There is a great deal of ruin in a nation

The panes were blind with showers. A fire had been lit in the drawing room – in August – accompanied by a heartening red. There was no nonsense about a light summer white on this August day. Warmed by flames and glasses, the talk settled into a very Tory rhythm: eupeptic pessimism.I apologised for using two phrases which I have repeated far too often. But I find it impossible to discuss geopolitics without falling back on them. They both sprang from the troubled Ireland of great hatred, little room. The first is Yeats: ‘The best lack all conviction; the worst are full of passionate intensity.’ The second, Sean O’Casey: The whole world’s in a terrible state o’chassis [chaos].’

So it is.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that over the past century, mankind has made a terrible mess of its affairs and is likely to go on doing so. There was a moment in the late eighteenth century when it seemed as if the Enlightenment might live up to its name, abetted by the Industrial and agricultural Revolutions. Until then, much human life had barely risen above an animal struggle for food, clothing, shelter and sex. Humanity’s most common anthem would have been a cry of pain. Then everything appeared to change. 

In Britain, the bloody constitutional conflicts of the seventeenth century gave way to a growth of political stability. Parliamentary disputes no longer ended in proscriptions, while new methods of production enabled men to move beyond subsistence-level survival.

There was still hardship. In Eric Hobsbawm‘s words, the first generation of industrial workers often responded to their new conditions with dreams and violence. But there was more progress than regress. In earlier decades, there were similar grounds of optimism in France. As befits a nation which prides itself on intellectualism, the French philosophers were the strike battalions of the Enlightenment. 

Then everything went wrong. Philosophers gave way to Jacobins, and with them a technological invention of the Enlightenment era: the guillotine. Napoleon restored order and crushed anarchy. He also followed in the footsteps of the most enlightened of all monarchs, Frederick the Great, who proved that Enlightened warfare was not a paradox: merely a more efficient way of fighting battles.

Napoleon went further and he also sowed the harvests of future wars by stimulating a development which he would not have wished to promote: nationalism. Bonaparte believed that there should only be one nationalism in Europe: the French version, reinforced by a successor to the Holy Roman Empire: kingdoms and principalities ruled by his dynasty. 

For a century after his fall, two versions of nationalism contended for mastery: the acceptable one, in which nation-states could evolve and succeed – and the malign one. In 1914, the latter prevailed.

There followed a second fall of man. But 1945, Europe was shattered: European civilisation looked like an old bitch gone in the teeth, as Ezra Pound put it. Two world wars had brought the world to the edge of the abyss. It seemed likely that a third would finish the process.

Mankind survived. It would be pleasant to believe that this was due to a rebirth of the ‘light’ aspects of the Enlightenment. Not so. We were only saved from destruction by the threat of annihilation, through mutually-assured destruction. 

Prosperity recovered and Western Europe stabilised. There was never going to be another war over Alsace-Lorraine, while the Cold war ceased to trouble the thermometer. Then, better still, we won the Cold War. George Bush hailed a New World Order; Francis Fukuyama, the End of History.

If only. History was not prepared to be written out of history. As for a new world order, there is a shorter phrase, which is still the best short summary of the human condition: original sin. 

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, we have a successor, which is much harder to police. What will befall Russia? Can we find a modus vivendi? Is there a benign outcome which does not risk the use of nuclear weapons? What about China? In the late Sixties, Richard Nixon argued that US diplomacy should strive to bring the Chinese into an international framework of legal understandings and economic partnership. The case for all that is as strong as ever. But is it achievable?

It would be easy to assert that since 1945, most of the West’s attempts to sort out the Middle East could be summarised in three words: folly, fatuity and failure. A late friend of mine, Frank Steele, always spoke of the ‘Muddle’ East. If anything, that is an understatement. Is there any hope of un-muddlement?

We could move westwards to Africa, Ex Africa semper aliquid mali. Nigeria and South Africa could both be major economies helping to pull up the rest of sub-Saharan Africa with them. Instead, there seems no escape from chaos and corruption. 

Chaos and corruption: what about a Biden-Trump rematch? The US has rarely if ever been in more need of strong leadership. Where is that to be found? 

It was almost time to paraphrase Housman; pass me the glass, lad and have some more claret. But let us finish on an optimistic note. Adam Smith once consoled his hearers by telling them that: ‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.’ We can only hope that he was right.

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