The end of neoliberalism and the rapid return to the past: Happy 1984 in the Eurasian steppes!

If we are witnessing the final decline of the liberal international order, what alternatives lie ahead for the global order of the future? Is a widespread monarchist restoration, as envisioned by the Russian ideologue Dugin, a realistic possibility? Why do Europe’s far-right authoritarian leaders increasingly turn to the East? Does liberal capitalism have a vaccine against the threats to the democratic order of society?

Author: Stojan Sinadinov

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at 5. The Eurasia Forum, held last November in Budapest, announced “the end of five centuries of domination by Western civilization”, claiming that the center of the world economy has moved east and the Eurasian century is beginning.

I would say that the liberal, progressive dominance within the Western world is over. This is the failure of the idea that the whole world should be organized along Western lines, and that the peoples chosen to undergo this would be willing to comply in exchange for economic advantages, financial advantages, was the point of Orbán’s speech, reported by Serbian Russia Today.

Of course, his views at this edition of the Eurasian Forum are a delight not only to the pro-Russian media outlets in the region, but also to social media posts glorifying Russia as a beacon against Nazism and Satanism (like this one), which did not miss the opportunity to build on and expand his views on the end of neoliberalism as the world knows it and the announcement of some new world order.

The world is entering a post-liberal era. However, this post-liberal era is completely at odds with communist and Marxist expectations. First, the socialist movement on a global level was stifled, and its branches, the USSR and China, abandoned orthodox forms and to one degree or another adopted a liberal model, writes Russian ideologist Aleksandr Dugin for RIA Novosti, translated by Russia Today into Serbian. 

 

Dugin further argues that the main driving force responsible for the collapse of liberalism were the traditional values and deep civilizational identities of each of the nations in particular.

Humanity overcomes liberalism not through the socialist, materialist and technological phase, but through the reactivation of the cultural layers that Western modernity considered to be obsolete, extinct, abolished, that is, with the premodernity that proved not to be destroyed, and not through the postmodernity that is completely derived from Western modernity. It turns out that postliberalism is quite different from what left-wing progressive thought envisioned. Postliberalism generally casts aside the era of Western domination in modern times, considering it only a temporary phenomenon, a phase in which there is nothing general and universal, argued Dugin.

 

Dugin’s far-reaching influence

According to him, “a certain culture, based on brute force and aggressive use of technology, achieved leadership on planetary scales in a certain period, trying to make its foundations, techniques, methods and goals universal”. For him, liberalism is historically the last form of the planetary imperialism of the West, absorbing all the basic principles of European modernity and bringing them to their newest logical conclusions such as gender politics, awakening, the culture of renunciation, critical theories of races, transgender people, quadrupeds, post-humanism, postmodernism…

By announcing the end of the West, Dugin also announces a new era, the era of monarchies.

Modern Russia, while still formally a liberal democracy but already relying on traditional values, is technically a monarchy. The national leader, the irremovability of the supreme power and the reliance on spiritual foundations, identity and tradition are already prerequisites for the monarchical transitionnot–not formal, but essential, foresees Dugin.

 

He also draws parallels with China, in which the ruler is slowly adopting the imperial archetype with the prerequisite of acquiring the “status of a Hegelian empire of the spirit”, and if the Islamic world is integrated according to the formula of the Baghdad (Abbasid) Caliphate, here we have another mega-monarchy of the East. According to Dugin, all sorts of miracles are possible when it comes to the post-liberal world, and even a monarchist overhaul in the United States!

Orbán’s „Drang nach Osten“

We’ve already written about the vision of Europe’s far-right leaders–among them Orbán–of the European Union as a “service” or an “ATM”, reducing the role of the European Commission to a minimum and turning its president into a mere “functionary” in the service of the member states. Orbán’s model as a “role model” for profiling the relations of European liberal leaders with the East is interesting. As defined by Politico, in the portrait entitled “The Conservative Subversive,” although Orbán is only the head of a Central European state with 10 million inhabitants and poor natural resources, it is still impossible to ignore the message that indifference to such threats is not an option.

Orbánism resembles the other -isms taking root on Europe’s edges—in Russia (Putinism) and Turkey (Erdoğanism). His variety is, to be sure, diluted: not bluntly authoritarian, broadly in line with EU norms. Still, his government has kneecapped NGOs, independent media and the judiciary in ways that Putin and Erdoğan would admire. Like them, his confrontational style with his opponents, domestic and foreign, has strengthened his popular position at home, writes “Politico.”

At the same time, it is worth emphasizing Orbán’s contradictory stance that although Europe is constantly impoverishing and is no longer among the top five countries in the world economy, the Old Continent “cannot be put in a Eurasian context, because there are currently no European leaders who would be willing to abandon the idea of a bloc division, build relations with Asian countries and benefit from the fact that Europe is part of Eurasia.”

So what would the framework of the desired world order look like according to Orbán, who in recent years has focused on Eurasia as a geopolitical concept? Why is a Hungarian leader who is openly or diplomatically covertly isolated in the EU in a kind of realization of the Hungarian “Drang nach Osten” (“Expansion to the East”), which unlike the original 19th-century German strategy of expansion into Slavic countries, is focused on the Central Asian non-Slavic countries? How important is the East Corridor to him, especially in recent years with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the disruption of the old transportation corridors?

