Book reviews

• Weltkrieg um Wohlstand. Wie Macht und Reichtum neu verteilt werden ("War for Wealth: The Global Grab for Power and Prosperity"). By Gabor Steingart. Piper, 2007, 397 pp.
• The Return of History and the End of Dreams. By Robert Kagan. Alfred A Knopf, 2008, 116 pp.
• The China Fantasy – Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China. By James Mann. Penguin, 2007, 141 pp.
• Wages of Destruction – The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. By Adam Tooze. Allen Lane, 2006, 800 pp.
• China – Fragile Superpower. Susan L Shirk. Oxford University Press, 2007, 320 pp.
• China’s New Confucianism. Daniel A Bell. Princeton University Press, 2008, 240 pp.
• Supercapitalism. The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. By Robert B Reich. Knopf, 2007, 272 pp.
• Superclass – The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making. By David Rothkopf. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, 376 pp.
• Richistan – A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. By Robert Frank. Three Rivers Press, 2007, 277 pp.
• Falling Behind – How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. By Robert H Frank. University of California Press, 2007, 148 pp.

What does the awakening of the Asian giants mean for the West? Is it a false alarm, as in the 1970s, when people thought Japan was about to take over the world? Is it a win-win situation, with the advance of China and India favouring everyone? To both questions the German financial journalist Gabor Steingart answers “No” in Weltkrieg um Wohlstand. Wie Macht und Reichtum neu verteilt werden (Piper, 397 pp. “The World War of Prosperity. How Power and Wealth Are Again Dividing the Globe”). Steingart’s books are bestsellers, and he has, what is more, as editor of the Der Spiegel great influence on the German debate.

There is a great deal to object to in the book, but Steingart’s intellectually robust manner of linking political and economic power is a timely reminder that globalisation is not just about opening up the world, but also about creating new powerful blocs. What the Western world refuses to realise is that it is involved in a world war about wealth and power, and that those countries that we have accustomed ourselves to regarding as underdeveloped are now acting systematically and single-mindedly. It is a question of state led attacks on the hegemony of the West by countries that have the humiliations of colonialism fresh in their memories. Steingart calls China and India “the aggressor states”, Europe “the declining states”.

These “aggressor states” smash the pre-requisites of the European welfare state, in which security is included in the price of goods and services. China and India are, according to Steingart, resolute in not allowing such considerations to make their products more expensive. In the West the unemployed cost money, as they have to be looked after, for China and India they are an asset to the national economy as this reserve army keeps down wages. We have gained a world labour market, and one of the big and dangerous illusions is that there is no connection between the enormous army of migrant workers in China and the car workers at Wolfsburg and Detroit. The supply of labour has suddenly become much greater than the demand, and that will inexorably reduce the price of labour everywhere.

The Chinese leadership is not governed at all by love of the principles of the market economy. Europe’s opponents are not Chinese Ayn Rand individualists, but state leaderships who, with a combination of market and state control, want to increase their economic, political and military power. For Europe’s part, it is perhaps more a lose-lose situation: both economic and political power are being transferred.

Most attempts to historically localise the present age have focused on something reaching its end, not on something new beginning. We have for example been post-modern for a number of decades. Another influential interpretation even states that history has come to an end. In his essay from 1989 “The End of History?”, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that there were no longer any rivals to democratic capitalist society. The fall of communism had made it clear that those who did not choose the liberal capitalist road irrevocably fell behind in economic and technological development and therefore ultimately in military development also. The world was converging on a single political and economic system. This “Fukuyamaism”, as it has come to be called, has shaped the view towards Russia and China. In its blithest form it has aimed to persuade us that all we need to do is to integrate these nations in the global economy, and democratisation will automatically follow on. Wandeln durch Handel (change through trade), as the Germans may say – promoting democracy and promoting profit are said to be two sides of the same coin.

