Simon Reid-Henry.  Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971-2017.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 2019.  ISBN:  9781451684964 (hardcover, $35.00); 9781451684971 (paperback, $20.00).

Cross-posted from H-Diplo: 25 January 2021 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT22-22

Editor:  Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii

Introduction by Mary Nolan, New York University, Emerita

Review by T.G. Otte, University of East Anglia

Review by Marc-William Palen, University of Exeter

Review by Michelle D. Paranzino, US Naval War College

Review by John A. Thompson, University of Cambridge

Response by Simon Reid-Henry, Queen Mary University of London

 

Simon Reid-Henry’s Empire of Democracy: The Remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971-2017 offers a sweeping narrative of the transformation of democracy and of political economy that has unfolded in Europe and North America over the past fifty years.  The title is taken from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,^[1] but while Reid-Henry shares Tocqueville’s admiration for democracy, or some forms thereof, he does not share his optimism about democracy’s progressive unfolding.  Indeed, according to T.G. Otte, Reid-Henry has written “a sort of negative Whig history of our times.”  In rich detail, Reid-Henry traces the multiple reinventions of democracy and imperial political economy.  He explores how we arrived at a situation where most western democracies now suffer from a crisis of institutional capacity and moral legitimacy, where executive power has grown enormously, experts and technocrats rule, and populations are skeptical and increasingly populist, where neoliberal capitalism has replaced social democracy and faith in social progress has dwindled.

Unlike some who date the origins of current crisis to the Great Recession of 2007-2008 or to the unintended outcomes of the collapse of Communism in 1989, Reid-Henry joins a growing body of scholars who see the 1970s as the key decade of regime change and neoliberal ascendency.  He begins his analysis in that troubled decade, then shifts to 1989 and its dramatic economic and political impacts and concludes with the dual crises of the early twenty-first century, 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2007-2008.  To each of these he devotes nearly 200 pages.  In each he reconstructs “a history of the political life of the western democracies,” (11) but also and often more so a history of political economy, of the changing forms and functioning of Euro American capitalism—or capitalisms.  He attends equally to the ideas and ideologies that promoted neoliberalism and globalization and to the social changes and movements that both pushed changes in politics and the economy and responded to them.

Part 1, “Democracy Unbound” explores the multiple crises that began in the troubled years between 1968 and 1971 and led to the undermining of postwar prosperity and social policies and the destruction of the financial architecture of the Bretton Woods system. New criticisms of democracy emerged from the left and later from a new more radical right.  Keynesianism and the social democratic compromise were replaced by neoliberal ideas and institutions that valued the market over the state, freedom over equality, and the individual over class.  Financialization, deindustrialization, and globalization, which were supported enthusiastically by the right and tolerated by social democrats, reconfigured national economies and their global interconnections.  This story of unravelling and reconfiguring is told with attention to transnational similarities and national particularities.  It focuses on new economic ideologies, institutions and practices, on the shifting balance of power within democratic states that benefitted the executive and judiciary.  Social Democracy was on the defensive, the working class was losing ground steadily, and new forms of right-wing activism took center stage.  Europe and America had been remade, even before 1989.

Part 2, “Novus Ordo Seclorum?” for which 1989 serves as starting point, examines the less crisis- ridden but deeply transformative 1990s.  It was not the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama had predicted.^[2] Globalization and financialization continued to dominate capitalism in the West, as Democratic, Social Democratic and Labour parties all came to embrace a neoliberal Third Way, even as that was costing them popular support.  Former Communist central and eastern Europe transitioned to neoliberal capitalism via disruptive shock therapy; creating viable democracies proved more difficult, and nations in the West were evolving in less democratic ways.  Power was increasingly in the hands of markets and corporations, rather than voters or labor.  Good governance and efficiency became the new watchwords of politicians as they attacked welfare states and promoted this model of democracy abroad.  Left-wing parties saw their base shrink and new forms of right-wing mobilization from Jean-Marie Le Pen, head of France’s National Front and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to U. S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America emerged prominently.  Reid-Henry argues that the “reigning liberal democratic order had been transposed from a system of public demand management, orchestrated through the institutions of mass democracy, to one of private consumption management, orchestrated through the market” (449).

Part 3, rather puzzlingly entitled “Victory without Peace” centers on the complex crises set in motion by 9/11 and the 2007-8 economic crisis.   It narrates the war on terror, the securitization of everyday life, primarily but not exclusively in the U.S., and the accelerated growth in executive power.  Within nation states, “democracy lite”(565), in which the consumer was the key agent, not the citizen, and voluntarism and public-private partnerships supplanted political obligation came to the fore, while in the European Union the single market was not accompanied by supranational democratization.  The Great Recession, for which working classes across the West paid, precipitated a crisis of democracy and of liberal values as much as a crisis of capitalism.  It fueled the growth of a populist radical right and a mobilized radical left, neither of which trusted the democracies in which they lived.  Democratic politics reinforced differences rather than reconciling them.  This marked the culmination of processes that began in the 1970s.  Whether this crisis of democracy will continue or we are entering a third postwar era is an open question, but Reid-Henry argues that only a change in ideas, rather than institutions and policies, will move his West in that direction.

As Marc-William Palen points out in his review, Empire of Democracy offers a wide-ranging synthesis of a growing body of work on neoliberalism, globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the geopolitical and economic crises of the first decades of the twenty-first century.  John A. Thompson admires its “lucid, live style” and calls “this huge book… a huge achievement.”  Otte expresses some concern that no archival sources were used and only English language secondary sources consulted, but nonetheless concludes that “this book offers much that is commendable and certainly this reviewer has found in it much food for thought.”

