Ch. 2: The Decline of the Elites

In the first chapter, we learned that the societal rot begins with a decline in creativity among the elites. But why does the creativity of elites wither in the first place? According to Toynbee, the decline of creativity originates from the elites idolising outdated ideas, laws, and institutions, which hinder the adaptation of society to new problems.

He illustrated this point with many examples, the most interesting being Italy during the time of its reunification in the mid-1800’s. The creative energy for this task did not come from the great cities of the Italian renaissance – Florence, Siena, Venice, Milan, and Padua – but from Piedmont, which did not rule any of the principal cities of the Renaissance until it acquired Genoa after the Napoleonic Wars. According to Toynbee, Renaissance cities did not lead the reunification because many of their citizens were beguiled by the ideal of city-state sovereignty, the political form in which these cities reached their zenith. Emotionally attached to the past, they could not devote themselves to the national project of the future.

Another example is provided by Correlli Barnett in his book The Audit of War which analysed the decline of the United Kingdom. As amateurs started the Industrial Revolution, the British came to idolise amateurism in industry. However, the consequent and deliberate neglect of technical education later resulted in the decline of British industry relative to German, Belgian, and American industry. The problem and the solution had been known and stated in reports for decades, butheir ideology simply would not allow them to prioritise the necessary educational measures.

Which ideas are guilty for the modern spell of decline? The natural suspect must be the hegemonic liberalism which has now dominated the West for so long. The key failures of today’s elites, without which the past decade’s anti-establishment movements would not be imaginable, are concentrated in four areas; trade, migration, foreign policy, and finance. In order for the guilt of liberalism to be proven, its responsibility for the failings in these four areas must be demonstrated. Let the trial begin.

2.1 The Trial of Post-War Liberalism

After the Second World War, a liberal international trading system was a suitable response to the communist menace, as it allowed diverse countries to access American technology, capital, and markets, thereby providing a path to development. Prosperity countered left-wing radicalism, and the West boosted both the strength and number of its allies in the process.[34] But after victory in the Cold War, the confidence of the liberal powers turned to hubris. New trade deals were struck at an international level, barriers to capital flows were razed, and migration was uncritically welcomed.

Globalisation thus obtained a new lease of life. The increasing liberalism specific to this period quickly came to be seen as an inexorable law of human history, becoming even an ersatz religion. Vast gains were attributed to globalisation and its related phenomena such as cultural diversity and trade agreements, even though there was little evidence of such gains. Those sceptical of this new quasi-religion were derided as being on the “wrong side of history”, similar to how heretics in former ages were accused of being “against nature”.

But then, sacralisation bred exaggeration, and yesterday’s solution paved the way for today’s problems. This pattern will now be outlined in the case of migration, free trade, foreign policy, and finance.

Migration

Human rights are a key part of international law. For example, the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, signed in Geneva in 1951, includes the right to asylum and the right to a family life, and therefore some level of family reunification. The result of this in recent times has been a large influx of migration into the West, and particularly Europe.

This might not have been an outcome imagined by the generation of liberals who created such rights. Ivan Krastev, in his book After Europe, argues that the rules on refugees finalised in 1951 were intended for individuals fleeing political persecution in the communist East.[35] Nowadays, such rights are exercised not just by persecuted minorities or the occasional dissident but by majorities in countries experiencing civil conflict, such as Syria.

Whether this was the originally intended outcome is difficult to ascertain. If Krastev is right, then the sacralisation of this right led to an exaggeration of it: this is the very logical outcome after something has been sacralised, as if it cannot be criticised, there will be little opposition to its expansion.

In practice, there seems to have been discrete opposition on the part of governments, as can be seen from the number of asylum-related court cases in the EU. For the entire decade of the 1990s there were 13 asylum-related cases. The number began to accelerate rapidly thereafter, with 10 cases in 2004, 104 in 2009, and 208 in 2011. This soar in litigation occurred at the same time the number of first-time asylum applications hit a 20-year low around 2008, only to rise slowly thereafter.

