John Gray on the End of the Post-Cold War Order: "Peace, as It Used to Be, Is an Irrecoverable Condition"

I'll make a brief introduction of yours. You know that. You know, I've constructed it, you know, from picking in different places of the internet, but so the main ideas coincide.

John Gray is a British political theorist and public intellectual whose career has been defined by a sustained refusal of confronting certainties. Educated at Oxford and long associated with the School of Economics, Gray emerged in the 1980s within the liberal tradition influenced by Isaiah Berlin and Friedrich Hayek and at times sympathetic to free market ideas.

Over subsequent decades, he underwent a decisive intellectual transformation that would make him one of liberalism's most unorthodox critics. Rather than rejecting liberalism wholesale, Gray recasts it in austere, historically grounded terms. He rejects the belief shared by both liberal and socialist thought that history tends towards moral progress or political convergence.

In Gray's account, liberalism is not a master plan for human flourishing, but a fragile set of norms and practices that help contain conflict among incommensurable values. His liberalism is minimal, pessimistic in its anthropology and wary of grand political projects.

Gray's most recent book, The New Leviathans: Global Powers and Moral Order in the 21st Century, as you can see it over there, we'll show you some covers of some of John Gray's books. In this book he develops these themes for our current era. Here he argues that contemporary global politics is defined not by a universal liberal project but by a multipolar struggle among rival Leviathan states and blocs that claim moral authority while pursuing sharply divergent visions of order. The result, he suggests, is a world in which political legitimacy is no longer anchored in any shared narrative of progress but in the contingent balance of power among competing sovereignties.

I leave it here. It's, as you have seen, unorthodox, critical, realist. I've even read that you're considered to have an unsentimental view of the human condition. I don't know if you would agree with that, but there's something with which I would like to start before we deal with geopolitics and all the rest, which is that the first time that we met was in the early '90s.

Yes.

So after the, I mean, immediately the post-Cold War period, and at that time, you know, there was an absolute consensus regarding, you know, the future of liberalism. The idea was politics can be put towards working towards not just peace, but also greater degrees of freedom, greater, with a unity among the peoples, globalization is really a gift for humanity, and you were absolutely skeptical regarding that position. So, you departed absolutely from that dominant discourse. But then, you know, your position seems to have gained considerable credibility nowadays once we see what's going on around. So, less can't perhaps have more hopes. So, do you feel more vindicated now?

When you ask me that question, Fernando, and you're right that in the early 1990s, or in 1989 when I published my first skeptical piece in October 1989 in an American conservative magazine, the title was "The End of History or Perhaps the End of Liberalism." I argued that history couldn't end, wouldn't end, that history is a succession of stages and cycles but has no destination, and that Francis Fukuyama's argument about that, which remember this was actually before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but when it was clear it was all ending, before the collapse of the Soviet system, that what would follow would be a reversion to a more traditional, normal type of history. The normal type of history, I said, was conflicts of ethnicities, conflicts over resources, conflicts over religions, these conflicts going in cycles, the rise and fall of different regimes, some empires, some nation states, the periods in which parts of the world became anarchical stateless zones. This is what would happen.

And that was regarded as apocalyptically pessimistic, which in itself is strange, because an apocalypse is a change, a radical change from one kind of world to another world. What I was saying was we're going to live in the same old world that we've already lived in, and the Cold War was itself anomalous, was an aberration. It was basically at its ideological level a contest between two Enlightenment projects. And once this conflict has ended, it will end not with an unconditional victory for the liberal side. The Russian side and the Chinese side will revert to more traditional ways of thinking, and that has indeed happened in Russia, so that now Putin is, so to speak, a Tsarist political mystic. He's moved to a more Eurasian, anti-Western stance. And that was regarded as a very strange thing to say.

But if you ask now, do I feel vindicated 30 years later? I'm reminded of the anecdote, which perhaps was based on a true story, of what the emperor of Mexico said when he was taken out by French forces in the 1860s to be shot. As he was taken out to be shot, he paused because his chef, his cook, was standing in the audience, and he turned to the cook as he was about to be shot a minute later, as it was, he said, "I told you this would happen but you wouldn't believe me. I warned you that this would happen and you said it was impossible." Then he's taken out and shot.

So I don't feel vindicated in that. I feel vindicated, but only in that rather ironic sense, which is that much that I warned against has happened. And much that I warned against will still happen. There is yet to be some of the conflicts I warned about.

What I thought would happen was that the world would return to something like the pre-1940s, pre-1914 dispensation. A world not of a single hegemon, a single superpower. I did not think then and I do not think now that the United States of America will be replaced by China, say, or another hegemon. We live in a world with several great powers competing and collaborating, but largely competing for resources, for influence, for technological advance, even for territory in parts. And this, as we know, is rather dangerous, because after what happened in 1914 was a first catastrophic war, what's sometimes called the European Civil War. And I think we're somewhat in that position again, not that a world war is inevitable, certainly not.