Empire of Democracy is both ambitious in chronology and narrower in geographic scope.  Palen admires the book’s “innovative reconceptualization of longstanding chronological frameworks.”   Michelle Paranzino commends Reid-Henry’s willingness to carry his interpretive narrative down to the present, something many historians shy away from.  For some, the “West” of the title proved more problematic.  The West, a term of conservative connotations, seems at odds with Reid-Henry’s admiration for more participatory and socially egalitarian forms of democracy.  The West includes only the U.S., Britain, continental Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.  The book is a transnational history rather than a global one.  Otte argues that not putting developments in the North Atlantic and Antipodes in global context was “a missed opportunity.”  Paranzino wonders whether “the ‘West’ holds much value as a conceptual category anymore.” She suggests that if Reid-Henry had focused instead on the First World as defined by the U.S., the history of democracy would be more complex.  While that broader category included many countries that were not initially democracies, many have subsequently become so, even as some European states have transitioned in an illiberal direction

Some of the reviewers raise concerns about the book’s definition of democracy.  Reid-Henry does insist that democracy is “something that is constantly made and remade” (8) and he traces the transnational contours of this remaking well.  Yet, Paranzino regrets that “virtually all liberal democracies are treated as interchangeable;” as a result the often significant policy differences among them are neither described nor explained. Thompson finds that there was “a somewhat disconcerting unsteadiness” about the meaning of the term democracy, a slippage between viewing it as political process and a social ideal.

Several reviewers raise concerns about empire.  Palen finds empire to be “the least developed concept.”  He urges attention to earlier theories of imperialism.  J. A. Hobson, for example, saw capitalist interdependence as a means of bolstering democracy whereas the neoliberalism Reid-Henry analyzes has impeded democracy.  It was “a repudiation of the very capitalistic theories that had underpinned the more liberal post-1945 economic order.”  Hobson also argues that the rather rosy picture of liberal democracies prior to the 1970s, which Reid-Henry paints look considerably more blemished if their responses to movements of national liberation and decolonization are considered.  Paranzino notes that empire is discussed with no attention to imperial subjects, and this despite the vast body of literature on the interdependence of metropole and periphery and the lasting legacy of colonialism and decolonization.

Otte and Paranzino fear that admirable teasing out of broad transnational trends leads to the neglect of how these developments differed in important ways in different countries.  Otte notes that the causes of current discontent in virtually all western democracies have more varied and nationally specific causes than Reid-Henry suggests.  Paranzino argues broad national similarities blur distinctive national chronologies.  The culture wars in America, for example, date back to the 1960s, and the imperial presidency did not begin with George W. Bush.

Two reviewers raise questions of causality.  Otte flags the “inevitabilist assumptions” that seem to underlie the book’s narrative of declension since 1970s.  He urges attention to contingencies, especially to the character and actions of particular political leaders. Thompson identifies a lack of clarity about whether the rise of neoliberalism and the decline of social democracy were “driven by objective economic conditions.” Reid-Henry argues in places that prosperity was the underlying and necessary basis for the more social democratic forms of capitalism and democracy in the 1950 and 1960s; its disappearance made their decline inevitable or at least very likely.  At other times, he suggests that changing social attitudes which stressed the individual over larger collectivities, the market over the state were of foremost importance.

Despite its rather daunting length (800+ pages) and the “many factual slips” that Otte finds “jarring,” all reviews find much to admire in Empire of Democracy and deem it to be of value especially to the general reader.  Its publication seems especially timely, as recent economic, political, and medical crises have raised in acute form the question of how democracy and capitalism will evolve, in Reid-Henry’s ‘West’ and beyond.

Reid-Henry offers a lengthy and spirited response to the commentaries that elaborates on several of his arguments and conceptual choices.  He defends his focus on the West, insisting that far from being a settled geography, it has been constantly reinvented.  Many other works, he notes, look outward from Europe and America, while his concern was to look inward at the ongoing ways in which democracy and capitalism interacted and have been contested and reconfigured from within since the 1970s.  He defends the book’s focus on liberalism and capitalism rather than the legacy of empire, arguing that they are central to understanding contemporary history.  “There are,” he notes, “many sides to the struggle to decolonize knowledge and its institutional repositories.” He likewise rejects the suggestion that he should have attended more to national particularities, for he wanted to “break out of the sovereign territorial mold.” The question remains, however, how best to move the analysis among the scales of the national, transnational, and global and how much weight to give to each.  He offers a cogent defense of 1971 as his starting point.

Addressing more methodological issues, Reid-Henry vigorously insists on the importance of ideas, but refuses to prioritize ideas over political-economic factors and says he seeks a middle ground that avoids “schematic formulations.  He defends his refusal to define democracy as clearly as some critics wish, arguing that his aim is to unpack the tensions within democratic values and the contestation between democracy as a political process and a social ideal.  In response to Otte’s critique that the narrative of declension seemed inevitabilist, Reid-Henry argues that political struggles, which feature so prominently in his narrative, are always contingent.  Finally, Reid-Henry is disappointed that none of the commentators reflected on the fact that the book was “written by a geographer with a geographical set of intentions.” Fair enough.  One wishes, however, that he had laid out in the book or in his response what the particular intentions and contributions of geographers were so as to promote a more fruitful dialogue between the two disciplines.

Participants:

Simon Reid-Henry is Professor of Historical and Political Geography at Queen Mary University of London, Director of QMUL’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.  His previous books include of The Political Origins of Inequality: Why a More Equal World is better for us All (University of Chicago Press, 2015), The Cuban Cure: Reason and Resistance in Global Science (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Mary Nolan is Professor of History emerita at NYU.  She is the author of Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (Oxford University Press (1994) and The Transatlantic Century: Europe and America, 1890-2010 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and co-editor of Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (Routledge, 2018).  She is currently working on the gender politics of right radical populism in Europe and the United States.

T.G. Otte is Professor of Diplomatic History at the University of East Anglia.  His latest book is Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (Allen Lane, 2020).

Marc-William Palen is Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Exeter.  He is editor of the Imperial & Global Forum and co-director of History & Policy’s Global Economics and History Forum.  His works include The “Conspiracy” of Free Trade: The Anglo-American Struggle over Empire and Economic Globalisation, 1846-1896 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). His current book project, under contract with Princeton University Press, explores the global intersections of capitalism, anti-imperialism, and peace activism from the mid-nineteenth century to today.

Michelle Paranzino (formerly Getchell) is an assistant professor in the Department of Strategy & Policy at the US Naval War College.  She is the author of The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Cold War: A Short History with Documents (Cambridge/Indianapolis: Hackett, 2018) and is currently working on a book about the Reagan administration and the War on Drugs.