This seems contradictory. Why would asylum become more contentious at the same time the numbers are falling? There are two possible explanations: Governments may have tried to tighten the rules, or more people were seeking to obtain asylum who were simply not entitled to it. That governments became more wary of migration may have been due to two events signalling a harder attitude among parts of the European electorate: the Pim Fortuyn List coming second in the 2002 Dutch elections, and the unexpected success of Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany is Abolishing Itself in 2010. Islam was a theme common to both phenomena. How did such as us-vs-them sense arise in a significant part of the population? 

First, people migrating from developing to advanced economies will concentrate in poor areas as this is what is affordable. Such geographic concentration will create a sense of social segregation, unless social barriers are actively combatted. But this was not done, partly because many thought that, over time, all would fall under the spell of liberalism and assimilation would occur quite naturally. Underlying this was an assumption that migrants from Muslim countries would abandon their conservative religion, just as European Christians had done. Adding to this liberal complacency was a long-standing pretence more to be found on the right, particularly in Germany, that migrants who arrived as guest workers would eventually return to their own country. The conclusion, again, was that there was no need to do anything. 

The result was that voters perceived the emergence of parallel societies in some cities in Europe. By failing to even speak about concerns regarding possible segregation, left-of-centre parties lost credibility among the part of their working class base opposed to migration. The German, Dutch, and French social democratic parties are now shades of their former selves. But the clearest demonstration of the electoral link between migration and voting patterns was yet to come in the form of the open border solution to the migration crisis.

In August 2015, the anti-EU Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, formed in opposition to the financial bailouts of other EU nations, was polling below five percent and was not likely to make it into the next Bundestag (the German federal parliament). Following the August 2015 announcement of the German government that they would no longer send those seeking asylum back to the first EU country they landed in, arrivals across the German border surged. The AfD re-clothed itself in anti-immigrant garb. In October 2018, it was roughly equal to the centre-left SPD in terms of polling strength, and had roughly half the support of the centre-right CDU. AfD support has declined since, but it seems to have become a durable part of the German political landscape.

EU governments now mostly have the flow under control. This is largely the effect of stringent border controls implemented by Austria and the Balkan countries against opposition from the Merkel government. After the closure of the Balkan route, the numbers entering Germany dropped dramatically, from 2,000 per day the week before to 140 the week after. Much to Merkel’s benefit, migration ceased to be the main political issue, seven months after Germany opened the door.

But even if the crisis has for now been brought under control, there have been permanent effects. First, the migration monomania of the British press translated into daily images of the Balkan migrant trail, which had the effect of boostin the campaign to leave the European Union. Second, the crisis also contributed to the estrangement of Eastern Europe: anti-liberal right-wing forces in Poland and Hungary certainly profited from the cultural insecurity triggered by the crisis, and have used this fear to undermine pluralism by reshaping the media and judicial landscape. Third, the now established eurosceptic presence in countries such as France and Italy increases the risk of a future government predisposed to jettisoning membership of the euro or the EU. Given the constant danger of the euro crisis re-emerging in the form of an Italian debt crisis, the costs of this failure could yet be considerable.

However, as large as these costs may ultimately be, migration is only one dimension of the decline of the elites. On its own, it would never have been sufficient to trigger a populist outbreak. The anti-establishment mood also had roots in the effects of long-standing deindustrialisation and fiscal austerity, for which the migrant may have become a scapegoat. More starkly, migration cannot fully explain how liberal elites were defeated by Trump in the US, where there was no migration crisis equal to that in Europe. To explain Trump, we need to discuss trade.

Free trade

The open trading system is inherent to the international liberal order. While there are undoubtedly many benefits to free trade, such as cheaper goods, greater access to markets, and higher productivity, dogmatic faith that such benefits would always exceed the costs led to free trade being sacralised among northern European and American elites. Although some countries such as France retained a relatively sceptical view of the benefits of free trade, this was not sufficient to counter the overall trend. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the determination to promote free trade became more fierce. Thus we saw the creation of the WTO in 1995, which put more constraints on countries in order to prevent protectionist behaviour. Concurrently the Uruguay Round was concluded in 1994, lowering further international barriers to trade.