We have now heard this mantra being repeated for almost 20 years. In that time, Russia has become increasingly authoritarian and stronger and has turned to Great Power politics; the Chinese economy has become a global power factor at the same time as the Communist party has kept its grip on developments and strengthened its legitimacy in the eyes of the population. Either we have underestimated the time it takes to establish a robust democracy, or there is something basically wrong with the suppositions of Fukuyamaism about the relation between the economy and democracy. Several attempts are now being made to summarise and analyse these factors, so that we achieve better insight into the period in which we live and can formulate more relevant policies. The Israeli historian Azar Gat’s theories and the Glasshouse Forum project "The return of the capitalist-authoritarian great powers" constitute one such attempt (see An Edited Transcript of a Round-Table Conference on Authoritarian Capitalism, Glasshouse Forum, 2008), but there are other related initiatives and this is a sign that we may be approaching a new interpretive paradigm to replace Fukuyamaism. Such a paradigm shift will be of major importance to how we regard capitalism in general and its relation to democracy, and may therefore be part of a greater change in the political climate.

The American political commentator Robert Kagan achieved international renown a few years ago with his book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, which elegantly summed up central lines of thought in the American national security establishment as regards the difference between the USA and Europe. His new book, The Return of History and the End of Dreams (116 pp, Alfred A Knopf, 2008), is a single-minded face-off with Fukuyamaism, and one can again assume that Kagan’s judgments are well-rooted in the national security elite, in particular among the Republicans. (Kagan is an adviser to the Republican presidential candidate John McCain.) We certainly cannot see any global convergence towards a democratic capitalist system, asserts Kagan. On the contrary, global rivalry has arisen between the Great Powers, and some of the Great Powers are authoritarian regimes and appear to be staying that way. They are in addition increasing their influence in the world, especially China, which has become a force to be reckoned with in Africa. Kagan does not see a repeat of the Cold War; there is not the same ideological rivalry today, even though Russia and China are doing their best to create legitimacy for their actions, and must therefore create some kind of ideological superstructure. Kagan’s book is focused on policies and makes no attempt at a more profound analysis of the Great Power rivalry – it is as it has been and will remain for the foreseeable future, and this must guide our policies. We can now state with certainty that trade does not necessarily make the world more peaceful and that nationalism is not a thing of the past in a globalised world.

It is true Kagan does not rule out a connection between economic growth and democracy, but any connection is weaker than we have thought and requires a longer period to be efficacious. He mentions what is said of Germany: it began its modernisation at the end of the 19th century and was a solid democracy 60 years later. Russia and China can also be solid democracies in half a century, but, one might object, in their case much can happen along the way. Kagan’s suggestion is that the democratic states unite in a “League of Democracies” and join forces against the autocracies. (See An Edited Transcript of a Round-Table Conference on Authoritarian Capitalism, Glasshouse Forum, 2008, for an appraisal of the prospects for such a project.) One big risk with such containment is that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and will consolidate the authoritarian regimes. Kagan is not uncritical of the actions of the USA – his previous book Dangerous Nation (2006) was a significant attempt to rectify the American self-image as a basically introverted nation, forced into its position of power by the actions of the rest of the world. The American Great Power mentality is so self-evident that the Americans themselves are not even aware of it, and they are just as surprised every time the rest of the world reacts negatively or feels threatened by this colossus. At certain points during the exposition, Kagan’s brow is furrowed by a dark cloud of misgivings that the Americans’ wont to confidently define their sphere of interest (practically the whole world) and often intervene with violence may have influenced Russia's actions with respect to Georgia and its ambition to establish a Russian sphere of interest.

A related confrontation with wishful thinking (and cynicism), but concentrating on US relations with China, can be found in The China Fantasy – Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China (141 pp, Penguin, 2007), a vitriolic work by the well-known journalist and author James Mann. The American debate on China is dominated by two scenarios: the Soothing Scenario and the Upheaval Scenario. The first says that if we integrate China economically, then sooner or later it will become democratic. In this, great expectations are often entertained of the Chinese middle class and the democratising influence of the modern consumer culture. If you have a choice between different sorts of coffee at Starbucks then you are not satisfied with only one political party to vote for, as it has been put. The Upheaval Scenario presupposes that China will collapse in the not too distant future, and therefore will not be a long-term problem to the USA. Far too seldom, Mann says, do we consider a Third Scenario: that China will be successful and will remain authoritarian. Hopes that the Chinese middle class will lead the democratisation ignore the political conditions. The middle class may be big in absolute numbers, but it is a minority in China and fears being swamped by the enormous rural population in the event of democratisation. It is therefore more probable that it will adapt to the Communist regime.