John A. Thompson gained his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge where he is now Emeritus Reader in American History and an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine’s College.  His principal research interests have been American liberalism and U.S. debate about foreign policy.  His publications include Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Woodrow Wilson (Longman, 2002), and numerous articles and book chapters.  His most recent book, A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Cornell University Press, 2015), was the subject of an H-Diplo/ISSF Roundtable in 2016, https://issforum.org/roundtables/8-15-sense-of-power

‘Aetas horribilis?’: Whig History in Reverse

Anniversaries are invariably occasions for reflection.  The autumn of 2019, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, was such an occasion, as was testified by a series of commemorative events in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and by a spate of publications across much of the Western world.

It has become something of a hackneyed cliché to note that the glad, confident prognostications of 1989 of a never-ending present have remained unfulfilled.  Events since then have confounded the ‘great expectations’ of those heady days.  History not only did not end, it has revived and accelerated, and in often unexpected ways.^[3] Political forces, long dormant and indeed considered dead, have resurfaced. In different guises and to varying degrees, ethnic nationalism, illiberalism, and xenophobia have become features of Western politics again, and the future of both capitalism and democracy in their current forms has been called into question.^[4] The twin-events of 2016, Britain’s Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s election as president, narrow outcomes though they were, have plunged the commentariat, and public intellectuals in the Anglo-Saxon world more especially, into anxious soul-searching. Something has ‘gone wrong’ in Western politics, it is regularly suggested; 2016 is presented as the ‘annus horribilis’ of contemporary history.

One structural ‘culprit’ that has frequently been cited in the scholarly literature is the growth of neoliberal politics in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War until the global financial crisis of 2008/9.^[5] Simon Reid-Henry’s Empire of Democracy follows in this groove, but it also deepens it by tracing the origins of neoliberal politics in the West back to the 1970s.  The essence of his argument is that at the root of the problems since 1989 is the ideological programme of Western leaders to anchor the newly emerging democracies of Eastern Europe in free market economies – the so-called ‘Washington consensus’.^[6] This faith in the power of markets, which are by preference unfettered, to do good originated in the methods chosen in the late 1960s and early 1970s to overcome the multiple crises that were then besetting Western European and North American societies. Inflation and stagnant growth – the phenomenon of ‘stagflation’ popularized by Mancur Olson^[7] – as well as currency volatility and declining productivity seemed to threaten the post-1945 consensus of growing prosperity and stable democratic governance.  In their attempts to solve these problems, Western leaders opened their hitherto tightly regulated economies to market forces.

This undoubtedly increased prosperity, but over time it also transformed the social contract between governments, capital, and labour that had defined the major democracies since the end of the Second World War.  By 1989/91 a new consensus view had become firmly entrenched in Western capitals, one that prioritized market solutions to economic or societal problems.  The corollary to this was the shrinking of the state and with it the capacity of governments to act.  When the Soviet empire and the command economies of its Eastern European satellites collapsed, Western capitalism seemed to be working well, amply competent to sustain both prosperity and democracy.

This, however, was a delusion, for – in Reid-Henry’s view – dangerous tendencies were gathering pace already.  Before too long, a sense of disconnection between ordinary citizens and the system of democratic governance gained ground.  It was caused by a rapidly rising incomes inequality, especially but not exclusively in the United States, and a free market consensus that seemed to rule out genuine change. This palpable sense of disenfranchisement was heightened further by the growth of largely unaccountable quasi-governmental agencies.  In the early 2000s mass immigration compounded matters further, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities it reinforced concerns about Islamist terror and interminable and unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In parallel, the financial sectors had been allowed to expand beyond all limits, while the state shed itself of regulatory instruments needed to protect the rampant casino capitalism of the early 2000s from itself and, if it ran in trouble, to rescue it.  The result was the 2008-9 near-meltdown of the international financial markets.  Although the subsequent, (mostly) coordinated efforts by Western governments prevented the worst, albeit belatedly, the rescued system is far from stable.^[8] Significant structural risks remain, as the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, warned in a tour d’horizon in the summer of 2019.

It not only made it harder to achieve price and financial stability but it is also encouraging protectionist and populist policies which are exacerbating the situation. This combination reduces the rate of global potential growth, increases its downside skew, and bolsters the likelihood of an extreme downside event…Past instances of very low rates have tended to coincide with high risk events such as wars, financial crises, and breaks in the monetary regime.^[9]

Empire of Democracy is broad in its scope, and there is much to be admired in this book.  It certainly does not lack for ambition.  And yet it also has curious limitations.  One of them is its heavy reliance on only English-language sources (mainly secondary; no archival materials have been used).  Another, at least to this reviewer’s mind, is the near-exclusive focus on Western developments and concerns.  Whilst it is perfectly legitimate to prioritise these, not to place them within the wider context of global developments seems a missed opportunity.

Finally, the narrative seems to be underpinned by implicit, ‘inevitabilist’ assumptions.  Once certain decisions had been made in the 1970s, Western policy (whatever exactly that means) was running along a fixed track that led to the decisions after 1989 to force a neoliberal economic reform regime on the former Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe and so on to the malaise of the early twenty first-century world.  It is a sort of negative Whig history of our times.  Historians will, perhaps, always be tempted by ex post facto rationalizations, but it does blind them to possible alternatives and to the contingencies of any given historical situation.  No doubt, political leaders are prone to present their preferred policies as without alternative.  From Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There is no alternative’ to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s equally insistent ‘alternativlos,’ this has been the refrain modern politics.^[10] But the reality of decision-making is often more complicated than such statements or the simple mapping of neoliberal ideological belief systems onto high politics here suggests.  It is in this context that the absence of archival sources is telling.^[11]

International politics remain permeated with contingency.  What if Erich Honecker in East Germany or Gustáv Husák in Czechoslovakia had opted for a ‘Chinese solution’ when dealing with the growing opposition movements in their countries, as some of their hardliners demanded?  There were, after all, the precedents of 1953 and 1968.  European politics might well have followed a different course.  Similarly, the decision to apply an economic ‘shock therapy’ to the ailing Soviet-style economies of Eastern Europe was not simply a case of Western governments and the myriad of economic advisers that descended on that blighted half of the continent forcing their solutions on reluctant East Europeans.  Leszek Balcerowicz and Václav Klaus, then finance ministers of Poland and Czechoslovakia respectively, or Yegor Gaidar, deputy prime minister of the Russian federation, embraced such a programme because they saw in the break with state capitalism in favour of radical free market reforms in Chile a role model that promised prosperity and – the dictator Augusto Pinochet after all fell in 1988 – democracy.^[12] There is no mention of the Chilean experiment here, but it gives a sense of the wider context that ought to be considered.