All this could have been easily managed but for a critical error made in 2001: the decision to admit China to the WTO. This generated a major shock in trade patterns whose impact is still only being discovered today. For example, one study by economists at MIT found that import competition from China resulted in American job losses in the range of 2 to 2.4 million during the period 1999-2011.[36] While economists expected employment increases in other sectors, such gains failed to materialise.[37] And it was not just China to whom the US opened up. A particularly contentious deal was NAFTA, given the outsourcing to Mexico it facilitated.

The negative effects of free trade with low-skilled populations were concentrated in states with large manufacturing sectors such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It was these Rust Belt states that, despite being Democrat for decades, voted for Trump. Had this “Blue Wall” endured, it would be Hillary Clinton in the White House today, and mainstream European elites would not be confronted with their own antithesis in the form of Donald Trump.

In Europe, the rise of China also had a damaging effect on the economies of Italy and Greece. German researchers noted that since 2001, Chinese textile exports started to displace Italian and Greek textile exports into the German market.[38] Given the fact that these countries specialised in medium-skilled industries, this story likely applies to more than one industry.

It should come as no surprise then that former industrial areas in France and Italy have begun to vote for radical eurosceptic parties. According to researchers at Bocconi University, the more a European region was exposed to Chinese imports, the greater this effect was.[39]

If job losses were the end of the story, and the Chinese economic shock was over, we would have some consolation. But the entry of China into the WTO has unleashed a number of unpredictable consequences which continue to hurt the West. As Mark Wu outlines, the unique institutional setup of China enables it to breach the spirit but not the letter of WTO rules.[40] The problem essentially arises from the fact that the Chinese economy is neither a traditional state-driven economy nor a market economy.

For example, due to the opaque links between the Chinese state, the Communist Party, and many firms, it is difficult to determine whether an entity is actually controlled by the state. All Chinese state-owned enterprises are controlled by one government agency, SASAC (the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission). According to Wu, SASAC controls over half of the Chinese corporations on the Fortune Global 500 list, some of whom apparently compete against each other. SASAC evaluates the performance of these companies by how they are achieving the objectives of the Chinese state.

Such an institutional structure would have been unimaginable at the time, as many who believed in the liberal teleology assumed the China would become a market economy. So what are the negative repercussions from this misjudgement?

The strong but indirect control of the Communist Party over the Chinese economy means that if the Chinese wanted to reduce imports from abroad, a tariff is not needed; a simple order would suffice. This gives the Chinese a very strong position when it comes to market access for foreign companies. Western multinational often agree to transfer core technology in exchange for very slim market access. For such firms, this means higher short-term profits but lower long-term profits due to increased competition in the future.

A typical example is high-speed rail. The French company Alstom transferred diesel locomotive technology in the 1980s, and high-speed locomotive technology in the 2000s. Today, however, the Chinese locomotive manufacturer is the world’s largest. It competes with Alstom in the European market, for example when it was recently awarded a contract for the Czech Republic.[41] In order to counter the challenge, a merger between Alstom and Siemens Mobility has been agreed. This however was rejected by the European Commission.

In order to deal with these new issues, WTO reform is necessary. Yet as the power of the West ebbs, the more difficult this becomes. Meanwhile, the high tide of Chinese investment throughout the world will incentivise many countries not to act. This brings us to the greatest fault with the general applause for increased trade: the geopolitical consequences. It may be true that as the West and China proceed to trade with each other, both will benefit. But China will gain much more than the other given its poorer starting position. This has already altered the power dynamics between these two countries, with China becoming a powerful player across the Eurasian landmass, the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and Africa.

Many now consider it likely that China will become more powerful than the US in the coming decades. That an authoritarian power might soon come to occupy this position, having been helped to so do by the trade policy of the West, is a monumental failure of policy. How could such a situation come to pass?

Foreign Policy

To those who worried that free trade would strengthen the foes of the West, there was a semi-religious answer available: the old claim that as countries became more interdependent, they would come to see the commonality of their interests, and conflict would thus become less likely.

