Guido's book tip of the month: "The light that failed" by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes

“The Light that Failed” is an amazing book by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes that explains the current state of the world as the result of the failed cosmopolitan project of the 1990s. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, we had a dream in the West that nationalism would lose its relevance, that we would build a democratic and pluralistic society in formerly repressed Communist states. It was supposed to be the “End of history” as Francis Fukuyama wrote triumphantly. We celebrated pluralism and diversity. I wrote my PhD on the beauty of reasonable dissensus in the mid 1990s. Most of us young philosophers looked down on communitarian ideas of society as backward oriented and conservative. The future was transnational and cosmopolitan. We would finally approach Kant's dream of a world united under the same (abstract) rules. Krastev and Holmes show how our universalization project failed. Globalization took away production jobs in the US and Europe, the borderless society led to mass emigration from the East to the West of the best educated young citizens and the financial crisis of 2007/8 was devastating for those already struggling countries. Economically, it never felt like progress and liberation in many parts of the “liberated” East. But not only economically, also culturally the universalization project failed. In the mid-1990s, I had spent a year in former East Germany and I was shocked by the level of frustration and anger that I observed. East Germans saw the reunification as a hostile takeover. The total devaluation of their East German biographies by the “victors” already then led to a growing polarization and radicalization. Now imagine the same humiliation but without the financial support of the German government and you have the situation in which Orban and the Kaczynski brothers could successfully develop their narrative of the threatened national identity which had to be defended against the colonialist Western Europeans and their celebration of diversity and pluralism and against non-European immigrants. Imagine that humiliation in Russia, the trauma of being destabilized by the US and you have Putin who in turn now feels justified in destabilizing the US and Europe in return. And finally you arrive at Trump and the refusal of any universal values and cosmopolitan mission over parochial interests and communitarian protectionism. The end of the universal liberal project also fuels the growing irrelevance of facts since in a gated world what counts is whether you can make claims that serve your camp and damages the other camp – a zero sum game within and across countries. Trump, Putin, Orban and the Kaczynskis are the sobering consequence of the failed project of the Enlightenment, which we considered close to completion when the Berlin Wall came down. How naive we were.

Don’t read all those irrelevant and short sighted books on Trump, read this one that takes the appropriate historic perspective and you will understand how we could end up in this polarized fake news mess. Thanks, Markus Williner for sending me the book!