Mann’s book is a forceful showdown with unwillingness to actually perceive China's authoritarian regime and the consequences its success would have in world politics. It is not purely a question of naivety: there are also powerful interests that support the Soothing Scenario, particularly in business, which is a powerful lobbyist. However, it is time to seriously ask the question who, in fact, is integrating whom. Trade reinforces the position of the Communist regime, and it is forming the world order to its advantage. It is China that is integrating the USA, not vice versa.

The conviction that economic development sooner or later presupposes democracy and that democracy is a superior system is based on conclusions drawn from the course of the 20th century and the fate that befell those who challenged democracy. As Azar Gat points out in the Glasshouse Forum seminar The return of the capitalist-authoritarian great powers, the conclusions as regards Communism are convincing. It opted out of history by giving rise to systems that were so ineffective that they simply did not survive. It is not at all possible for us to draw similarly firm conclusions about the then authoritarian regimes with a capitalist economy – Japan, Italy and Germany. They lost the Second World War because as countries they were too small to struggle for world domination, not because they were ineffective. There are vital tendencies in the historical account of the Third Reich which favour Gat’s interpretation. The young British economic historian Adam Tooze in his groundbreaking study Wages of Destruction – The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (800 pp, Allen Lane, 2006) questions perceptions of the economic ineffectiveness of the Third Reich.

Many of the perceptions stemmed from Albert Speer, minister of armaments from 1943, who wanted to present in a more favourable way his own part in the final phase of the war. Hitler was well aware of Germany's limitations and by conquering the Soviet Union wanted to lay the foundations for a modern economy which could compete with the American. What is often seen as an economically irrational rearmament process was rather determined by the fact that Germany was economically too small for its ambitions and therefore continually forced into one-sided priorities, which hit other areas of the war economy. Neither was the Third Reich technologically inferior to its adversaries. There was no push to create the atom bomb because it was judged impossible to complete it before the end of the war, while the two other futuristic weapons of the war – the jet fighter and the missile – were developed by the German armaments industry. Tooze’s work, which has given a new dimension to discussions of the economy of the Third Reich, is part of a greater historiographical trend which focuses on national socialism as an alternative modernity, rather than an extremely reactionary movement. It affirmed economic and technological development, but rejected liberal pluralism and individualism.

Despite many significant differences, something similar may be gradually happening in China – the creation of an alternative modernity, which combines economic and technological development with authoritarian political governance and an authoritarian political culture. In the long term it could mean much stronger ideological rivalry globally than Kagan's scenario indicates. It is here worth pointing out that there was also strong ideological rivalry between Great Britain and Germany around the time of the First World War, formulated for example in terms of the clash between culture (German and deep) and civilisation (English and superficial). China finds itself at the beginning of a transition from Communism and is still characterised by a tentative approach. There are no successful models to refer to and therefore it will take time before they dare propone a model with any self-confidence. Susan L Shirk’s China – Fragile Superpower (320 pp, Oxford University Press, 2007) does not really fit in with Mann’s Upheaval Scenario, but it makes clear the enormous complexity of Chinese domestic politics, and shatters the image of the country as a monolith.

It is weakness that leads to the big risks and if the rest of the world, above all the USA, does not understand the fear among the Chinese leadership, it can easily provoke overreaction. The Chinese leadership is aware that it will be difficult to maintain the high rate of growth, but it is something that is required if China is to achieve stability and a position as a Great Power. They know too that they have limited time at their disposal due to demographic developments. China today has an enormous population of working age, 70 per cent, but this will change fairly soon and there is a risk that China will become old before it becomes rich. The leadership knows that the precondition for a successful climb is political stability, both domestic and international, but it does not have sovereign control over the political dynamics.

Shirk’s ambition is to open the black box of Chinese domestic politics. By that she means above all to show what role consideration for public opinion means to the Communist party. Generally, even dictators have to show consideration to opinion and the Chinese leadership is well aware that historically there is one factor above all which has triggered revolts and revolutions – if the regime in power shows weakness towards foreign powers. At present, the more public opinion has the floor, the stronger grows the position of the hawks. In an opinion survey carried out by Pew in 2006, 95 per cent of the Chinese respondents considered that the country's growing military strength was a good thing. Relations between China and Japan are particularly infected; both populations have an eminently negative view of one another.