This teleological argument has an old pedigree. In 1911, Norman Angell published a book entitled The Great Illusion whose central claim was that the economic cost of war would be so great that any war would be self-harming. This main thesis was certainly correct, yet World War I still broke out. This is because countries do not care just about prosperity, but also security. Yet economists typically ignore security concerns, leading to misleading policy recommendations.

A related argument states that trading with illiberal countries will make them more liberal over time, and thus more peaceable to other liberal countries. This panglossian mindset was well expressed by Bill Clinton when he argued in 2000 that the US should open up to China. To counter the critics who warned against strengthening an authoritarian China, he predicted that following Chinese admittance into the WTO and the greater economic freedom this entailed, “the genie of freedom will not go back into the bottle” and that China would move ”faster and further in the right direction”, with citizens ultimately demanding a democratic say.[42] This was the great bet that was taken with respect to China. It failed, and now we have a major ideological, geopolitical, and industrial competitor.

In fact, globalisation raises not just the probability of war, but also the potential scale of it. The rapidly changing economic fortunes induced by globalisation causes the geopolitical system to become imbalanced; formerly secure powers now feel threatened, while emerging powers indulge in hubris and overconfidence. The increasing wealth of nations means that some of them can now afford weapons which previously would have been impossible for them to procure.

In addition, before globalisation countries had fewer interests to protect. For example, it is mainly because we import oil from the Middle East that the region is so geopolitically important. More generally, high volumes of trade means that there is a higher number of valuable trade routes, which need to be protected to ensure continued prosperity. For instance, if China did not export and import vast amounts of goods through the Malacca Strait and the Gulf of Aden, then they would be less interested in influencing the key players in that area.

However, the zombie idea that trade can liberalise remains alive, and we now see the same logic being applied to Iran. Faith, not logic, is at work here. Should the sanctions on Iran be lifted, the likely scenario will be a strengthened Iran with its ideological edge intact or perhaps even sharpened by increased confidence.

Faith that countries would liberalise played a prominent role in other ill-fated foreign policies. During the dawn of the Arab Spring, many Westerners thought that North Africa and the Middle East were finally embracing liberal democracy. What they desired, they predicted, and this misprediction led Western states to be too keen in dismantling a previously stable political order. Even when the risks were acknowledged, they were dismissed. Consider the following extract from The Economist regarding Italian fears of instability, just as the trouble was starting:[43]

Italy has shifted to shrill alarm. It fears the prospect of Libya breaking up, the threat of a radical Islamic state taking root across the Mediterranean and, above all, the threat of a biblical exodus of refugees and migrants. In short, Italy is worried about everything except the really important consideration: the fate of Libyans themselves as Colonel Qaddafi murderously clings to his shrinking “state of the masses”.

Such short-sightedness would be distasteful from any European state. But it is particularly disturbing coming from the country that had once colonised Libya...

All the Italian fears materialised. Chaos in Libya and Syria lasted for years and contributed to the refugee crisis which so damaged the EU.

As described by Claire Berlinski, there was also a widespread assumption that Turkey would liberalise despite many signs to the contrary.[44] Many Western institutions such as The New York Times, the Financial Times, the IMF, the European Commission, and the US State Department praised the ”vibrant democracy” of Turkey. This was despite 1) there being no progress on Turkey’s EU application outside of some technical regulations, 2) the 2010 referendum which brought the judiciary under the control of the executive, and 3) the massive show trials which begun in 2011.

Even worse, many Western institutions were parroting manifestly untrue claims, such as the idea that the Erdoğan government had trebled the size of the Turkish economy. Such is the power of a narrative and our determination to interpret events so that they fit that narrative. The Turkish government certainly knew what rhetorical buttons to press. Generally speaking, any non-Western government which pays rhetorical homage to democracy and liberal values can count on favourable coverage from the Western media. So it was with Turkey which embarked on privatisations (to Erdoğan’s cronies) and frequently stated their desire to become part of the EU. That no progress was made in joining the EU is not a contradiction; the declaration of a European vocation was just a rhetorical trick, and it worked its magic by beguiling the Western governing class. So when the 2017 referendum passed and Turkey continued its journey to unoriginal authoritarianism, many were surprised. Turkey had put itself on the “wrong side” of history, and what country would want to do that?