Equally, the global financial crisis of 2008/9 did not end in a repeat of the worldwide depression of 1929 because political and banking leaders were determined to avoid such an outcome – Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, for instance, was a student of the economic and financial crisis of the early 1930s. State intervention on an unprecedented scale helped to prevent a meltdown.^[13] The extent to which central bankers and finance ministers coordinated their efforts in 2008-10 offer scope for more detailed discussion than is presented here.

The advanced economies of the West might have had a lucky escape at that time, but in the wake of the crisis the tools for any further intervention are much diminished, hence Carney’s warnings in 2019.  The close link between politics and banking, moreover, played a central role in the rise of the ‘Tea Party’ and the 2016 presidential election in the United States, giving both of them the notion of a remote ‘establishment’ as the perfect foil for their populist campaigns.  But the rise of nativist populism in the United States and the Brexit vote in Great Britain followed where Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had led, for here was another improbable politician who – in his own terms – successfully filled the political and ideological vacuum that opened in Italy in the 1990s.^[14]

There is no space to develop some of these themes further in a review essay.  It will suffice here to observe that the reasons for the current discontent in many of the developed industrial economies are more varied and variegated, and specific to individual countries, than the grand narrative advanced in Empire of Democracy might suggest.  No doubt, traditional power balances and international alignments are changing.  No doubt also, the years around 2016 mark a caesura in the developments since 1989/90.  Whether they signify the end of an epoch, let alone whether it was a ‘horrible age,’ historians still lack distance and perspective to tell.  And they should resist the temptation of Whig history in reverse.

This book offers much that is commendable, and certainly this reviewer has found in it much food for thought.  Some of the narrative, however, could usefully have been condensed, and some of the extraneous details stripped away.  But it is the many factual slips, which flourish like wildflowers in this 800-page tome, which strike a jarring note. Though slight on their own, in total they suggest a certain carelessness.  To name but a few and at random: Ian Macleod was not Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1965.  Mikhail Gorbachev was born in Southern Russia, not in the Ukraine, and he was not ‘Soviet premier’ but Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and – briefly – President of the Soviet Union.  The English-language acronym for West Germany was FRG (Federal Republic of Germany), not FDR.  The Social Democrats there were no longer in government in the mid-1980s; the date of the German general election in 1990 was 2 December; Joschka Fischer was not a member of the Kohl government, and Kohl left office in 1998, not in 1997.  The Dutch diplomat and Social Democrat politician Jan Pronk held a number of ministerial portfolios but was never prime minister; and it was the Danes who voted against the Maastricht treaty in a referendum, not the Dutch – they voted, in 2005, against the proposed European Constitution Treaty.  Peter Sutherland was an Irish, not a British, EU-commissioner; and Ralf Dahrendorf was a Liberal German politician and university professor, not a member of the British House of Lords, when he made the comments about German politics quoted here.  To call the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) ‘formerly liberal’ is rather to misunderstand the origins of the party as a rallying point for former Nazis and other right-wingers.^[15] The founder and leader of the Lega Nord in Italy was Umberto Bossi (not Ossi).  One could go on.

 

The decades that followed the Second World War witnessed in the capitalist West a democratic system in flux.  As Simon Reid-Henry puts it in Empire of Democracy (2019), amid the “onrush of the Cold War,” liberalism’s defense of individualism became “the glue that could best hold capitalism and democracy together going forward” and counterbalance the growth of the national welfare state (31).  This restructuring of the relationship between capitalism and democracy was occurring across much of the West during the 1950s and 1960s. Rumblings of dissent against the new state of things, however, grew from within among labor, civil rights workers, and anti-war activists, and from without—for Western Europe in particular—stemming from the unrest associated with “the gradual unwinding of colonialism” (37).

According to Reid-Henry, the student uprisings of 1968 marked the beginning of the end of the new post-war status quo.  What happened between 1968 and 1974 therefore was far more important than the years that immediately followed 1945, let alone between 1989 or 1991, which are portrayed as a “denouement” rather than a beginning (6).  The origins of the post-Cold War order thus are not to be found among those supranational governing mechanisms created at Bretton Woods in 1944, but within a new finance-oriented globalization regime and a resurgent rightwing political movement that began taking shape upon the Bretton Woods system’s collapse in the early 1970s. Reid-Henry provocatively shows that the West’s relationship between capitalism and democracy would never be the same again.

