Taken together, these decisions of 1948 yielded the building blocks of an international order arranged, on the Western side of the Iron Curtain and that bloc's allies, by nation-states organized along the lines of national, ethnic and religious identities, where goods trade freely across borders, basic norms safeguard the well-being of minority groups, and of individuals, irrespective of their group identity or whether they belonged to any group at all. While not every state adhered to this model, those that did were committed to enforcing it; when necessary by force.
That, in outline, is the essential worldview emerging from the anniversaries of 1948 and the argument for that vision's preservation. This is what we mean when we talk about the liberal international order now so desperately under siege
The whole article is a must read for everyone. But i have come to many of its conclusions over the years...
But we also need to ask something else, and ask it hard: What is it that we failed to understand, what are the realities to which we blinded ourselves? It's a question that will take decades to answer but I think we can point to several sets of errors. This list is not exhaustive, but you have to start somewhere.
First, we assumed that people all over the world want the same things; that mix of individual, civil and political freedom plus regulated free market capitalism characteristic of America and the states of Western Europe. Relatedly, we believed that when pressed to choose between prosperity and freedom, people everywhere would choose freedom. Moreover, we thought that one couldn't go without the other, an error that China is proving more and more wrong with each passing day.
Second, we thought human rights and nationalism were antithetical and that promoting the former meant pushing back on the latter. The architects of the world of 1948 understood better. As historian James Loeffler has shown in his remarkable new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans, so many key figures in the human rights revolution of midcentury were not only Jews but Zionists. For them, an international regime of protecting individual human rights as well as nation-states for persecuted minorities were both necessary to overcome the Holocaust's ghastly trauma of statelessness. The deep structural suspicion of the idea of state sovereignty woven into the human rights framework, it seems, has unwittingly fostered the legalistic abstraction and airy disregard for political realities that has made that framework such a supple tool in the hands of dictators who couldn't care less.
Third, we assumed that with proper incentives greed and competition could be channeled towards the common good. Not that human nature could be changed, as Marx thought, but that human nature's darker sides could themselves serve society, per the ideas of Adam Smith. The exuberant celebrants of free market capitalism conveniently forgot Smith's addendum that the invisible hand of capitalism will run amok without the equally invisible but no less important heart of beneficence and justice. The darker angels of our nature are real and need to be reckoned with.
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