Time: Rise Of The Strong Man – 16

Time: Rise Of The Strong Man – 16

As 2016 draws to an end, it is difficult to recall any other year since 1989, the time of German reunification, which provokes such a profound sense of discontinuity.  It is thus eerily ironic that Donald Trump’s surprise victory was announced on November 9, the exact day that the Berlin Wall, the ultimate antithesis of globalisation, came down 27 years ago.

Back then I was a university student in the Soviet Union, and vividly recall the feeling of dislocation, becoming a foreigner in my own country, its political attitudes incomprehensible and its values alien. Luckily for my generation, the Soviet Union peacefully collapsed two years later, and a wave of democratic revolutions offered hope for renewal.

This year brought a strong sense of déjà vu, the same loss of identity coupled with a deep anxiety about the future. Like many liberal thinkers, I started to wonder whether the West, as a community of values and institutions, is now in danger of collapsing.

Not all post-Soviet societies realised their potential as they entered the post-Communist era. For some, such as President Vladimir Putin and millions of his followers, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the ‘biggest tragedy of the 20th century”. But for most of us, the educated internationalist middle classes, there is no doubt that all citizens in the West and in the East alike have benefitted from the past two decades of peace, democratic revival, globalisation and economic growth.

Political elites in the West have not been blind to the mounting problems of our times: the lingering legacy of the global financial crisis (and its aftermath), rising inequality, growing public anxiety about the impact of migration and the technological revolution affecting jobs (particularly low skilled manufacturing), spreading cynicism about corruption within national political establishments (post-Panama papers scandal), and a growing unease over the democratic deficit within some European institutions. These problems were seen as challenges that could be handled through reform – but not as political game changers.

In 2016 this political complacency has been severely tested, not by the poorest nations that find themselves at the fringes of the globalisation, but by the global economic superpowers with large middle classes and the highest per capita incomes in the world. The Brexit referendum in the UK, and Donald Trump’s election in the US, have unleashed the forces of nationalism and populism on a scale not seen in the West since the1930s.