Carl Schmitt once asked Alexandre Kojève for “an authentic Hegelian answer” to the question of what precise need was fulfilled by the invention of the atom bomb. Kojève’s answer was that our species required a “moral alibi to have an excuse not to wage wars anymore.” Assuming a prophetic register, he would go on to declare: “For a new humanity is beginning, without war, without games, without heroism, without risk, total welfare is beginning. We are not at the end of all security, but at the beginning of total security.” Schmitt notes that Kojève made sure to clarify that “this new paradise was not his paradise.” There's a common assumption that Kojève was in some way an enthusiast for the object of his analysis, as widespread and erroneous as accusations of a similar kind made towards Marshal McLuhan and the electric age. For both, their subject matter is treated without moralism, hence the ease at which a reader might mistake the neutral presentation of ‘facts’ with polemical or enthusiastic commitment to their respective subject matters. Kojève’s personal sentiments towards the end of history are clear enough by the famous ‘long footnote’ in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, however it's in the above statements, quoted by Schmitt in his Glossarium, that the tension between his palpable exhilaration and immense trepidation toward posthistory is most succinct. The order of bilateral and multilateral agreements, global complexes of debtor-creditor obligations, treaties for the prohibition of excess conflict, all the basic stuff of posthistory were for Kojève sufficiently ‘realised’ in the atom bomb, which became, for him, the material foundation for the obliteration of wisdom. This paradise appears to have stalled in its construction, however; universal liberalism has faltered in the maintenance of posthistory in the boundless regime of total welfare and security, and in its place a different dynamic preponderates. Whether the persistence of history is good or bad is irrelevant. It suffices to say that, to some degree, extant phenomena – war, games, heroism, and risk – still prevail.
Meekly after the capture of Maduro, then “once more with feeling” in the Greenland episode, Keir Starmer wheeled out worn shibboleths of universal liberalism, ‘international law’ and ‘human rights’, phrases which speak to a belief system that seems acutely distant and naive in present circumstances. In our period, under conditions of what we might refer to as an interregnal settlement – conceived in Ukraine, consummated in Venezuela – these concepts have lost their universalist lustre, something to which certain liberals are now adjusting. Mark Carney’s recent speech at Davos prescribes a partial suspension of the ‘universal’ component of the liberal order, liberalism converted from a totalising international system into one of many possible modes of engagement between states. Per Adam Tooze, Carney's proposition is one where a given state can “do liberalism” with another to whom that liberalism will be reciprocated, but either can just as easily engage otherwise depending on circumstance, disregarding suppositions of shared values or the presumed future adjustment of a state towards liberalism as conditions for engagement. In this context a state can engage ‘liberally’ with China in a manner similar to that of the prior (80s through early 10s) period, albeit suspending the certainty that China will become essentially ‘liberalised’ as a result. Perhaps this denotes no more than a strategic retreat from global universalist ambition until conditions permit a return to form; In any case, that liberal states can adopt methods and pursue engagements in a non-liberal manner, and vice versa, is proof enough that a substantive change in quality is underway. This is not necessarily to say liberalism has lost all its veracity or strength, nor does it put us in an essentially geopolitically post-liberal or illiberal condition. It would be more precise to say that liberalism has developed past its totalising, world-revolutionary self-conception, that it has ‘gone beyond’ the end of history. This iteration could be properly called a ‘tragic’ liberalism, looking with sober senses at the real conditions of international engagement. If this tragic iteration becomes liberalism's normative mode, adherents to the universal type will, in time, be considered childish, commensurate with Trump and illberal populists in Europe; the criteria for being the ‘adults in the room’ will change.
Via Carney, something like the pursuit of sovereign interest arrives here not as a total negation of the liberal order, but as a means to preserve and maintain certain achievements. The universal regime was not built, but the methods developed during its partial ascent can now be used and directed to other, more ‘realistic’ ends. The suspension of ideological liberalism’s world-economic foundations dovetails with debates in the West regarding the veracity of human rights legislation and the legitimacy of transnational courts in conditions of endemic immigration and supply crises. The possibility of a modified or suspended ECHR which is presently in discussion in corners of both the ruling Social Democrats in Denmark and Labour in Britain suggests that a break in the contemporary West’s foundational ideological consensus may come from within centre-left and liberal elements rather than from without. The question then is what would liberalism become in the event of abandoning its world-economic ground and its claim to universality? What is political liberalism without a self-conception of universal economic and moral order in construction?