Some others, it would seem. Not least the United Kingdom who voted to leave the European Union, and the United States who elected a President avowedly hostile to globalisation and multiculturalism. We could also include Russia when they annexed Crimea and launched a war against Ukraine, and Hungary and Poland who seek to create illiberal democracies.

The teleological mindset is responsible for at least one other failure. The belief that democracy was the natural state of man partially motivated the launch of the Iraq War, an adventure that fated the United States to waste several trillion dollars and perhaps to surrender its position as the dominant superpower.

The fiasco of the Iraq War demonstrated the foreign policy incompetence of the West. The financial crisis which followed soon after demonstrated economic incompetence. We shall now see how this too had its roots in liberalism.

The Financial Crisis

After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was as if the elites of the West had cast a spell, such was the great success they enjoyed. Developing countries the world over sought the advice of Western-led institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. The standard policy mix espoused by these institutions generally involved free trade, free markets and the liberalisation of finance.

Unfortunately, not only did such advice not work, it actively did harm. After the Latin American debt crisis various South American countries enacted the recommended policy mix, but they remained middle-income countries despite the political cost of the reforms.

Financial liberalisation also facilitated the Asian financial crisis. As Dani Rodrik explains, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the afflicted economies, and all of them recovered quite quickly after.[45] In other words, a classic financial panic occurred but at an international level. Rodrik concludes that countries that exposed themselves to international capital markets faced greater risks, without higher economic growth.

But the greater tragedy here is that Western elites failed to learn from these experiences. For a long time, the IMF sought to pressure those countries who had not already done so to liberalise capital flows. Few in academia dissented from this new orthodoxy. Governing elites continued to deregulate finance in their own countries. In the US, regulations dating from just after the Great Depression were significantly weakened in the later stage of the Clinton Administration. In Europe and the US, deregulation surrounding the use of repurchase agreements led to the dramatic growth of the shadow banking sector, which was mostly unregulated and vulnerable to run-like behaviour. It was in this part of the financial system that the crisis would later begin.

In total, over the period 1970 to 2007, over 124 systemic banking crises took place.[46] The crisis taught many countries a valuable lesson about taking advice from Western-led institutions.

The Verdict

As we saw in the case of asylum and migration, the sacralisation of the right to asylum prevented Europe from quickly adapting to incoming waves of migration. With regard to free trade, the main fault was putting faith in an untested narrative which foretold that China would develop into liberal, non-protectionist power. As a result, the international trading system is no longer fit for purpose, and China is making a bid for regional hegemony which could endanger the interests of the West. On Turkey, Russia, and the Middle East the narrative led to other systematic errors.

Therefore, the tenets of liberalism led to the policy mistakes which paved the way for the anti-establishment backlash. This would seem to indicate a guilty verdict.

Such a verdict would, however, be too severe. Liberals thought they were doing good, and did not foresee the negative consequences they would unleash. In short, they were blinded by ideology. While it would be too strong to say liberals were insane, their collective behaviour would certainly allow them to make a credible insanity defence. For example, under the Naughton Rule, a defendant could be considered insane if “at the time of committing the act, the accused was laboring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing or, if he did know it, that he did not know what he was doing was wrong.” And what else could the sacralisation of arbitrary human constructs and narration of misleading stories be, if not defects of reason?

In our imaginary court, we would therefore conclude that liberalism is not guilty by reason of insanity. Liberals should not feel too maligned by this verdict; insanity is perhaps the fate of all ideologies that idolise institutions, ideas, and norms that while useful at one point, sooner or later inhibit the adaptation of society to new challenges. In other words, liberalism may not have been born with these faults, but it did possess some pre-existing conditions (ideas of rights, equality, and theories of human behaviour) which weakened its immunity to this imaginary mental malady. In the next chapter, we shall try to develop an ideology immune to such “insanity” – an ideology that will differ from liberalism in some key respects while resembling it in others.

