Age of Revolutions — a sweeping survey of democracy under attack
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On the last page of Fareed Zakaria’s sweeping new book, Age of Revolutions, he quotes from Civilisation, the classic 1960s BBC series narrated by the art historian Kenneth Clark. “It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation,” said Clark. “We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.”
Zakaria is best known for GPS — America’s only serious TV show on world events. As a former editor of Foreign Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations’ weighty periodical, and author of bestsellers such as The Post-American World (2008) and The Future of Freedom (2007), which charted the rise of illiberal democracy (a phrase that he coined), Zakaria has figured out policy wonkery and TV, and many points between. The Indian-born pundit could thus claim to be America’s best-known tutor on world events.
Even by his standards, however, Age of Revolutions is breathtakingly ambitious. The book, in the author’s words, chronicles the “ceaseless action and reaction, progress and backlash” that has been endemic to the modern age. That Zakaria avoids pat remedies to populism today is a virtue; one of liberalism’s qualities is an aversion to sloganeering.
Zakaria dates the birth of the liberal nation state to the 16th-century Netherlands, which is where his book begins. He ends 325 pages later with liberal democracy today facing mortal threats from within and without. From the inside, the system is threatened by those who see themselves to be its victims. From the outside, it faces challenges posed by the “rise of the rest” (another Zakaria coinage) — most potently from autocratic China and Russia.
Though Zakaria does not put it quite so bluntly, the threats coalesce in the person of Donald Trump, who challenges America’s system from within and is an open admirer of its enemies without, notably Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.
For Zakaria, the basic DNA of what we call liberal democracy was established by the Dutch during their long war of liberation from Habsburg Spain (1568-1648). Key to the Dutch Republic’s success was a decentralised system that pooled the efforts of a patchwork of towns and ports into a robust defence. The Dutch were the earliest champions of toleration and free trade. They were also the first to throw off the smothering blanket of absolutist monarchy. It is no accident that Holland’s vast feat of land reclamation takes off.
At the end of England’s turbulent 17th century, which was sawn in half by the beheading of a king, the Dutch put their stamp on their emerging rival across the North Sea. England’s “glorious revolution” of 1688 was literally crowned by Holland’s William and Mary of Orange, who were invited to become sovereigns by London’s elite. Their shift of address came 16 years after the Netherlands’ Rampjaar (year of disaster) in which the Dutch literally opened the floodgates to keep the invading French Bourbons out. The opening of the dikes was the end of the Dutch golden age.
It was in 18th-century Britain that liberal democracy’s formal building blocks were put in place — power sharing between the social classes, a constitutional monarchy and an independent judiciary. Interestingly, Zakaria does not include the American Revolution, which he sees as a war of independence, in the critical stages of liberal modernity. Yet neither the American industrial revolution, which does qualify for a chapter, nor the British one, could have happened in the absence of liberal democracy, Zakaria argues.
His counterpoint is the French Revolution. Reaction against the horror of that became the origin story of modern conservatism. In contrast to the trial-and-error reform taking place across the English Channel, France’s Jacobins attempted to remake their world by diktat from above. The French Revolution gave us the word terrorism — notably from an armed state, not a splinter group. It laid out the perennial alternative to liberal democracy.
Zakaria declines to offer prescriptions for today’s ailments. But he counsels a regime of historical awareness. His philosophical heart lies with Edmund Burke, Thomas Macaulay and Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who in various ways agreed that moderate reform is the only way to preserve what is valuable. Or in the memorable line from Lampedusa’s The Leopard, “If we want everything to stay as it is, everything has to change.” Whether that makes Zakaria a moderate conservative, or a tempered progressive, is almost irrelevant. Nowadays they are on the same side, sharing a revulsion for both Napoleon and the Jacobins — reaction and revolution.
Age of Revolutions successfully bridges the divide between the general reader and the academic. It is an easy read that offers fresh perspective. That is no mean feat. In an age of abstruse hyper-specialism in the social sciences and ever more attention-deficit disorder in popular culture, Zakaria stakes out the space for accessible humanities. Nowadays especially, that land is worth reclaiming.
Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria, Allen Lane £25/WW Norton $29.99, 400 pages
Edward Luce is the FT’s US national editor
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