It’s easy enough to suggest that in the event of a figure like Gavin Newsom grasping the US Presidency that this novel, tragic iteration of liberalism will revert to the universal-global form of the last period. Even in such circumstances, the incapacity for universally-oriented liberal institutions to address the European immigration crises indicates that, whatever happens, political liberalism will have to reformulate or risk being overcome; even if such solutions are found, the route to that solution will inevitably further unground its premises. This begs a further question: What will committed liberals ultimately seek to protect and what they would be willing to sacrifice? Suspending the pursuit of a global universal liberal order means in the first instance the decline and repudiation of Neoconservatism as a coherent and legitimate means of conducting foreign policy (at the very least it means that Neoconservatism, like the form of economic liberalism which previously accompanied it, becomes hollowed out of its moral-ethical foundations, rendered as a descriptor for set of tools rather than as a coherent philosophy or praxis. Trump’s Venezuela operation isn't ‘neocon’ because it lacked the pretense of a broader universal moral and ethical ambition for world liberal democracy). Neoconservatism, having significantly determined the liberal West's approach for roughly half a century now, is, as everyone knows, genealogically rooted in American Trotskyism. Its abandonment then conjures images of its opposite, of Stalinism, and of the slightly ham-fisted term ‘Liberalism in One Country’ opposed to Neoconservatism’s ‘Liberal Permanent Revolution’.
Liberals, forced to defend themselves, adapt and change beyond bounds, reveal latent potential for extension and change, and therefore to their possible end; even if liberalism survives, it has lost, is no longer ‘true’ by the criteria of Hegel-Kojève. Like Communism, liberalism demands universality. The great promise of the prior order was the irreversible dissolution of boundaries between nations and the erection of vast transnational bodies in their place, rooted by conceptual presuppositions towards total equality before the law; the distance between the statesman and the apparatus of state they are elected to command has, in the period of accelerated world-liberal ascent, become increasingly distant. This has been made explicit by Keir Starmer: “we pulled levers, and nothing happened.” The image of a posthistorical liberal order where electoralism and statecraft serve as a theatrical accompaniment to the incomprehensible interplay of transnational entities in common cause becomes a very visible existential concern for both liberalism and the state when they are forced by circumstance to provide solutions to crises which serve to undermine their first principles. It seems that in terms of effective or transformative state activity, a contemporary Western ‘middle power’ is permitted to administer, facilitate, and marginally tinker with (from their own vantage) the system of world trade, and very little else (in the British case there has been little evidence to disprove this, where servitude to broader transnational entities is perhaps more profound or more pronounced than it is in, for instance, France, which claims a more lasting sovereigntist current carried through subterraneanly in the ascent of universal liberalism). The prospect of building or rebuilding a functional quasi-dirigistic state in the contemporary West seems dubious, hence Carney's ‘realist’ desire to see the modification and reconstitution of the premises by which a post-universal liberal international order might operate.
Moving past the requirement that liberalism in international relations requires mutually engaged parties to be nominally liberal domestically, the trinity of economic liberalism / political liberalism / IR liberalism is effectively nullified. IR liberalism has previously supposed that at least one-and-a-bit of the other parts in this trinity are required as conditions for engagement; by their suspension or devaluing the presumption of liberalism as a relation between the state and its citizens is made secondary to liberalism as a relation between states. In the conditions of a prevailing ‘second order’ liberalism overtaking and undermining its previously assumed foundation, does this then open up within the purview of liberal states a possibility for a renegotiation of the relation between citizens and the state? Can liberalism, from its new tragic vantage, rebuild the state-form previously dismantled during the ascent of the prior universalist type? In the marginal ascent of illiberal counter-currents within the ex-vanguard forces of liberalism and social democracy in Europe, the declaration of Tooze-Carney's tragic fortress liberalism, the scandalous return to preeminence of war, games, heroism, and risk, all force to the front considerations of the state, and consequently of wisdom, at what should be their moment of oblivion.