But there are many risks of war in many parts of the world, and in Europe I think there's a clear risk of the war in Ukraine, if it is resolved or ended in a way which is advantageous to Russia, being followed by further attempts at advance within Europe. So, we're back to classical history with all of its dangers and all of its risks. And I think what we need in the circumstances which we're now in and that are unfolding are some of the classical virtues: stoicism, determination, realism, courage. We need these old virtues, these old classical pagan virtues, though they're also to some extent Christian virtues, rather than the thin and brittle hopes of liberalism as it has been.

Yeah, well, you have in part answered already what would have been my second question, because in your last article in the New Statesman, you start defining our current situation, you know, in terms of this concept of the interregnum, you know, by characterizing the sense that, you know, the old order is dying, yet the new has not fully emerged, right? So, my question would have been, as I told you, you have already answered part of it, my question would have been, so what is dying and what is emerging? Or we don't have still the means in order to be capable of anticipating, you know, any result. Everything, you know, is radically unpredictable.

Well, the idea of the interregnum, of course, was popularized on the left by the Italian Marxist theorist Gramsci. And he said that the old order of capitalism was dying, as you say, and there were many pathological or morbid symptoms of its dying, but the new order had not emerged, and we were living in this painful, awkward interregnum. I think the interregnum will be permanent.

That's to say, Gramsci took from the Enlightenment what many liberals and neoliberals and even some conservatives have taken from the Enlightenment, the idea that human history is a series of successive stages or phases which we would go through, and the end point is somehow programmed. It may not be strictly inevitable. There might be a reversion to barbarism, there might be a nuclear war or whatever, but there's a kind of built-in telos, as the Greeks called it, a built-in end state, which is a universal civilization modeled on the West, modeled initially on Europe. If you want to know where this idea first emerged, I think in a clear form, it was the French positivist thinker Auguste Comte, mid-19th century thinker. He said basically the West, by which he then meant Europe, is the engine of modernity. Modernity is basically a movement, but a universal movement eventually, from societies based on faith and magic and religion to societies based on science. And the end point of this movement is a universal civilization based on science. And I think many people who have never heard of Auguste Comte, or have not thought about this very deeply, take that as an assumption. And so when they talk about an interregnum, they will say, "Well, there are kind of anomalous phases, there are regressions, there are difficulties, there are periods of barbarism, but history as a whole is moving, however painfully, however slowly, with however many deviations, towards that."

So, I take the view which is more like actually the ancient pagan view, or the Indian view, or the Chinese view, or the Japanese view, non-Western view, but which was also the view of ancient Europe, that history is more cyclical. Civilizations rise and fall. There are different regimes in the world, different types of civilization, different types of politics. It's always been the case, it always will be. So, the question then is how do we live successfully in such a world? How do we live in a world in which a certain kind of radical disorder, conflicts of values, conflicts of regimes, is endemic?

And that I think is the precondition of living well now. We have to put aside these hopes of a universal order. And particularly we have to get over what I think is a deep-seated weakness of thought in Britain and other European countries, which is of thinking of this, the Trumpian period, the period of MAGA, and the period in which the United States itself has actively rejected the order it used to support. The basic regime change in the world is in Washington.

Washington was the basis of, I mean, I think most of us in this hall now are old enough to remember the semi-forgotten Washington Consensus. An economic consensus partly, but also political, emerging partly from Fukuyama's writings but those of many others too, according to which the type of democratic capitalism that existed in the United States in the '90s, say, would become universal. The deep irony, the deep paradox, is not that it hasn't become universal. Of course it hasn't; it was never possible actually. The deep irony is that it's been actively rejected in America itself. It's protectionist, free trade is rejected, the Trump administration is deeply involved in various aspects of the economy, in the crypto economy, the virtual economy, in the banking sector, rare earths resource companies; they're taking active stakes in them. It's become a dirigiste economy actually, not a free market, and that's come from the very source of this supposedly eternal neoliberal order. I mean, I think the most, in a sense, alarming or offensive thing I said in the 1990s is that this order, which was believed not just by Fukuyama but by practically everybody to be permanent, would be very short-lived. It turned out to be what? 30 years? Tops.

Yeah, but I remember when we first met, you know, in the early '90s, that you were telling us that you were being constantly invited to the United States because they wanted to be scandalized. You probably don't remember that, but—

Scandalized. Yeah. Yeah, but look how much— But they learned nothing. Yeah, how much the country has changed, right?

Yes. Because they have now an absolutely affirmative culture. So, they don't want even be slightly criticized.

So, and I should tell you one thing. The idea of decline in America hasn't been so much cancelled, but it's always used in a pedagogic way, because the assumption is if we can identify any aspect of American decline, we can reverse it. Within eight years. Well, the decline of great powers does not take eight years, and it cannot be reversed in eight years. So, you're right. Now, they don't want to hear any of this because it's more realistic, because it's nearer at hand. They're not interested in the entertainment value of being scandalized. They're frightened by that possibility. So, they adamantly deny it.

