian radical excess.
[00:21:15] Sam Moyn: I mean, there's something to that, but I'd still maintain their differences. So, if you take a figure like Rostow or the neocons later, they basically, of course, have their enemies list. And they're on the march against the latest Hitler, Saddam Hussein. And we'll be welcomed as liberators. And I just think, for the liberal internationalists, they have this idea that the world is a scary place and there are just going to be enemies out there, and we shouldn't topple. But we should at least keep the torture from happening.
You know, George W. Bush had this tendency, of course. He was argued into war by neocons, but when he came to justify it, he said, "No, but the rape rooms and torture chambers that Saddam has.” Even if you don't buy the Ba'athist, fascist, commie argument that he's the latest Hitler, human rights demands that we, for the very worst off, the worst victims in the world, we embark on this war, humanitarian intervention. And that was Ignatieff's idea, which I think he gets out of this Cold War liberal, kind of, tragic perspective.
[00:22:31] Peter Slezkine: Well, it seems there's obviously some genealogy going back to the notion of civilization combating barbarism. And that was a clearly important strain during that George W. Bush war on terror period. And it seemed like it combined the Cold War logic or the mythology of World War II, that then is institutionalized during the Cold War, that you have Hitler and then Stalin, and Saddam is just the latest in that line. And problems abroad can all be reduced to one single otherworldly evil. But there's also, sort of, civilization slowly but surely-
[00:23:05] Sam Moyn: For sure.
[00:23:05] Peter Slezkine: ... triumphing over backwardness in barbarism. And the Middle East was both Nazi Germany revived, but also just the barbaric Hinterlands that have existed forever. And you even see it now with, sort of, European talk of jungles and gardens.
[00:23:23] Sam Moyn: Yeah, I'm totally with you. I just think we're now talking about, like, the elements of a composite. And not all those elements have to be shared by everyone. And so, there's the idea that the Western and White powers will civilize the globe, but I think the idea of human rights adds something to that. But regardless, you could hold either the 19th-century version of the civilizing mission or the late 20th, without believing that you should use military power to advance it. And so, this strain where you're basically like, "We have a mission to civilize humanity,” doesn't need to take the form of shock and awe or neoconservatism.
Similarly, most people in the human rights project have this kind of tragic view. And it's precisely for that reason that most of them have not been militaristic. And so, what's interesting about a figure like Ignatieff is that he shares the human rights view that the world's avail of tears, the states, likely, is to abuse its population if it's left to be too powerful. And that's why we need to deploy the most powerful state humanity has ever devised, the United States, to join this neoconservative war, which is something very few people, like a composite that very few people put together in that particular moment.
[00:24:56] Peter Slezkine: Interesting. I would've thought that was a more standard combination, that the responsibility to protect it, just, sort of, the unipolar moment or even late Cold War period allowed for a return to predominance of the civilizational perspective in some respect. But when that project ran into limits, then the obstacles were reconceived in Cold War framing as an essential alien other that is responsible for our responsibility to protect, constantly failing.
[00:25:31] Sam Moyn: Totally. I mean, it creates this enormous temptation when you have this universalistic view, which I have also, which is that, well, if we don't have an agent to advance it anytime soon, shouldn't we find one or hope there is one? But if we take the case of the Libyan regime change in 2011, well, a lot of people who had forged the concept of the responsibility to protect literally were for a humanitarian intervention resolution in the United Nations Security Council. Were they happy when the Americans and the French engaged in a, more or less, neocon regime change? No. They are on the hook for being confused at a critical moment and supporting humanitarian intervention, which was very predictably going to lead where it did.
But they were, let's say, innocent of being neoconservatives. It's just that they aided and abetted, kind of, ideologically, a neoconservative outcome. And so, to me, that's, like, an important thing, because ultimately, if we just say liberalism is always going to be this American/imperial belligerent militaristic project, well, do we just abandon all the good stuff in liberalism? Do we abandon the liberals who have gotten so confused in our time and aided an abetted empire? I wouldn’t want to, because that’s everyone I know, practically.
[00:27:07] Peter Slezkine: Is it possible to divorce liberalism, then, from the American Imperial Project as it has existed since 1950? So, perhaps, this is the result we get when you combine American Empire with liberalism of a certain kind born after World War II and during the Cold War. But if the U.S. were to return to its borders, it could launch a political project of liberalism that would look very differently. And perhaps, in the rest of the world, there could be other versions of liberalism that would also work differently.
