History Has Begun by Bruno Maçães review – the world turned inside out
In his new and wildly provocative new book, Bruno Maçães, diplomat, thinker, writer and sage of the Twitter sphere turns history inside out.
It is an essay on world politics – a world where the past seems to have absorbed most grounds for optimism. The book looks at the world of the 21st century, especially the hyper power of the new technologies, such as nano and quantum, and where giant personalities and potentates cavort in their infinite playpens of social media – Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-Un, Kim Kardashian and Donald J Trump, to name but four.
History hasn’t so much ended, as in the ill-begotten title of Francis Fukuyama’s great book, but is now running our future. Symptomatic of this, Maçães argues in his introduction, is the lack of optimism in general – that the future, if there is one, isn’t much worth having.
The book tweaks and teases in the style Maçães has burnished to perfection on the page, in broadcasts, and in pithy epigrams and long shaggy-dog arguments on Twitter. On occasion I found myself wanting to argue with every page, sometimes every paragraph, of this stimulating polemic – and laugh out loud.
Forget any notion of this being the era of China’s century, or the century of Europe, or Africa or a combination of them. As the author of two books on China and its thrust to dominate the globalized economy, Maçães suggests the claims of Beijing and the Communist Party are overblown. Their crude rewriting of old-fashioned mercantilism and the lumbering offensives of Belt and Road to draw up a new economic dominance down the routes Marco Polo knew are not a guaranteed success.
The whole process is too high risk, and local powers and politics can always throw sand and grit into the gearing. This is why the whole story of the suppression of the Uighurs is so potent. The Uighurs are in the way, virtually, culturally and physically – because they and their land in Xinjiang province lie at or near junctions of the Silk Road, ancient and modern.
In his more recent tweets, Maçães has excoriated the crude propaganda ploys of Beijing, especially through the foreign ministry and the embassies, and the way they spread fake news and cover regime lapses in the coronavirus pandemic. Lately they have started intimating that the outbreak didn’t start in China, but in Italy. Bruno Maçães puts this on a par with the broadside of misinformation from Russia to bamboozle and deflect following the downing of Flight MH17 in July 2014 over Ukraine and the clumsy chemical attack on the Skripals in Salisbury in 2018.
The book was written before the Covid-19 pandemic, which is a misfortune but not a calamity. The style and challenge of the argument will make it last, doubtless through many editions and updates.
In his review of nations, powers and cultures, he sees a clear winner, as things stand now. In this case “now” may mean only this week, or month; for all is in the lap of the gods, or the virus.
For now the winner is the America of post-truth, television, and hyper-technology, of which Donald J Trump is the singular adornment and emblem.
If he writes down the clunky regimen of Beijing, especially under Xi Jinping, Europe verges on being a write-off in this book. A native of Portugal, Maçães almost refers to the continent with the Rumsfeldian pejorative: “Old Europe.” Europe is old and knackered by wars, its empires and an inflated sense of its historical, institutional and philosophical superiority.
America has had to define itself, in politics and aspiration against Europe – despite institutions, blood lines and a lot of other good and bad things being drawn from it, Maçães suggests. Now America is free, out on its own and not beholden to Eurasia, or anyone else for that matter. It has now moved into a post-truth dimension. It will lead, though not necessarily conquer – it doesn’t have to – by hyper-tech, with hyper wealthy oligarchs from that hyper-tech world in charge, and promote the ability to mess with our brains and destiny through artificial intelligence and technical possibilities almost beyond imagination.
The culture of dreamlike possibility has Donald Trump as its champion and playmaker, the first post-truth president. Under him the United Sates can be what it wants, and say what it wants. It doesn’t have to be beholden to China, let alone Europe. It is out there, ideally situated, geographically and virtually between two great oceans. In recent comments, Bruno Maçães has raised the possibility that Trump could damage his dreamland America by his quirky vanity, and needs to pick a playground fight. He sees him becoming too involved in an unnecessary trade brawl with China, with or without the complications of the virus and what that will bring to international relations.
The main argument lies on the fulcrum of America and Europe. In arguing the case for and against both, Macaes uses the tools of the advocate, not the historian or human geographer. A lot is left out. A graduate of Harvard, his rejection of Europe seems almost an exercise in Freudian patricide. There is a lot more juice in European thinking, and culture, than he is prepared to allow. But in doing so, he shows himself a true confrère of Voltaire, Montaigne or Rousseau – a wonderful contrarian.
He is right in suggesting that the political legacy of Westphalia, Vienna or Versailles is all but over – history, politics and geography aren’t governed by lines on maps and the anointed makers of laws and wars. Nor do I think the European Union of the 27 as currently cast, hidebound by bureaucracy and the dogma of the European Monetary System, stands much of a prayer.
He leaves out the radical and the quirky, the utopians and the inventors, and the breakers of moulds. Somewhere the spirit of the radicals of the Putney Debates – who scared Oliver Cromwell with their egalitarian ideas – lives on in the new forms of community politics now getting a foothold across old Europe.
This is a book of wonderful ideas, arguments and conceits. It doesn’t deal overmuch with the nitty gritty of grinding, vulgar journalism and reporting. Facts on the ground, opinion polls, migration, and effects of climate change, and what the poor and marginalized – the billions of them – do and think don’t register significantly. The new Africa doesn’t feature at all in the audit.
On Trump, though, the book is simply brilliant, mischievous, and full of insights and good laughs. It is not that Trump has brought the television gameshow into politics, he has made the White House a continuum of the gameshow. Being president of the United States is no different from being the omniscient, omnipotent host of The Apprentice. As president and host, he can make his own reality – it doesn’t matter what the facts say. On his post-truth television set he can be the world’s most successful businessman ever.
Not that Trump is unique here. Both John F Kennedy and George W Bush’s team believed in adjustable reality. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” boasted Karl Rove, the White House Svengali before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
As Lincoln said in his second inaugural, the war came. In this case, the virus came. At first glance, the impact of coronavirus might shipwreck the whole tenor and thesis of this book. The reality of what may lie ahead for millions of Americans threatened by the pathogen, unprotected and unprepared, is about to collide with the reality show of trumpismo. Suggesting the cure could be worse than the disease, and America must be back to work in a fortnight is a huge gamble. Meanwhile Joe Biden gains in the polls.
Bruno Maçães has wrestled in his Twitter observations and diatribes with the implications of the virus on people and politics across the world. The virus and how wild and extravagant cultures – especially those of India – will respond are subjects for his next two book projects.
But don’t overlook this contribution. His imaginative use of history and argument are a joy – to sharpen the brain and lift the soul in these besieged times.
Read it, and follow @MacaesBruno on Twitter – you won’t be disappointed.