The Communist party leadership has studied not only the fall of the Soviet Union, but also European history, to understand how a power in the ascent can avoid coming into conflict with the hegemony, and has developed a strategy to give the USA an interest in China’s progress. But both public opinion and the military are sceptical to the USA and often wish to see a harder line. Paying regard to this can make the regime overreact in crisis situations and adopt a harder line, from which will then be difficult to retreat without loss of face on the home front. It is of course important to remember that the Communist regime in itself through its propaganda shares responsibility for these enemy images, since it has for its legitimacy often encouraged nationalism.

There is a need for something to replace communist ideology as a cohesive force. Nationalism is and will certainly continue to be significant and will perhaps seek support in Chinese tradition. The Canadian Daniel A Bell, currently professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, considers that Confucian tradition may be given a central role. In his new book China’s New Confucianism (240 pp, Princeton University Press, 2008) he states that China should not try to directly imitate western democracy, but instead must be enriched and limited by Confucian values. It is possible to win legitimacy if those in power really constitute a meritocracy and comprise people who truly have the public good in mind. Bell also favours hierarchic rituals, since in his opinion this sort of interaction creates ties between different groups of society and promotes the assumption of responsibility by leadership circles. It can be easy to dismiss this as a patriarchal illusion, but it is at least worth considering that countries such as Japan, which has these hierarchic rituals, show smaller income gaps and less segregated living than countries that lack them – for example the Anglo-Saxon sphere. Even if the individual concepts in this Chinese discussion can be difficult for a westerner to grasp, the general political syntax is well known in European history.

Bell's book is an Asiatic variation on the classical European discussion of the relations between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft – the influential distinction by German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. Gemeinschaft (community) refers to groups characterised by strong mutual ties which the individual strives to maintain. Gesellschaft (society) refers to the contexts and organisations that the individual uses in order to achieve individual goals. Family versus corporation, one might say. This polarity played an enormous role in the European debate and it is not difficult to see that Bell’s stance in favour of Confucianism has great similarities with European conservatism, even though he is a leftist intellectual.

Developments in Russia and China must be put in relation to what is happening in the West. We will be influenced by what is happening there, not merely with regard to national security reactions and the general consequences of the threat landscape to the political climate. The more problems in the West, the greater the authority of the Chinese model. It is no secret that the Chinese have become more self-aware after the financial crises in the West. The more difficulties capitalistic democracy grapples with, the greater the understanding for and inspiration of the Chinese model. But this does not mean attempts to copy, but rather a subtler influence with regard to how we see the relation between state, society and business, as well as the relation between the individual and the collective, between tradition and modernity.

Kagan says that we are back in pre-war times as regards global Great Power rivalry, but perhaps we have also been taken back in time with regard to the political and cultural climate. If, with the help of the classic sociologist Max Weber, we imagined ourselves 100 years back in time, we might be able to distinguish the following situation. Early bourgeois society could evoke traditional conceptions of the world when it came to creating cohesion and community. In late bourgeois society this has disappeared: the world has become “disenchanted”. On the one hand we have successful science and technology, and on the other complete relativism in all issues of value – polytheism, as Weber called it. The totalitarian movements of the 20th century – communism, fascism and national socialism – were disastrous attempts to conquer this relativism and give back to society a common foundation and centre. Communism appealed to those who were disillusioned with capitalism, while fascism and national socialism attracted those who felt disillusioned with both capitalism and socialism and were trying to find a third way, national socialism.

Much of this reasoning has been taboo during the post-war period, but it is not certain that it will remain so. It is not only history that has returned; it is also a case of the end of the post-war limitations of the political spectrum. It is now possible to reason about the cultural and political consequences of biological races (see for instance Mark Pagel’s article ”The Kindness of Strangers” in the magazine Prospect, June 2008). The Second World War is becoming the object of a freer and more frivolous treatment in fiction – Jonathan Littell’s book Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones) and Quentin Tarentino’s new Second World War film Inglorious Bastards are examples. We cannot discount nationalism, nor socialism in the sense of a national distribution policy; the openly national socialisms can make a comeback as a reaction to globalisation and the growing gaps. National socialism need not be racist or ethno-centred, even though this cannot be discounted. It chooses the nation as the common vessel in which there is an attempt to create reasonably equal conditions, and it can have an embracing citizenship concept which encompasses all those in the vessel regardless of origin.