Before doing so, there are some other factors we need to account for: why the rule of liberalism persisted for so long, and why a credible alternative has not yet appeared.

2.2 Where is the Alternative?

Thus far in the book, we have seen how liberalism has not only failed to address innumerable problems, but has also actively created them. But why has it not already been replaced by a satisfactory alternative?

This question brings to mind Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of the circulation of elites. According to Pareto, there are two types of elites: lions and foxes. Lions tend to prefer the status quo, whereas foxes tend to be more creative, speculative and Machiavellian.[47] He associates the lions with the traditional conservative elites of his time, and the foxes with the liberal elite. Each group has particular strengths and weaknesses. Foxes are particularly responsible for economic and social change, whereas lions seek stability and thereby counteract the risks introduced by the activities of the foxes.

Underlying Pareto’s thesis is the idea that there is an ideal mix of these two elite types in the governing elite at any one point in time; that as circumstances change power transitions from one elite to another over time; and that if this transition does not occur, problems arise. If the fox type predominates, there is a lack of stability, and society is prone to accidents. If the lion type predominates, then society becomes stagnant to the point of being crystallised.

However, he noted that there were times when lions were decidedly non-conservative and courted their own ruin, such as during the Crusades. A modern demonstration of this dynamic may be seen in the United Kingdom, where elites of the Conservative Party attempt to escape the influence the European Union, without having first established feasible alternative vision.

Events today indicate that the fox type predominates. The lion, in espousing the nationalist cause, has once again allowed himself to be blinded by group sentiment into supporting causes that will be detrimental to his own interest. The sympathy for the nation state can arise from the idolisation of ephemeral institutions, which can also inhibit survival. For example, some kind of federation of the Hellenic city-states was necessary for Ancient Greece to maintain its autonomy against the rising Macedonian power in the north. But such a federation did not materialise, and the Greek world finally lost its self-determination when it was conquered by the Romans.[48]

Europe today could be going through a similar process. The re-emerging enthusiasm for the nation state could culminate in a divided continent and the countries of Europe submitting to whoever the great power of the day happens to be. The current weakness of Europe has already resulted in it giving into blackmail from weaker but more unified foreign powers, such as Turkey.

Thankfully, the radicalism of the populist-nationalists excludes them as an alternative for most people. Even where they have arrived into power, they have had to battle against the bureaucracy which tends to be populated by liberals.

But this raises another puzzle: why has no politician or movement derived a new alternative capable of harnessing and quelling the evident frustration across the West? This mystery is deepened when one considers that Pareto’s thesis might not apply in today’s world, as the political class is divided into different parties, among whom there is considerable competition for votes. But then why is the level of political creativity so low?

First, the political class has certain collective interests, such as making it difficult for new parties to form. For example, if you are a senior politician in Belgium, the multi-layered political system is useful as it gives you a wide range of positions to hand out to your followers: you now have the power of patronage. Reforming the system may mean losing this. There may thus be a general political consensus against radical change.

Second, creativity may be mitigated by the permanent civil service, such as in Ireland and the United Kingdom. A minister who must rely upon the civil service for their daily work is unlikely to adopt any measure that will greatly antagonise them, for then little will get done.

Third, competition among political parties may not be sufficient to ensure timely creation and destruction of political ideas. For example, a new political party in power is but a very thin and transient film over a very deep bureaucratic pool. Moreover, the people who themselves go into politics have already undergone a sort of selection process which would have introduced certain biases. They may simply not be talented enough to discover new frustrations and articulate new answers. As illustrated by one study, a number of factors may reduce the quality of politicians.[49] First of all, those who can earn higher salaries outside of politics are less likely to enter the political game. Second, as the poor performance of one politician tends to damage the reputation of politicians as a class, the presence of bad politicians drives out those of good quality.

If a number of low quality groups compete against each other, the result will still be that a low quality group is nominally in charge of the government. That the resulting political competition is not normally sufficient is illustrated by the fact that certain issues – immigration, trade – are ignored until raised by a third force. But in the meantime, a decade could pass during which people only become more frustrated.