The growing scholarship on ‘neoliberal globalization’ has, of course, been emphasizing how the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a break from the liberal market integration project that had begun taking shape in the mid-1940s.  And thanks to a wide array of innovative scholarship, we now have a much better understanding of the connections between the demise of the fixed monetary regime of Bretton Woods, neoliberalism, deregulation, human rights, stagflation, decolonization, and mounting demands from the non-aligned world for a ‘new international economic order.’^[16] But what is new here is Reid-Henry’s wide-ranging synthesis of these studies and his emphasis upon how this confluence of forces influenced the democratic transformation of the West. Out of the economic turmoil of the early 1970s arose a “new style of capitalism” (73) that embraced economic uncertainty and that pitted capital against labor in a long struggle that capital won.  A new political alignment between investors and businesses to uphold what they considered the most important achievement of postwar democracy—political stability (and the profits wrought from it)—augured poorly for labor rights agitation.  What arose out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression was not “the reregulation of capitalism, as had eventually stanched the crisis of the interwar period, but through the reimagination of the place of the market in the liberal democratic state . . . the great strength of Keynesianism—popular consent to economic outcomes—was revealed to have also been its Achilles heel” (84).  The post-war welfare state retreated before the advancement of global finance and floating exchange rates, giving way to a neoliberal reformation that sought to peel back the welfare state while at the same time to use the state to protect the free market from the “challenge posed by democracy to the market” (92).  By the 1980s, “the brave new world of international finance” was proclaiming “its global status loudly” and with brazen disregard for avoiding risk (219).  Governments began caring more about getting support from business lobbies, corporate leaders, and financiers than they did about winning votes.  This new political economy existed first and foremost to safeguard capitalism, not democracy.  And the quick post-Cold-War successes of the first Gulf War (1990-1991) also “restored militarism to the heart of American national identity” (286).  This unipolar moment, alongside integrative projects like NAFTA and the European Union, ushered in “an historic resurgence of laissez-faire international capitalism” (315) and fiscal conservatism that had its roots in the 1970s.

The crisis of democracy remains front-and-center throughout the book, but what about empire?  Even though the title of the book places empire at the forefront, this is the least developed concept within it.  And yet imperial theory informs this very decoupling of capitalism from democracy that Reid-Henry explores.  Indeed, this decoupling becomes even more significant if the frame of reference is expanded to include ‘classical’ capitalist theories of imperialism.  Going back a century and more, capitalism – or ‘industrialism’ as British political philosopher Herbert Spencer preferred – had been closely associated with democracy.  From the mid-nineteenth century capitalist radicalism of British free trader and peace activist Richard Cobden to the early-twentieth-century radicalism of British ‘new Liberal’ critics of empire like J. A. Hobson and Norman Angell—free-market capitalism and democracy were not just corollaries; they were mutually reinforcing.^[17] Free markets, in undermining the influence of aristocratic landed elites and monopolies, meant greater democracy and an end to empires.  The British imperial theorist J. A. Hobson perhaps most famously laid out the connection in Imperialism: A Study (1902)—that the great threat to capitalism and democracy at the turn of the century was the militant growth and influence of financial monopoly: a parasitic symbiosis of Wall Street, aristocratic elites, and big business.^[18] Of course, the big difference between ‘new Liberals’ like Hobson and Reid-Henry’s ‘neoliberals’ was that Hobson came to see economic interdependence as a way towards furthering democracy, whereas the capitalist transformation that Reid-Henry depicts showed democracy to be an impediment to interdependence. In other words, imperial theory highlights how what began taking shape in the early 1970s was not just a break from two decades of postwar politics; it was also a repudiation of the very capitalistic theories that had underpinned the more liberal post-1945 economic order.

Had Reid-Henry not placed empire in the background, he might also have avoided the  tendency in the book to downplay the important role that decolonizing states played in holding an uncomfortable mirror up to the Western liberal democracies over the preceding decades. For example, Empire of Democracy vividly conveys the importance of violent divisions that were ripping apart Western democracies from within, all culminating in the late 1970s, as well as the violent ways that these divisions were put down by democratic governments.  But was this really a break from what came before?  That postwar liberal democracies were capable of brutal policies of counterterrorism had already been well established in the 1940s and 1950s, an era filled with such examples of repression as the Western powers sought to halt democratic movements within their colonies.  As Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson put it, “Labour Ministers with impeccable Fabian ethics and British colonial officials genuinely enthused by ideas of self-government locked up those who asked for it too soon.  Left-wing politicians in liberated France, their reputations built on careers in the Resistance, ordered mass arrests, detentions without trial, even the systematic use of torture to extract information.”^[19] In other words, the crisis of capitalist democracy had been on display across the decolonizing world long before it became manifest in the former imperial metropoles in the 1970s in the wake of the Vietnam War.  Nor were the imperial dimensions of U.S. democracy promotion in the 1990s capitalized upon as much as they could have been, and the subsequent section on the War on Terror entitled “American Empire?” never quite answers its own question.

These ruminations about empire, of course, are not meant to detract from the book’s timely argument, sweeping narrative synthesis, and innovative reconceptualization of longstanding chronological frameworks to show how nineteenth-century French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘empire of democracy’ was transformed into the handmaiden of a new form of global capitalism.^[20] The book also concludes with a glimmer of hope, along with insightful speculations about the rise of Brexit and the anti-democratic presidency of Donald Trump, both of which succeeded on platforms emphasizing “anti-immigration, economic nationalism, and patriotic aggrandizement” (728). Reid-Henry observes how, after 2016, “it was almost as if the Western democracies had been brought back full circle to the 1970s . . . . Of course, it was not the 1970s again, much less the 1930s” (736).  The current crisis now gives us time for further reflection and speculation.  Since Empire of Democracy was published, the expanding coronavirus pandemic is causing stock markets to seize, freedom of movement to freeze, and global supply chains to break down.  More and more people are turning to the strong state for succour and economic self-sufficiency for a cure, a movement that has more elements of the the 1930s than the 1970s, let alone the 1950s or 1990s. Neoliberal globalization is reeling, maybe even on its last legs, begging the questions – where goeth globalization?  Where goeth democracy?

 

Perhaps partly as a push back against the academic trend toward social, cultural, and gender history, ‘applied history,’ which seeks to illuminate contemporary policy issues through the study of historical precedents, and so-called ‘big history,’ an interdisciplinary and macro-level attempt to discern patterns across cultures and eras, are now in vogue.  This book thus arrives at a propitious time; it is nothing if not sweeping in scope and purpose.  Simon Reid-Henry sets out an ambitious goal for himself – to explore the twists and travails of the western liberal democracies (which he defines as the transatlantic world, including Canada and Australia) over the past half century.  This is an important task and Reid-Henry tackles it with skill and verve.  There are a number of interpretive issues, however, that may limit the value of this volume for academic historians.