However, national socialisms are certainly anticapitalistic. In addition to actual problems, they gain nutrition in a conspiratorial view of capitalism as something by which we are undeservedly afflicted. It is more expedient to conjure up the image of shady actors (who indeed exist!) than to scrutinise one's own part in developments. In this respect, Robert B Reich’s Supercapitalism. The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life (272 pp, Knopf, 2007) is a welcome contribution to the debate. Reich, a former Secretary of Labour under Clinton, reminds us that this supercapitalism aims to safeguard our interests as consumers and investors and we are more precisely putting ourselves under pressure. But the right hand does not want to know what the left hand is doing and both are pointing a finger at a third.

Supercapitalism is primarily defined in contrast to democratic capitalism between 1945 and 1975. Global competition was much weaker then, and large corporations that existed within the protection of national borders could afford to listen attentively to employees and the community in general. Prosperity was distributed fairly evenly, and careers proceeded in a relatively predictable way for most people. It was not evil forces or politicians like Reagan and Thatcher who shattered this world, in Reich's opinion: the change began before them. It was in particular technological development that gave consumers and investors an aggregate power which they did not previously possess and it is this which has given rise to supercapitalism: consumers who want increasingly cheap goods and investors who want an increasingly better return.

In other words: most of us participate in this, at least in part. It happens when we are in a shop choosing the cheapest alternative without weighing in other factors, or when we are sitting with our bank manager, deciding to move our savings to achieve a better return. The other part of our personality may express dismay when companies cut costs in every conceivable way – but it is that which makes our cheap goods possible. We may take offence when a local managing director closes down a factory in a nearby community, but it was perhaps we who contributed to increasing the pressure on the managing director by moving our savings.
 
Developments have favoured us as consumers and investors, but weakened us as citizens, claims Reich. Common political goals are not so easily aggregated as consumer power and investments; the citizen inside us is constantly losing out to the consumer and investor inside us. It is not until we realise this that we can ask the real question, says Reich. The cure is not corporate social responsibility, but a vitalisation of the civil political sphere. Whoever imagines that companies are mainly steered by anything other than chasing profits will be disappointed, and as consumers we are seldom prepared to pay for other considerations when they lead to higher prices. It is the role of politics to set the game rules.

One might think he is over-simplifying his reasoning and is not seriously asking the question whether there are alternative strategies for companies. To get us to realise that we are moral subjects in this process, Reich somewhat excessively amoralises the corporate sector. Nevertheless, his book is a welcome contribution to a non-conspiratorial analysis of power.

The perception that we have been weakened as citizens, and the political paralysis which this creates, can without doubt contribute to the emergence of authoritarian political reactions. Increasing income gaps are another factor which can give rise to strong political reactions. This is the ongoing theme in David Rothkopf’s Superclass – The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making (376 pp, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Historical experience shows that societies with large income differences are not politically stable. We see such a society taking shape to varying degrees all over the world. The very highest income group has taken wings, transcending the rest of the population and the national borders. A small upper stratum receives an increasing share of the economic cake, and a group of about 6,000 people, according to Rothkopf, form a global superclass with the power to form political and economic development. The book is a highly readable hybrid between fly-on-the-wall documentary and social analysis. It is suggestive, but at critical points is content to make suggestions, indications that are not developed into a clear theory.

This applies above all to Rothkopf’s conception that this small group of 6,000 people has enormous influence on the forms which globalisation takes and how it is perceived by public opinion. Without doubt, power over the media is of great significance, but the fact that Washington Consensus has been the predominant concept for a generation or so has a much more complicated background than that an influential group has decided to pursue this line. The failure of communism in particular has been a contributory factor, but also that which Reich points out: as consumers and investors, we have all profited from developments.

However, there are undoubtedly occasions when collaboration within a small elite can be of crucial significance, even in democratic states. In the USA, the networks are tight between the defence industry and the national political establishment, and people circulate fairly freely between the different camps. It is not hard to imagine that this has been of importance to the USA's reacting to the terrorism threat with a conventional war, which would appear counterproductive with respect to fighting terrorism, but much more profitable for the defence industry than combating through policing measures.