[00:27:41] Sam Moyn: Absolutely. I mean, so, there's so much to say on that point, because it's really important. So, the first thing is that, in the Cold War, there was also decolonization. And that emerges as a liberal project, in a sense, because liberals invented nationalism in the 19th century, and the 20th just saw the globalization of the idea that anti-imperial projects, in the name of peoples, will serve liberal values and liberal outcomes. And so, that's something to which we could return, where there are, like, these experiments globally in emancipation. In the absence of some hegemons [crosstalk 00:28:22].
[00:28:22] Peter Slezkine: But you can also argue that decolonization was a disaster in some respects because of its liberal origins, that there was an identification between the nation state and the autonomous individual through this liberal ideological prism. And so, we ended up with these fairly artificial constructs that were assumed to have formally equal sovereignty but, in fact, do not, as everybody recognizes. And so, this analogy between an individual and nation has created a very strange form of, sort of, political division on the world map that doesn't seem to be working fantastically [crosstalk 00:29:01].
[00:29:01] Sam Moyn: No, not at all. But again, I'm having a referendum on what our choices are, compared to the available alternatives. And I think decolonization was better for all its faults than the imperial world it attempted to displace. Of course, it never displaced that world, really. But formal sovereignty of the 200 states is a big deal, relative to the prior alternative.
And then the question would be, well, what was the other way to do it? What is the other way now? I go back to the, kind of, founding liberal nationalists and Italian, Giuseppe Mazzini, who said, "Well, wait, we never said that nations were these enduring ethno-national entities. Nations are just stepping stones to a truly cosmopolitan order." And people like Adom Getachew insist, no, I mean, anti-colonial nationalism was always a cosmopolitan project at the height of decolonization, especially when it was challenging, not just American imperialism, but, kind of, economic unfairness on the global scale.
But I still want to get back to the other part of your question, which is that, to me, it seems essential that we look at the alternatives, domestically and internationally, and ask, well, what are the available ones now? Because I'm totally sympathetic to the idea that liberals shouldn't get to say what Marxist did about communism, that Marxism was never tried. Actually, it was. And liberalism has been tried in the international realm. It seems like there's so much evidence it's imperial British in the 19th American in the 20th. There's so much evidence it's capitalistic or whatever you want to say. It seems to drift towards economic liberalism, not just domestically, but internationally. And yet, I have to ask, well, what about the good stuff? And what's the alternative that would keep the good stuff but avoid this tilt in liberalism towards empire and economic unfairness? And I don't know of one.
[00:31:22] Peter Slezkine: So, what is the good stuff? Because I think...
[00:31:24] Sam Moyn: Well, why are we doing this creativity and modernity emancipation? You know, what the Americans and Soviets were both offering and no one [crosstalk 00:31:33]?
[00:31:33] Peter Slezkine: Is it fair to say that, for you, the post-war European welfare state was an example of this success?
[00:31:41] Sam Moyn: No, because it was merely better than the alternatives and depended on American hegemony. And I think it's an inkling compared to the neoliberal states we have now. And the Europeans have increasingly created through their European Union, of the fact that there are these real alternatives that liberals can embrace and build, to just a merely economically liberal state. But it's just an inkling. And we wouldn't want it to be for just a few White people under American protection.
[00:32:19] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, it was the American protection that I was getting at, is that obviously occurred in a particular context. So, if we are witnessing a decline in American power, and the liberal order, however one judges it, led by the U.S., created in the middle of the 20th century, is receding, perhaps, being displaced, what does that mean for the West which gave rise to liberalism and which was the core of this order to the transatlantic relationship, which is obviously under strain at the moment and to the areas of the world, big and small, that have remained outside of the orbit of the liberal order, either as barbarians to be modernized or crushed, or the Russians, Chinese, Germans, at various moments, who were the evil force that served to provide the liberal order with its internal coherence?
[00:33:16] Sam Moyn: I think we've reached the core of the matter, which is we have to ask whether the coming multipolar order can be the best thing that ever happened to liberal values because liberalism can finally be freed of unipolarity, or one side in this bipolar dispute that the Cold War was. And I don't want to say there aren't enormous dangers and risks in multipolarity. Because honestly, things can always be worse than the imperial projects we've seen. But I see enormous opportunities, in part because we've learned that we can't just go back. We wouldn't want to go back to saving these false starts in freedom, whether the American side in the Cold War, the Soviet side, the European welfare state, under the auspices of this imperial project, a form of decolonization that did trend in the direction of autocracy. So, we have, like, the rubble of emancipation that the 20th century and early 21st created. And it's really not worth trying to reboot any of those projects because they're so clearly failing and there's no way to get them back, in fight of all the nostalgias. And so, to me, I just think there's no alternative now but to build a real, kind of, emancipatory project within multipolar auspices.