First and perhaps most substantive is the spatial and temporal frame in which the narrative is constructed.  Why is 1971 the starting point of the book?  Why not 1968, which, as Reid-Henry demonstrates, was a watershed year by any meaningful indicator?  The imposition of this start date neglects the deeper historical roots of many of the phenomena under examination here.  For instance, he waxes eloquent about the “new style of capitalism” (72) that emerged in the 1970s, but the quotation from renowned Keynesian economist  John Kenneth Galbraith he offers to epitomize this “new” style is from 1958, suggesting perhaps that it wasn’t quite so new after all. Readers might be surprised to learn that the culture wars in the United States “began” (117) in the 1970s, rather than in fact propelling Ronald Reagan to California’s governorship in 1964 and Richard Nixon to the White House in 1968.  His treatment of California’s Proposition 13 further neglects Reagan’s gubernatorial years, when many of what Reid-Henry considers “post-Prop 13” trends originated (184).  Latin Americanists will undoubtedly be interested to know that civil society “emerged” (224) in Latin America in the 1980s.  We are told that George W. Bush’s lawyers overturned posse comitatus (517), which restricted the use of the military in domestic law enforcement, yet it had already been undermined by Reagan’s War on Drugs.  Indeed, Reid-Henry’s portrayal of Bush’s expansion of presidential powers as some kind of departure ignores the much deeper roots of the “imperial presidency.”^[21]  Painting with such a broad brush glosses over many important details and nuances.

Moreover, given the ways in which global interdependency has been accelerating since the end of the Second World War, does “the West” hold much value as a conceptual category anymore?  Reid-Henry never explicitly makes a case for the analytical value of his definition and deployment of the term.  It is an inaccurate label in terms of physical geography (Australia is in the eastern hemisphere), nor does it capture the way U.S. Cold Warriors conceptualized the so-called ‘First World,’ as they would have certainly included the Western Hemisphere nations that had signed onto the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty).  Though most of the countries that joined the security pact were not governed by liberal democratic regimes in 1948, when the treaty was ratified, many have since transitioned from dictatorship to illiberal democracy, with some further transitioning from illiberal to liberal democracy.^[22]  An analysis of this sort would require more definitional rigor but would also reveal that the prospects for democracy elsewhere have been brighter than perhaps in the West.  Reid-Henry’s approach, however, obscures or otherwise ignores key global developments, including the third wave of democratization in the 1980s and perhaps most consequentially, the rise of China.

This points to an associated problem with the book’s framing, which relates to the under-theorization of the key terms employed in the title and throughout.  Though it seems pretty clear that Reid-Henry was inspired by the incredibly sharp observations and insightful comparisons of Alexis de Tocqueville’s monumental work, Democracy in America, it is not at all clear what the eponymous Empire of Democracy actually is.^[23]  Is he referring to the United States or to the entire Western world (as he defines it)? If it is the former, then the focus on Britain, continental Europe, Australia, and Canada muddies the waters.  If it is the latter, readers need to understand how and why this empire was constructed and how it was both similar to and different from other empires in world history. It is not clear that the periodization of 1971-2017 fits either perspective.  Furthermore, given the explosion of scholarship on the interdependency of metropole and periphery, does it make sense to consider the “empire” – any empire – apart from its subjects?  Reid-Henry hints at a link between European integration and decolonization (178) but unfortunately fails to examine it.

Though he claims that a focus on the Western liberal democracies can “provide clarity over how our values and our institutions interact” (8), this is not an analysis that is sustained throughout the volume.  Reid-Henry makes occasional references to, for instance, the different political climate of a country like Sweden from the United States, but he eschews direct comparisons of the values and institutions of the various liberal democracies under examination here.  At no point are readers made to understand that different policy outcomes have resulted from different values, different institutions, and different interactions between them.  Rather, liberal democracies are treated as virtually interchangeable.  This is truly a shame, as scholars are in dire need of a rigorous analysis of these differences.  They will not find it here.  Furthermore, short shrift is given to the various ways in which popular leaders can shape both values and institutions, for better or for worse.

All this, however, should not detract from the book’s value for a general audience.  Given that it was published with a trade press and not an academic press, it seems likely that this was the audience Reid-Henry was hoping to reach.  The book covers much ground and illuminates many patterns across the western world.  It is beautifully written and the author has a keen eye for witty quotations and insightful anecdotes. More importantly, it fills a wide chronological gap that is unlikely to completely disappear anytime soon.  Academic historians are often reluctant to carry their narratives through to the present day, fearing this may erode the scholarly value of their work.  Reid-Henry, on the other hand, was inspired by the contemporary crisis of democracy and this book is his attempt to make historical sense of it.  It is a worthy and admirable endeavor, and one is given to hope that others will follow where he has led.

 

This massive book’s subject is itself massive.  In 865 pages, Simon Reid-Henry provides a history of the West from the early 1970s to 2017.  Reid-Henry is British, and the geographical conception of “the West” he works with might be seen as reflecting a London-based perspective, with the United Kingdom and the United States occupying center stage and the rest of the English-speaking world along with the countries of Western Europe filling out the picture.  Political events form the stem of the narrative but these are placed in the context of economic and social developments and the movement of ideas. Based on extraordinarily wide reading (as the 72 pages of footnotes attest), the book provides a comprehensive and deeply informed account of a substantial slice of history.  Its lucid, lively style makes it an easy read, despite its daunting length.  Altogether, this huge book is a huge achievement of which the author may be properly proud.

Simply as a narrative, the work has many valuable qualities.  In the first place, it pulls together a great deal of precise and detailed information.  There are statistics here on matters ranging from the growth of government spending as a proportion of GDP in Western Europe between 1950 and 1973 (32) to the exponential growth of US arms sales in the 1970s (167) and the number of asylum applications by country in 2015.  (712-713).  All these statistics give a welcome precision to specific points and some will surprise many.  One learns, for example, that the sale of council houses in the UK raised more revenue in the 1980s than all the privatizations of industries combined.  (783).  The growth of international finance receives particular attention although (as is often the case with statistics) some of the figures are not easy to reconcile with each other (notably those on the growth of international bank lending between the 1970s and early 1990s on pages 103 and 313).  Beyond this, reconstruction of the sequence of events shows how one thing led to another, such as the connection between the huge costs to the United States of the “war on terror” and the financial crisis of 2007-2009.  (553-559).  And the “resolutely transnational” approach (9) brings out both the extent to which all these countries were subject to common trends and also significant national differences,  – as with the much more rigorous way in which monetarism was implemented by the UK and the U.S. in the 1980s than it was by Germany. (95).  Brief but vivid pen-portraits bring to life many of the numerous individuals who figure in the story.

