Reading the news is a pretty bleak experience these days. As if the story at home wasn’t bad enough, things are even worse abroad: papers speculate about which Eurozone nation will be the next victim of the bond markets; terrorist plots and rogue states spring up as if we were in a James Bond film.
For all the talk of a new world order, the collapse of the Euro and even the occasional touch of anarchy in the UK, no-one is expecting very much to change. Make no mistake – these are harder times than we’ve seen in decades (unless you happen to be a Conservative Lord) – but we’re British, and we don’t do revolution. A watered-down reform of the voting system here, perhaps a step back from European integration there, but we have very little appetite for any fundamental change. If the combined force of the financial crisis and the MPs’ expenses scandal can’t shake the system, what can?
This line of thought may well be right – it almost certainly will be for the foreseeable future – but this type of complacent inertia is extremely dangerous. History is littered with tales of the rise and fall of empires. Nations and world orders have been built out of ingenuity and strife, through a series of ideas or on the back of a single figurehead. Just as species come and go in the evolutionary game, as corporations expand and collapse through a creative process of destruction, no single nation or way of life is invulnerable.
The longest period of sustained peace in recorded human history – the Pax Romana – began 2,000 years ago, after one of the bloodiest civil wars the ancient world had known. The Roman empire was advanced, all-powerful and ruthlessly efficient. To historians of the time, it must have seemed inconceivable that this Roman global hegemony could ever be broken. And yet, it was not some advanced force that brought down the world’s greatest empire, but a series of backward barbarian hordes. Rome succumbed to complacency, a pathogen bred by centuries of success and stability.
Of course, this time things are different. Democracy, we presume, is different to the litany of empires that decorate the annals of history. Empires are fixed in their values and aims; democracies can change their spots to match their surroundings. Once democracy has taken hold, it is the only game in town. There’s no going back – not for long, at least.
When Francis Fukuyama heralded the fall of the Berlin Wall as the end of history, his claim was given a certain plausibility even at a time of unbounded optimism.
Like so many people, I would like to think that democracy can last forever – albeit with a fairer voting system, and a more reliable link between people and power brokers. But that kind of wishful thinking cannot be taken for granted. The very nature of democracy should preclude complacency in favour of continuous progress, but somehow that doesn’t seem to be the case. The threats to the democratic world are greater now than they have been since World War 2: China’s model of governance in the national interest appears far more practicable than any Marxist ideology; religious extremism breeds off ignorance and apathy in a way not seen since the Nazis.
A Chinese friend used to laugh at me when I defended the rights of the preachers of hate. I’m fairly sure that a fair number of extremists were also appreciating the joke, in more sinister fashion. I still believe I was right about this – but we can afford to show clemency to self-avowed enemies of democracy only if we are consistent about it. There is either a war on extremism, played out within the reasonable norms of conflict, or we meet hatred with unstinting tolerance and reason. The moment we start compromising our ideals – launching rockets with one hand while upholding the scales of justice with the other – we are at our most vulnerable. We may have learnt about the perils of complacency in international warfare, but we are a long way from discovering the courage of our convictions.
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