[00:34:52] Peter Slezkine: But can you have liberalism become attached to one of these poles? Because the trend seems to be away from liberalism, at least in its universalist instantiation, toward multipolarity, which is about particularity, about, often, nationalism in its tribal forms. Civilization now is a hot new topic, and a label every polity wants to ascribe to itself. So, it seems like, generally, it’s the illiberal alternatives that seek to claim the mantle of multipolarity. It, of course, creates a diversity that, in total, could be thought to be liberal and each side would be tolerant of the other in some liberal sense. But each civilization, each state, each nation would be bound by traditions, histories, and philosophies that seem very far from liberal.
[00:35:55] Sam Moyn: It could work out that way, and that's probably the likeliest outcome. I think it would be sad for anyone who's ultimately like me, a cosmopolitan, with some grudging love or liberal content to it, because we can imagine a world in which there are plural experiments in freedom. And we've learned that one country ruling them all actually threatens that freedom rather than...
[00:36:22] Peter Slezkine: Is that a Lord of the Rings reference?
[00:36:24] Sam Moyn: It was, yeah. So, I just think that's the goal. And it was announced by various thinkers, Chuck Hagel. The plurality of nations and power centers doesn't necessarily mean that, like, some of them have to stand for autocracy and tradition. They could all stand for experiments and freedom. And then we have, like, a bunch of laboratories in the world. And maybe, cultural exchange allows us to figure out, well, which model is worth following, adapting, moving towards? There doesn't need to be war to change the world, but there can be just, like, a series of experiments running, each protected by the power of a civilization. But that civilization doesn't need to reflect some, like, ancient tradition or claim that one ethnicity is better than another, which sounds crazy.
[00:37:23] Peter Slezkine: Well, civilizations, I think, by definition, do have to claim a particular ancient tradition. And nations do have to revolve around a tribal identity. So, Mazzini may have had a liberal conception of nationalism at a particular moment in the 19th century, but as soon as his project was realized in Europe, began to fragment into nation-states, the ethnic impulse became very strong. So, that idea of his didn't seem to hold much purchase in the real world.
[00:37:54] Sam Moyn: Well, I'm sympathetic to that skepticism. And in fact, there's a very interesting scholar who attempted to show that Mazzini was, kind of, the godfather of fascism because he didn't mean it, but, like, once you set up nationalism, you're basically paving the way for ethnonationalism. And there has to be not just, like, universal ideals, but, you know, old traditions that define your nation and so forth.
[00:38:24] Peter Slezkine: Well, I think tribalism predates Mazzini in his [crosstalk 00:38:28] of the chimps.
[00:38:30] Sam Moyn: I don't know.
[00:38:30] Peter Slezkine: It's yoking that to the power of this modern state, which is a new development.
[00:38:35] Sam Moyn: It's all fair. It's all fair, Peter. I just think, like, what do you want to happen? And there could be a slim outside possibility that we could imagine multipolarity in this other form, which is [crosstalk 00:38:50].
[00:38:51] Peter Slezkine: I'm intrigued by your description of these experiments, that each run separately autonomously, and then the marketplace could figure out which of these experiments is most successful, and the others would imitate it. This sounds a lot like the ideas emanating from Silicon Valley in a more optimistic moment about a decade ago. When Peter Thiel and others were into sea studying and there was a sense that different communities of like-minded individuals could splinter off experiment in various social formations and make the best of it outside of the tyranny of old traditional states in civilizations, but now those exact same people are investing in Palantir, talking about the Chinese Communist Party and the importance of developing American national strength.
[00:39:44] Sam Moyn: So, Thiel was always, first and foremost, an anti-status libertarian. And I'd argue that, whatever game he's playing on the international front by having this company advance authoritarian aims, I think his goals for himself and for the places he wants to be part of are anti-status and libertarian. I'm astatus, I think. The game is not to secede in the name of freedom, but to conquer and create an emancipatory state, the kind of thing the Americans and Soviets both actually promised and failed to deliver.
And so, I'm with Thiel, if you're saying part of that libertarianism is opposing tradition. Although he's a big Christian, but never mind. Where I think I disagree with you is that you have this idea of the iron law of tradition, where, well, the only alternative to empire is going to be a multipolar world that inevitably is going to be like Chineseness and Russianness defining the states that claim those names.