However, this work is by no means simply a narrative.  It is an interpretation of history, and one that is shaped by a political point of view.  The historical scope of the book reflects this interpretation, (as Reid-Henry points out, this true of all periodizations).  (9).  Thus, the early 1970s are seen as marking the beginning of a “regime change” in the West.  (5).  The regime that was ending had been created in the years following World War II when not only Western Europe but also (if to a lesser extent) the United States had established welfare states that involved a large public sector, Keynesian economics, high rates of direct taxation, and a recognized role for trade unions in a “consensus” model of democracy.  All this produced “considerably greater convergence of political culture among and between the Western democracies than had existed even half a century before” (30-35).  In terms of the Tocquevillian phrase that provides the book’s title, this was the first “empire of democracy.” Like others, Reid-Henry sees this period as a “Golden Age” (34, 641-642).

The consensus on which this regime rested was challenged in the 1960s by a radicalism that raised cultural issues involving the recognition of rights that, as Reid-Henry shrewdly observes, were less susceptible to compromise than earlier ones over the redistribution of resources (51).  But a more powerful source of change were the economic problems of the early 1970s – the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the rise in the oil price initiated by OPEC (Oil Producing and Exporting Countries).  The consequent “stagflation” and labor unrest led western governments to lose faith in Keynesianism and adopt what Reid-Henry describes as a regime of “political minimalism that reduced state capacity and amplified market freedoms,” and elsewhere as “societies governed at a distance” (738, 466).  By the end of the decade there was a backlash against labor militancy and a weakening of the political support for the post-war order.  Social democratic parties suffered electorally and some, notably the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), moved to the right themselves.  The 1980s saw a much more drastic unwinding of the welfare state, not only by the Reagan administration in the United States and the Thatcher government in the UK but also in Australia, New Zealand and most of continental Europe (after French President François Mitterrand’s U-turn in 1983).  The trend since the 1940s toward greater economic equality in western societies started moving in the other direction in the 1970s (157).

The narrative of internal developments in different countries is set in the context of international events.  Just as the consensual political support for high public spending in the postwar years (even in the United States) had owed much to the perceived Communist threat, so its decline coincided with the era of détente.  As international affairs became less dominated by the superpower rivalry, new institutions such as the G7 (founded 1975) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) promoting human rights came on stage.  Reid-Henry sees this as a counterpart to the contemporary privileging of freedom over equality at home: “human rights were the perfect cipher internationally for an era of political minimalism nationally” (188).  On the other hand, the emergence of “eurocommunism” when the Communist parties of Italy, Spain and eventually France broke with Moscow was “one of the most promising experiments of democratic socialism all century” (170).  The renewal of the Cold War after 1979 extinguished that hope in the West but led a few years later, Reid-Henry suggests, to “the final battle for social democracy” taking place in Russia over what, following Archie Brown and William Taubman, he sees as Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s “effort to adopt Western-style social democracy as the new political system of the Soviet Union” (265).^[24]

Reid-Henry takes issue with the view that Gorbachev’s failure and the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted from the evident practical superiority of the capitalist version of democracy that was by then dominant in the West and its consequent attraction for the peoples of Eastern Europe.  After detailing the scale of the Soviet bloc’s hard currency debts by the late 1980s, he suggests that “the fall of communism in the East was born of the same moment of crisis as the West had been living through since the 1970s (238-239).  While he draws attention to the role of the 1975 Helsinki Accords in de-legitimizing repression in the name of socialism, Reid-Henry nevertheless stresses the variety of ways in which regime change came about in different eastern bloc countries and that the protest movements “were ad hoc constellations that represented no single social group, nor did they have a clear political platform beyond the desire just to live more normal unencumbered lives” (237-238).  It was only afterwards, he argues, that the institutions of a market economy, most significantly independent central banks, were seen as desirable by successor governments wrestling with the “huge challenge” of building a new system.  This made it possible for the transition to be portrayed as “a ‘glorious victory’ for liberalism and Western democracy” in a manner that not only strengthened the ideological hold of “the new neoliberal consensus in the West” but also inspired millennial hopes of a “new world order” in which freedom and democracy would spread across the globe, underpinned by America’s newly “unipolar” power.  “We know how to secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth,” that improbable visionary George H.W. Bush declared.  It was “through free markets, free speech, free elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state” (240, 268-77).^[25]

Reid-Henry views this second “empire of democracy” less favourably than the earlier version.  In contrast to America’s fruitful provision of security to Western Europe after World War II, the “more liberal-interventionist” foreign policy that emerged following the Cold War had a mixed record of success (276) More central to Reid-Henry’s concern, however, is the form of economic globalization promoted by trade treaties such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the de-regulation of financial markets and the ascendancy of the “Washington consensus” in such institutions as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the newly-formed World Trade Organization (WTO). In the United States and the United Kingdom (and also Germany), this process was now carried forward not by free market crusaders such as President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher but by leaders of progressive parties whose “third way” also involved changes in the welfare system designed to incentivize the search for paid employment.  The economic boom in the later 1990s appeared to vindicate this approach but Reid-Henry is keen to emphasize the extent to which this prosperity rested upon an explosion of private debt.  (388-389, 595-596) The decade also saw the emergence of the European Union out of the European Community, its vast expansion of membership and the creation of ancillary institutions like the European Court of Justice and the Schengen area.  In narrating these developments, Reid-Henry deftly sketches the various immediate interests that propelled them, but again the main thrust of his account is the way in which the impulse to build a political entity large enough to check the power of international capital that had been a motive for social democrats like the former European Commission President Jacques Delors earlier gave ground to “a market model” in which the terms of the single market outlawed restrictions on the movement of capital while the fiscally conservative Growth and Stability pact was insisted on by Germany as a condition for agreeing to a single currency (238, 253-61, 408-18).