There is also reason to question whether this superclass wants to act as a uniform group, and whether it will be allowed to do so. In the event of an escalating Great Power conflict, there will inevitably be a requirement to declare one's national loyalty. There is also considerable political opinion in favour of limiting this superclass. Marx would probably question whether they had a common class interest.

That it really exists is however undeniable. Even though the tendency is most marked in the Anglo-Saxon countries, it can be detected in many parts of the world. A couple of years ago Ajay Kapur of the finance company Citigroup wrote a report in which he characterised the Anglo-Saxon countries as “plutonomies”. In a plutonomy, income and consumption are essentially a matter for the uppermost percentage, while the rest are allocated a stunningly small proportion of the national cake.

Plutonomies are mainly found in the Anglo-Saxon sphere and have existed earlier in history, in the USA of the 1920s for example. They seem to be produced by a combination of politicians favouring capital, major technological revolutions and financial innovations. Such waves of prosperity lead to enormous complexities in the economy, which are best exploited by the rich. It is quite evident that the present plutocracy in the USA has been favoured by tax cuts since the 1980s, and by technological development, which seems to create a winner-takes-all market – small differences in skills or quality lead to enormous differences in financial rewards.

The complexity of such a process includes the factor that it takes time to grasp what is happening. The USA is intensively involved in mapping out and understanding what a plutonomy is. Robert Frank, journalist with the Wall Street Journal, in Richistan – A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich (277 p, Three Rivers Press, 2007) depicts the rich in America as a land apart, with roughly the same population as Sweden (9 million). Most have created their wealth themselves and they bring new behaviour patterns to Richistan. They spend a great deal on charity, but want in a new way to have control over what happens to the money. This is understandable in view of what has been revealed about the administrative costs of many aid organisations, but at the same time it enables problematic influence. We know far too little about the rich, says Frank, and he certainly mitigates this shortcoming somewhat. Money is like truth drug, says one of the interviewees, it gets people to really show who they are. Nevertheless they are so evidently social beings, whose sense of worth and satisfaction is based on comparisons with those closest below and above themselves. Yes, it is apparently possible to feel poor even as a billionaire, if the neighbour is even richer. Richistan is very much a class society; the very richest pressure the others to keep up, and the inhabitants of Richistan are remarkably overdrawn. However striking it may seem, they put pressure on American society in general, and this is a significant reason why the Americans consume beyond their means.

Richistan sends a shock wave which reverberates through the whole of society, says Cornell economist Robert H Frank in Falling Behind – How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (148 p, University of California Press, 2007). The group just below Richistan tries to keep up and thereby puts pressure on the next stratum. We may remember the definition of being rich by the satirist H L Mencken – earning $100 more than your wife's brother-in-law. What we perceive as an acceptable standard is context-oriented and the Richistanis create a strong sense of relative deprivation among large groups. Relative deprivation is a term which economists find a little hard to embrace, but it is central to understanding why people act and feel as they do. It may be, as Reich says, that we as consumers have all benefited in the most recent decades, but such more objective measures are not psychological reality. It is built on comparisons with how others live, and realisation is now growing that there is a small stratum that is exceedingly better off.

Plutonomies are tolerated as long as the rest of the population feel that they themselves have the possibility to reach this stratum or to share a substantial part of its prosperity. It is probably just doubt about this that has become perceptible in recent years. According to an opinion survey carried out by the Financial Times/Harris last spring, public opinion in the USA, Europe and Asia is remarkably unanimous that the gap between rich and poor has become too great, and the superclass has become a burning political issue (see Financial Times May 18, 2008). The stage seems to be set for a swing to the left, an attempt to bring the airborne elite down to earth and get them to share their prosperity. So far, the left does not seem to have discovered this, or perhaps it does not know how to react.

There is a widespread perception of globalisation as an irreversible process, but history instead indicates a pulsation between expansion and contraction. As Jeffry A Frieden shows in Global Capitalism (2006), the world was just as globalised before the First World War as it is today. Populations were directly affected by the vagaries of the international economy, but governments did not show consideration to the broad masses. When the broad masses later acquired the means through democratisation, they put on the brakes. It can happen again, and the plutocracy’s provocative prosperity will then certainly be an important reason.

We undoubtedly live in interesting times. The geopolitical and socio-economic structure is in motion. But this is also said to be an old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times!