And I was just in China; I've never been to Russia. But these are people in the thick of modernity. And they absolutely have an authoritarian state with which they're compliant. But they want to live our lives. They want to be part of the emancipation of humanity from all the constraints it suffered. They've done something extraordinary in China in really revolutionizing a whole peasant-based way of life over a few decades. And everyone is living more technologically advanced lives than most Americans do, as a result of this great leap forward.
[00:41:46] Peter Slezkine: That’s the wrong phrase to use.
[00:41:49] Sam Moyn: Well, okay. As a result of their, you know, series of longer plans.
[00:41:52] Peter Slezkine: Longer leap forward.
[00:41:52] Sam Moyn: How about five-year plans, which were good and worked out for the Soviet Union and which worked out for the marketizing Chinese? But my point is that they don't want Confucianism, and they may want, you know, an authoritarian modernization, but they don't want tradition for its own sake. They want modernity. And that just shows that they're like everybody.
[00:42:17] Peter Slezkine: It's absolutely true that modernity has made it to China, and that China, in some sense, is the model of modernity, as in its latest instantiation at the moment. And even Russia is not as backward a place as one might think from the internet memes meanwhile in Russia.
[00:42:35] Sam Moyn: Of course.
[00:42:36] Peter Slezkine: The question is, as always, about multiple modernities and whether those multiples will be defined by some appeal to common tribal identity or civilizational traditions.
[00:42:49] Sam Moyn: Absolutely. And again, if we were betting, I would bet with you. If we're dreaming, I wouldn't substitute the bet for the dream. And so, instead of Thiel, I'm citing another German, Hagel, who wasn't a liberal, but never mind. He basically says, the end of history, which he just, you know, well, like Francis Fukuyama declared prematurely, will involve universal freedom and equality cited in different communities that are like these laboratories and showing just a version of how you're collectively free. And there's no one way to be collectively free. That's why there can't be a unified end of history. There have to be these different experiments, which are of general interest to everyone.
[00:43:36] Peter Slezkine: Well, so to finish, let's talk about one experiment in particular. You started off as an intellectual historian of Europe, specifically. The EU seems to be, in some respects, the last vestige of 20th-century liberalism. I talk to Europeans. They admit that geopolitics have returned to the world, but they refuse to even countenance the possibility that it might return to their continent. The EU will just become more tightly bound within itself in the face of the challenge from Russia, difficulties with China, and Trumpian unpredictability across the Atlantic.
So, what do you make of Europe at the end of this particular, sort of, arc of liberalism? Is it really the last vestige of a system that has seen its day? Or is it a model for something else that may come? Will it cohere? Will it fragment? Or will they just bow and scrape and hope to remain in the American embrace for as long as possible?
[00:44:39] Sam Moyn: I think the last is the likeliest, but you know, Western Europeans, whom I know best, are generally very confused because they don't acknowledge how far they have been vassalized. And then they don't acknowledge how far they exceeded to a neoliberal order, which led them to strip down successively the really different kinds of states they pioneered, compared to the American one.
And lastly, they refused to see that Europe in our time has meant a neoliberal project. Now, of course, it is being augmented right now by, let's call them, faints and gestures in the direction of a military self-defense project.
But I would say it's pretty laughable at this point on a couple of grounds. First of all, there's not enough of a genuine threat to justify it. But more important, they're not really making the kinds of moves, both relative to the United States and relative to their own spending that would be required to militarize. And so, I think it's more... You know, it's rude to say this, but it's more grunts and noises in search of a project. And the sad thing is that Europeans who invented liberalism, like, there are no American liberals self-described until after World War I. That's a full century after Europeans start experimenting with what liberalism is and could be. They've lost the thread. They're not very good candidates right now. In spite of having done extraordinary things under liberal auspices, some economic, but many cultural, they don't strike me as very good candidates to rescue liberalism from its imperial and neoliberal entanglements in our time. And so, we should look elsewhere. And I’m hopeful that a multipolar world will give us candidates in the Global South that can end up, paradoxically, being the saviors of liberalism from those who have stood for its ideals in the last couple of centuries.
[00:47:00] Peter Slezkine: Any inspiring or auspicious candidates for this role in the Global South?
[00:47:06] Sam Moyn: I don't know. Why not Brazil?
[00:47:07] Peter Slezkine: Who knows? Well, so, let's end on that hopeful note — why not Brazil?
[00:47:13] Sam Moyn: Sounds good.
[00:47:17] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss out on any episode. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.