2.3 Desiderata for a New Ideology

In this chapter, we saw that the principal defects of liberalism are those of excessive sacralisation and narration. Should we wish to create a society with the best chance of surviving, we would need a governing philosophy immune to these problems.

There is perhaps a third defect present in each of the examples above: exaggeration. By this, I mean a tendency to take the key tenets of an ideology and to simply go too far with them. Such a tendency is visible in the desire to either exaggerate or believe uncritically in the benefits of diversity, free trade, financial liberalisation or national sovereignty. Any new ideology should thus permit a certain degree of humility among its followers, forcing them both to recognise the limits of their own knowledge and to understand how quickly their assumptions about the world can change. A final task for such an ideology will be to raise the quality of the governing class, and to facilitate a wide range of differently-minded elites, so that every challenge has some elite able and willing to solve it.

But what should such a philosophy be, and what should it value?

This we shall now address in the next chapter.

Next Chapter: Introducing Metasophism

Previous Chapter: Whispers from Fallen Civilisations

Endnotes

[34] Robert E. Baldwin. “The Changing Nature of U.S. Trade Policy since World War II”. in: Robert E. Baldwin and Anne O. Krueger. The Structure and Evolution of Recent U.S. Trade Policy. University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 5–32. URL: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c5828

[35] Ivan Krastev. After Europe. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

[36] Daron Acemoglu et al. “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s”. In: Journal of Labor Economics 34.S1 (2016), pp. 141–198. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/doi10.1086-682384.html

[37] David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. “The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade”. In: Annual Review of Economics 8.1 (Oct. 2016), pp. 205–240. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/anr/reveco/v8y2016p205-240.html

[38] Wolfgang Dauth, Sebastian Findeisen, and Jens Suedekum. The rise of the East and the Far East: German labor markets and trade integration. DICE Discussion Papers 127. University of Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), 2013. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/dicedp/127.html

[39] Italo Colantone and Piero Stanig. “The Trade Origins of Economic Nationalism: Import Competition and Voting Behavior in Western Europe”. In: American Journal of Political Science (2018). DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12358. URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ajps.12358.

[40] Mark Wu. “The ‘China, Inc.’ Challenge to Global Trade Governance”. In: Harvard International Law Journal 57 (2016), pp. 1001–1063. URL: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2779781#

[41] Loïc Grasset. “Le TGV chinois, nouvelle référence mondiale”. In: Le Journal du Dimanche (2018). URL: https://www.lejdd.fr/international/asie/le-tgv-chinois-nouvelle-reference-mondiale-3736136

[42] Bill Clinton (2000). Full Text of Clinton’s Speech on China Trade Bill. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/030900clinton-china-text.html. Accessed: 2018-08-26.

[43] Charlemagne. “Italy’s shame in Libya”. In: The Economist (Feb. 2011). URL: https://www.economist.com/charlemagne/2011/02/25/italys-shame-in-libya

[44] Claire Berlinski. “Guilty Men”. In: The American Interest (Apr. 2017). URL: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/04/24/guilty-men/

[45] Dani Rodrik. The Globalization Paradox: Why Global Markets, States, and Democracy Can’t Coexist. OUP Catalogue 9780199603336. Oxford University Press, 2011. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/b/oxp/obooks/9780199603336.html

[46] Fabian Valencia and Luc Laeven. Systemic Banking Crises; A New Database. IMF Working Papers 08/224. International Monetary Fund, 2008. URL: https://EconPapers. repec.org/RePEc:imf:imfwpa:08/224

[47] Alisdair J. Marshall. Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology: A Framework for Political Sociology. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007, p.39

[48] Arnold J. Toynbee. A Study of History: Abridgement of Volumes I-VI by D.C. Somervell. Oxford University Press, 1947, p.317

[49] Francesco Caselli and Massimo Morelli. “Bad politicians”. In: Journal of Public Economics 88.3-4 (Mar. 2004), pp. 759–782. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/pubeco/v88y2004i3-4p759-782.html