Angela Merkel’s has provoked a lot of pining amongst liberals for the good ol’ days, but they are not coming back.
Coll McCail is an activist and writer based in Glasgow. He is a member of Progressive International’s Secretariat and edits Skotia.
Cross-posted from Conter
Last week, Nicola Sturgeon penned a glowing review of Angela Merkel’s new memoir Freedom in the New Statesman. The Iron Chancellor’s book, wrote Sturgeon, “reminds us of the rational, forensic, evidence-driven approach she brought to governing, and provokes a sense of nostalgia for all that she represented.” In recent months, however, the centrist restoration that Scotland’s former First Minister craves has been put beyond the realms of possibility.
From Donald Trump’s re-election to the Gaza genocide, the ‘rules-based international order’ is unravelling in real-time, forcing Western liberalism’s contradictions to the surface. These are the weeks when decades happen. The halcyon days of post-Brexit Britain when a militant, radical centrism threatened to overturn the expressed wish of the British public are long gone. All that remains is incoherent hubris, be it Rory Stewart’s insistence that Kamala Harris should have won the Presidential election or Lewis Goodall’s claim that the Democratic nominee made “no strategic mistake”. Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another, one might ask.
That Nicola Sturgeon should reach for the rose-tinted spectacles rather than offer a political perspective on Merkel’s leadership chimes with the centre’s intellectual incapacity to interpret, let alone address, the world’s present conjuncture. Before our eyes, at home and abroad, the gradual decline of American hegemony – and the morbid symptoms which accompany it – is deepening the crisis of legitimacy facing Western liberalism.
Even Francis Fukuyama identified “a decisive rejection of the particular way that the understanding of a ‘free society’ has evolved since the 1980s” in Donald Trump’s re-election. History, it turns out, is not over – and today those who have spent 30 years insisting otherwise look weaker than ever.
On the 21st of October, as Kamala Harris welcomed the endorsement of Liz Cheney in Pennsylvania, Alex Cole-Hamilton crossed the Atlantic to join her campaign. The leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats was the first in a trickle of former and serving Scottish politicians to make the trip Stateside. Emblematic of Scotland’s broader subordination to Washington, these politicians shrugged off the banality of Scottish politics to throw their lot in with the Democratic Party.
In so doing, they joined a campaign so incoherent that the Vice President labelled Donald Trump a “fascist” and compared him to Hitler only to then guarantee a peaceful transfer of power. While her opponent donned a McDonald’s uniform and drove a bin lorry, she endlessly courted celebrity endorsements only to roll out multimillionaire pop stars in cities immiserated by the political choices of successive administrations. The Democrats insisted this was the most important election in history and yet offered voters nothing but vibes. Kamala Harris ignored the material conditions of millions of Americans in favour of a platform that sought to portray Trump as an existential threat to a liberal order which working-class voters simply didn’t care for. Not that any of this mattered to those who made the jaunt across the pond.
The defeat of liberalism in the United States consequently revealed the fragility of its Scottish acolytes, who are left to reminisce about the days of Angela Merkel. However, underpinning the centre’s transatlantic crisis is a far less immediate contradiction – one that stretches back decades.
“We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South… Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again,” said one G7 Diplomat in October last year. His warning came as Keir Starmer, Ursula Von Der Leyen and Joe Biden lined up behind Israel’s blockade of food, water and energy to the Gaza Strip. Last month, these were the precise crimes against humanity listed as part of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Western governments have taken a sledgehammer to their very own international order in the intervening period.
As the multipolar world is born and US economic decline accelerates, the significance of regional footholds like Israel to American imperialism only grows. This is the context in which the Israeli state has torn apart the international system and broken every one of Washington’s supposed “red lines” while receiving $17.9 billion in US military aid.
The Lancet estimate that 180,000 people have died as a result of Irsael’s genocide in Gaza and yet last month the US vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire for the fourth time. The International Court of Justice’s provisional measures in its genocide case against Israel have gone ignored. Israel has bombed foreign embassies in third countries, attacked European politicians and massacred well over 100 journalists without consequence. Having already threatened to sanction the ICC, the US Congress has now passed a bill empowering the President to punish pro-Palestine non-profit organisations arbitrarily. When the ICC – “built for Africa and thugs like Putin” in the words of one prosecutor – issued arrest warrants for the leaders of one the US’ closest allies, one Senator even threatened to invade the Netherlands. Another promised to sanction Canada, Britain, Germany and France should they act on the warrants.
While international law looked to have briefly clawed back some credibility following the ICC’s announcement, many signatories to the Rome Statute were quick to distance themselves from The Hague’s decision. The French, for example, withdrew their commitment to enforce the arrest warrants as part of the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire agreement – which Israel breached within days, having already bombed Beirut 20 times in two minutes, hours before the deal was struck. Even First Minister John Swinney’s response to the news was characteristically vague.
The ‘rules-based international order’ has always been a myth, amounting to little more than an informal set of norms that sustained US economic and political dominance. In fleeting moments throughout history, the mask has slipped – the Pentagon Papers in 1971, the Dodgy Dossier in 2003, and Collateral Murder in 2010. The United Nations, said its second Secretary-General in 1954, “was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.” Seven decades later, his successor pinpointed “hell on earth” on a map, the Gaza Strip. Over the last 12 months, the mask has dropped for good.
As Nixon’s National Security Advisor in the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger advocated waging war in the “grey areas”. On terrain far from the gaze of the American public, argued
Kissinger, the US should use covert military means to quietly cement its hegemony. The people of Cambodia and Laos continue to live with the consequences of his scheme. Today, in the age of mass communication, there are no “grey areas”. Genocide, greenlit by the free world, is live-streamed on our mobile phones. Consequently, one by one, the legitimacy of the interstate institutions crafted by Europe and the USA in the postwar period has crumbled.
This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Western liberalism’s crisis. The centre has accelerated its own demise. Even the rise of multipolarity has been hastened by neoconservatism. A third of the globe’s population, for example, now lives under some form of US economic sanction, forcing together alternative trading blocks. Last month, when Scotland’s politicians descended on the swing states to help save the liberal order, they were shilling for the architects of its downfall.
In Scotland and across Europe, consecutive waves of radical mass mobilisation have been successfully co-opted by the ruling class over the last five years. The youth climate marches of 2019 were quelled by capital’s greenwash. The following year, the Black Lives Matter movement lost momentum as empty symbolism took root. In 2022, the strike wave lulled as the language of trade unionism found its way into President Biden’s stump speeches. The centre has had no such luck with the question of Palestine. Instead, politicians have tied themselves in knots to defend the indefensible to obscure their intellectual dishonesty. After all, the Democratic Party refused to even platform a pre-screened Palestinian speaker at their National Convention. To do so would be to humanise the Palestinian people – a red line the Biden administration could not cross. From London to Berlin, similar paradoxes have confronted other governments complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing.
Perhaps then it is of little wonder that Nicola Sturgeon should feel nostalgic for Angela Merkel’s leadership. Its political foundations shattered, the world she inhabited as German Chancellor is fast disappearing – as is the popular space for her ideological descendants.
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