Of course, there are economic interests involved, although private and public interests are often mixed. But there is also a dimension of political system. Since 2014 at least, Orbán sees these states as a political example. And there is an ideological-mythological layer, which portrays the Hungarians as “semi-Asian people”, with roots from Central Asia, Péter Krekó, Director of the Budapest-based Political Capital Institute, told BIRN.

Geopolitical aspirations are not lacking if you add a bit of “ideology to the roots”, a century old, because “as early as the 1910s, the Hungarian political and business elite began exploring ways to strengthen ties with the non-Slavic peoples of the east, often referring to them as Turans,” explains Zoltán Egeresi, an expert on Turkey and Central Asia from the National University of Public Service.

Turanism, the ideology that promotes common ancestry and cultural ties between Hungarian and Central Asian peoples, was erased from the political agenda during communism, but right-wing traditionalists revived it after the democratic transition. Some elements in society have also begun to reject the generally accepted 200-year-old theory that the Hungarian language, which is a rare language and has no Indo-European origin, is part of the Finno-Ugric group of languages, so they consider it to belong to the Turkic group of languages, the BIRN analysis says.

 

Before and after the defeat of neoliberalism

This vision, declaring neoliberalism dead, is already beginning to resemble the world as in George Orwell‘s famous dystopian novel “1984,” arranged in three global blocks—Eurasia (Europe plus Russia), Oceania (Western Europe plus the United States) and Eastasia (China, India, Pakistan…). While Orwell’s fiction has rightly been read as a textbook for the analysis of totalitarian societies of the middle and second half of the last century—with Stalinism in the Soviet Union as a direct inspiration, the question rightly arises as to whether we should have that reading on hand in the future, especially the one envisioned by the aforementioned far-right conservatives.

Although liberalism triumphed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, proclaiming liberal democracy and the capitalist free market as the only possible options for human progress— summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s well-known maxim about “The End of History and the Last Man”—it is critical thinkers in the West who in recent years have been most vocal in warning that the liberal international order faces its greatest dangers.

The neoliberal experiment–lower taxes on the rich, deregulation of labor and product markets, financialization, and globalization–has been a spectacular failure. Growth is lower than it was in the quarter-century after the Second World War, and most of it has accrued to the very top of the income scale. After decades of stagnant or even falling incomes for those below them, neoliberalism must be pronounced dead and buried, writes in 2019 Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics.

Stiglitz as a follower of neo-Keynesian economic policy 6 years ago predicted that at least three political alternatives would take the place of neoliberalism: far-right nationalism, center-left reformists and the progressive left, while the center-right, which is the bearer of neoliberal failure, is in decline. Analyzing these models for the possible ordering of the world in the future, Stiglitz argues that with the exception of the progressive left, these alternatives remain obsessed with forms of neoliberal ideology whose time has expired.

Progressive capitalism is not an oxymoron. Rather, it is the most viable and vibrant alternative to an ideology that has clearly failed. As such, it represents the best chance we have of escaping our current economic and political malaise, writes Stiglitz.

Analyst Kenan Malik, in his essay on what would follow the collapse of neoliberalism, writes that the history of the liberal international order is marked by the intertwining of economics and geopolitics.

And, within both threads, the desire for order took precedence over any belief in “liberalism.” The economic aim was to keep the world safe for global free markets, not through the pursuit of laissez-faire policies but,as the historian Quinn Slobodian has shown, by “designing institutions…to inoculate capitalism against the threat of democracy” and establishing “rules set by supranational bodies operating beyond the reach of any electorate.” This was the project of neoliberalism, born in the 1930s through the work of economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and coming to fruition in the post-Cold War period, through the institutions and mechanisms of the liberal international order, writes Malik.

Analyzing the success of figures such as Donald Trump, whose anti-globalist views have inspired many to celebrate the “end of neoliberalism,” Malik reminds that many of those who benefited from the neoliberal order remain at the heart of the Trump project:

Not least “tech bros” such as Elon Musk. The triumphant globalism of the post-Cold War era might be no more, but many components of neoliberalism are now being refracted through the lens of an assertive nationalism. 

Many liberal protagonists will reach out with both hands to the book by German philosopher Oswald Spengler, borrowing its alluring title “The Decline of the West.” However, it was this already classic work of political philosophy, which appeared just after the end of World War I, that advocated the theory of the cyclical histories of individual peoples, rather than a single orthodox history of mankind that began with Christian historians and culminated with Karl Marx and Friedrich Hegel.

To understand the challenge of the new, even when the arrival of the new  undeniable, means recognizing that it can be a shock to liberal sensibilities that so few tears will be shed over the end of the old order. Contrary to what seemed like the true reaction in 2016, the task for Trump’s opponents today is not to resist the political change he has introduced, but to embrace it and seize this moment to form a new coalition for a better society, Krasztev writes.

All comments and remarks regarding this and other Vistinomer articles, correction and clarification requests as well as suggestions for fact-checking politicians’ statements and political parties’ promises can be submitted by using this form