Re-Civilize or Die
An Interview with Philip Pilkington on the collapse of global liberalism and the postliberal fate of nations.
An interview with Philip Pilkington.
PLO: You’ve described global liberalism as a “delusional” post-Cold War vision about a frictionless free-flowing global economy. Can you tell us what made that delusion plausible for a time?
PP: To a large extent late liberalism just cannabilised what was left of the pre-liberal social capital. On my reading, liberalism is an inherently unstable and destabilising ideology because it pushes people to reject all social hierarchies and therefore all social structures. It can only really survive by marrying itself to non-liberal aspects of a society. I think this is basically what happened in the case of the global economy. After the Second World War Western economies were managed and a key goal of this management — you find it at the center of the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 — is to ensure that trade imbalances are limited. That system evaporated in 1973 when Nixon closed the gold window but even then concerns about trade imbalances persisted, as we see with the Plaza Accords that sought to close the US trade deficit that was pursued by the Reagan administration. It was in the 1990s and 2000s, under Clinton and Bush that the system was allowed to completely unravel.
PLO: Deindustrialization and financialization are central to your diagnosis of what went wrong. The uni-party shipped manufacturing and jobs abroad — especially to China — and this in turn hollowed out the American heartland. Can you walk us through this? How aggressive does this Trump/Vance Administration need to be on reindustrialization? Can the damage be reversed?
PP: Well, the Chinese wouldn’t see it that way. They would argue that they outcompeted the Western economies. There is some truth to this but really it was facilitated by what you might call the “Wall Street model” in the United States that sought to profit on these shifts in global trade by creating an endless series of financial instruments which were then sold to foreigners to prop up the value of the US dollar. This allowed the United States to run large trade deficits with the rest of the world. Regarding reindustrialisation, it is not simply a switch that you can flip, unfortunately. I am quite skeptical that tariffs will do the job and attempts at industrial policy — I think of the CHIPS Act — have not proved very successful. I think it is becoming increasingly clear that to increase industry in the United States foreign direct investment from China is probably necessary — that is, the paper Wall Street investments currently being undertaken would be replaced with investments in factories. This has been controversial for some time but recent reports suggest that the Trump administration is moving in this direction.
PLO: You argue that liberalism’s emphasis on individualism fueled plummeting birth rates. Liberalism was predicated on contractualist views of family, so perhaps this was inevitable that we would eventually exchange children for property. Tell us how a “contract proliferation” mindset exacerbated demographic decline, and also why open borders was such a poor solution to the problem.
PP: When politicians say that they want to maximise GDP growth what they are actually saying is that people should spend as much time as possible engaged in production and consumption. That is what GDP growth is. If they are busy producing and consuming, when are they supposed to have a family? Yet this is the paradox: if the species does not reproduce there will be no one to produce and consume — and so the economy will collapse. This seems to me a “contradiction of capitalism” far more profound than anything discussed in Karl Marx. The “solution” to this problem for liberals is what I have referred to in the book as “biological imperialism”. That is, the outsourcing of reproduction outside Western borders. This is not sustainable. Culturally and politically, there are only a certain amount of immigrants that can be absorbed. But even abstracting from this, birth rates are now falling across the world as the liberal GDP-maximization framework is being adopted in other societies.
PLO: In the book, you portray Western interventions—like those in Ukraine—as self-sabotaging provocations that have awakened Russian revanchism. Brussels is pursuing war while the United States aligning itself in Europe against Brussels-interventionism, and with countries like Hungary who act in the interests of national sovereignty. What’s the significance of that shift?
PP: I think that the Americans have realised just how big a mistake they have made in fighting a proxy war with Russia. The Russia-Chinese partnership that this has led to is now the most powerful military-economic bloc on the planet. I think that the Trump administration is trying to figure out a way to reverse some of the damage that has been done. But it is not proving easy. It is like trying to unscramble an omelette. But at least they are starting to think about this issue. The Europeans cannot even begin to think about what is happening in the world around them. They are incredibly isolated and are becoming quite mad, in my opinion. Yet they are so weak that this is not much of an actual threat to anyone. It is really just quite sad to watch.
PLO: Let’s talk about China. You see China as itself evidence of the collapse of liberalism because it doesn’t rest on a free market fundamentalism, but insists that the state has a significant role in directing the flow of capital in the national interest. Is this any different than what the American New Right has called “economic patriotism”? What are the implications for the relationship between China and the United States?
PP: I don’t think that we can really compare the Chinese economic model and anything that is likely to emerge in the United States any time soon. The American system — even at a federal level — is extremely decentralised. Think of how Congressmen and Congresswomen lobby for spending allocations based on the interests of their particular district. Perhaps a more centralized system with a more coherent national plan could emerge out of this over time — but we are probably talking decades rather than years. An American postliberal economy is going to look very different from what a Chinese postliberal economy will look like. I do not think that there is anything wrong with that. I see one of the more promising aspects of postliberalism as not insisting that we should all be homogeneous liberal subjects. Diversity, in a sense, is truly a strength of postliberalism.
PLO: You frame Russia as a rational actor. They aren’t engaged in some irrational imperial march into neighboring nations, as is often suggested by liberals, but as a logical response to NATO expansion and liberal imperialism. The Ukraine conflict, on your account, is the most visible terminus of global liberalism. How do you think that’s going to end? What comes after? Can you imagine stable European security in a post-liberal age?
PP: Despite the rhetoric I think most educated people have come to this conclusion about the war. Those holdouts who claim the Russians are trying to recreate the USSR will be disproved when this does not happen. So it is clear to me which interpretation is going to win out. I think its also clear that the war will be settled on the battlefield and I think the Trump administration has come to accept that. In the immediate aftermath I expect that Europe will collapse into paranoia and become even more dysfunctional than it currently is — this already happening if you watch this hysteria over drone sightings. But over time, I think they will gradually realise that they need some sort of shared security architecture with Russia.
PLO: Your book ends on a note of urgency but also possibility, urging the West to adapt or perish in this emerging order. For readers feeling overwhelmed by your diagnosis, what gives you personal grounds for optimism about a post-liberal West—one that’s pragmatic, secure, and perhaps even more humane than the liberal era it replaces? How can the postliberal realist be politically hopeful for their country?
PP: The West really is faced with a binary choice: either recivilize your societies or face collapse. There is no third option that I can see. If we keep going down the path we have been on for the last three decades, our societies will collapse. It is not hard to understand what this means: we need to abandon the liberal metaphysics of the last half millennia and return to the core of Western civilization: the Bible and the classics, Rome and Athens. I think that it is quite rare for civilizations to genuinely collapse so I think that this is the most likely outcome. But I do fear that we are facing down a period of heightened instability. We should probably be realistic about that.
Philip Pilkington’s latest book is The Collapse of Global Liberalism, And the Emergence of the Postliberal World Order
Suggest 'PLO' may not be the most felicitous acronym for the Post-Liberal Order.