In the final section of the book, we enter the twenty-first century and the story is dominated by the succession of crises and setbacks that the new millennium brought for the “empire of democracy.”  These began with the 9/11 attacks in 2001 but, Reid-Henry makes clear, it was not the attacks themselves but the response of the George W. Bush administration that caused the real damage – not only the vastly expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also the illegal detentions and torture of non-citizens and the restrictions on civil liberties within the United States itself as the security state extended its prerogatives and powers.  The next major crisis was the financial crash of 2008 and Reid-Henry provides a full and detailed account of the causes of this and the response to it of various governments.  (The extent to which he draws here upon Adam Tooze’s brilliant analysis is a good example of the excellent use throughout the book of existing studies.^[26]) Reid-Henry’s main focus remains, however, upon the political implications and consequences of these events.  He sees both crises as having required some rebuilding of the state capacity that had been eroded during the heyday of neo-liberalism, but as also creating public alienation from governments and hostility toward the ‘elites’ who were seen as controlling them for their own advantage.  Manifested first in the American Tea Party movement, this populist sentiment later found expression in the trans-national Occupy demonstrations of 2011, and the rise of anti-immigrant right-wing parties across Europe, culminating in 2016 in the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump as president in the United States.  Notwithstanding their often anti-liberal character, Reid-Henry finds something positive in these developments, seeing them as a “clear-cut recovery of political voice”: “they did not represent a spurning of democracy so much as a quite dramatic re-enchantment of politics – albeit that this had not taken the form that the Western liberal elite wanted to see” (720).

This bald summary of the book’s argumentative thread does not do justice to the richness of the detail or the several insightful observations embedded in it.  A notable example is the highlighting of the way United States policymakers disregarded the extent to which there was popular support after the end of the Cold War for a withdrawal from international involvement – the sentiment articulated by the publicist Patrick Buchanan in his initially successful run for the Republican nomination in 1992.  Interestingly, Reid-Henry sees this as “perhaps the first indication of a growing gap between politicians of all political stripes and the publics they were mandated to represent” (302).  Also shrewd is the observation that the conception and fashioning of the “Global War on Terrorism” owed much not only to the Cold War experience of men like Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld but also to some nostalgia for it.  (511-513).  Given all this, the occasional error in a work of this scope and range is a trivial matter (Iain Macleod was not Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1965 nor John Gielgud “young” in 1971, 66, 54).

Less trivial, perhaps, is a certain lack of clarity about two basic issues.  One is the explanation for the retreat of social democracy and the ascendancy of neo-liberalism that is the central theme of the book, and in particular how far this development was driven by objective economic factors.  In places, Reid-Henry suggests that this was the case.  Thus, he sees the political support for the post-war consensus as dependent on a prosperity based on a growth in productivity which stalled in the 1970s (30-1, 70-1).  Consequently what the left “wanted to offer … was no longer affordable” (216).  In these circumstances, “governments sensed there was more to be gained and less to be lost by cooperating more closely with big business” and by loosening financial regulation (84).  This led to a situation in which “it was both difficult and costly to defend domestic economic policies – however democratically agreed – from ever-greater volumes of international financial transactions and the market pressures they created” (106, also 216, 331-4).  Yet Reid-Henry seems to place equal explanatory weight on changes in social attitudes as freedom came to be valued above equality, and in the political balance as the organised working-class declined.  He never explicitly attempts to assess the comparative causal importance of these factors or their inter-relationship.  Nevertheless, the broad scope of his account does provide material that throws light on both the extent and the limits of economic determinism.  Thus, with respect to the tightening up of welfare provisions in the 1990s, Reid-Henry points out that these were a response to such objective and trans-national factors as aging populations, the entry of many more women into the labor forces, and changing patterns of employment but also that there remained fundamental national differences in the methods and principles by which benefits were distributed. (441-9).

The other basic issue on which there is a somewhat disconcerting unsteadiness is the meaning of the term “democracy” itself.  At times, Reid-Henry seems to see it as simply governance in accordance with the will of the people, the question being “how public preferences are given meaningful institutional expression.” (740).  Leaving aside the issue of divisions of opinion, such a characterization ignores the richer conceptualization of democracy as involving also social equality and a sense of community that Reid-Henry invokes elsewhere – notably by endorsing quotations from the Polish-American political scientist Adam Przeworski and the British thinker and historian R.H. Tawney (312, 684).  Reid-Henry implicitly acknowledges that these two meanings of democracy can conflict when he observes that, by the time of Trump’s election, “the US was less democratic because this is what the people themselves had unthinkingly brought about for many years” (748).  The tension between democracy as a social ideal and as a political process is by no means new in liberal and social democratic thought, but more explicit recognition of it would have given greater precision and clarity to much of Reid-Henry’s text.

These reservations aside, Empire of Democracy is a marvellously thorough and readable account and analysis of more than half a century of history.  Those readers who are not deterred by the sheer size (and weight) of the book are bound to learn much from it, as well as to be stimulated (and possibly provoked) by its interpretative thrust.  It also seems likely that the date of its completion and publication will seem increasingly opportune as there are many signs that the West (and indeed the world) may be about to enter a new era.

 

I am grateful to the four reviewers who have engaged with Empire of Democracy, and to Mary Nolan for her introduction.  Empire of Democracy is a long book, which makes me all the more appreciative of their attention.  The book attempts to provide a transnational account of the struggles and transformations of the liberal democratic west over the past half-century.  It does not attempt the sort of macro-theoretical framing of a Marcel Gauchet, Heinrich August Winkler or, more concisely, a Paul Nolte: and its intended audience is different.^[27] Nor is it a history of the modern West, which would have to begin with the emergence of ‘the West’ as a political concept in the nineteenth century.^[28] But it does seek to understand democracy as itself a central actor in the history of western modernity over the past half century.  In a context where attention tended to focus – for much of the period it studies – upon the barriers and threats to democracy from elsewhere, it set out to examine (and take seriously) the tensions confronting liberal democracy from within.

Notes

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