Yeah. Yeah, but on the other hand, I want to stop for a while with Trump, right? Because in a sense lots of people believe that Donald Trump is, well, a narcissistic president, that his policies are based on whims, you know, but, you know, somehow, do you think that most of his policies would have been taken anyway? So, has it been an accelerator of changes that were already on the way? And I'm thinking particularly of something that affects Europe directly, which is, you know, to let us pay ourselves for our defense, or, you know, this more accommodating stance with Russia and China, or even, you know, the idea of NATO. And I think, I mean, that would have happened anyway, probably, right? So,

I think Trump is in part an acute accentuation of trends in American thinking and policy that were going on under the Biden administration even. The Biden administration was tilting towards protectionism in certain respects. And there have long been discussions in American defense circles about Europe not fairly sharing the burden of its defense and of what to do about the rise of China. But Trump, I suppose, is more radical, as well as being in a way more coarse in the way he expresses things, has been more radical. He's accelerated that development to a point at which, first of all, I think it's irreversible, a very, very important point. Many aspects of the Trumpian project, or Trump's America, or the Trumpian world. I mean, he has achieved one thing which he wanted to achieve: to be the best known person in the world. The world's leading reality television showman, penetrating deeply into the imaginations and consciousness and subconscious, the mental life of almost every human being on the planet. He's actually achieved that. So, he is a phenomenon. He is a world historical phenomenon.

I mentioned to a group I addressed in Oxford recently, I said, just as the philosopher Hegel saw Napoleon after a great battle, battle of Vienna I think it was, he said, "This is the world spirit on horseback." And I said, "There must be many people in the world now who look to Trump and say, 'Here's the world spirit in his golf cart.'"

It is a— And of course, Napoleon was a liberating figure, but also brought great wars and disasters with him. Trump is an even more profoundly divisive and ambiguous figure, but he's an enormous— I think, in other words, it's not only acceleration of existing trends, though they were there. He's accelerated them to a point at which they've entered a new phase, and it's hard to go back to the situation in the pre-Trump world. I think impossible, because America

itself has changed. Remember he's achieved not complete but a high degree of control over the justice process. He, in his first period in the White House, stacked the Supreme Court in his favor. It's not perhaps wholly in his power. It could eventually rule against his tariffs and so on, but nonetheless the separation of powers in America is not what it was.

He's also brought the media to its knees. Most of the American media, not just the Washington Post, which has been semi-destroyed by Bezos, its owner, in the last few weeks or days. All of the different aspects of the American media have been reshaped. They're afraid of Trump, as most American businesses are afraid of Trump's threats to them. So, America, from being the haven of safety in a capitalist world, is actually in some eyes becoming not investable. Because any capital put there, you don't know what's going to happen to those. You don't know how the barriers, which under the liberal neoliberal period were never absolute, but there were barriers between the parts of government and how markets operate, all have been largely dissolved.

So, it is an accentuation of trends, the Trumpian order, but one which is so accelerated because of media, social media, and other factors. Everything's accelerated nowadays. We're in a different world. And I think it's that, the hardest thing to do. Actually, an American poet wrote this. Wallace Stevens, great American 20th century poet, he said, "The future is easy. It's the present that's uncharted." It's the present that's hard to understand when the present is very different from even the recent past. Even though there are some continuities with the recent past, they're so attenuated that we're in a new world which is quite different from the recent past.

And then you have a permanent, you have a deep-seated cognitive dissonance, which is that people are continually trying to screen out aspects of the world which undermine their world view. So, I mean, I think I saw that myself a little bit at the same time. Think of this: at the very same time that many European leaders were deeply worried about Trump's threats to Greenland, which included at one point threats of using military force, they were simultaneously having meetings about Ukraine, which depended on Trump giving backstop to a peace settlement. Two completely... On the one hand, they were afraid of being attacked by the United States, European territory, EU territory. On the other hand, they were looking to a solution for the terrible and tragic Ukraine conflict, which would presuppose a reliable American backstop. That's cognitive dissonance. Two things which are completely incompatible, and yet they were doing it at the same time. So, grappling with these realities, I think, is a precondition of any kind of intelligent response to the world as it exists now.

Yeah. Yeah, why don't we switch to Europe, you know, because here, from a Spanish perspective, I think this is probably a real fear. Do you think Europe is resilient enough to be capable of supporting, you know, these new changes?

I think the problem is that the European project that we now inherit was expanded and acquired its present form at the end of the Cold War, because it then incorporated most of the former post-communist states. And the European project as it exists now, unfortunately in many ways, 'cause it has many attractive and even beautiful features. I mean, one of the beautiful features of the European project is that people would not be identified with the identity that was projected onto them. I mean, the history of Europe in the 20th century was a history in a period in which people would say, "I'm Austrian." And someone else would say, "No, you're not Austrian, you're Jewish." Which was not a very auspicious moment for them. People projecting identities onto other people very often has fatal consequences, which is one of the... a little lesson of 20th century history is: if someone tells you he's going to kill you, he wants to kill you, it's a good idea to believe him. Some of these threats can then be realized.

So, the European project began, I think, in its attractive and philosophical aspect as a way in which people could live with plural identities without being threatened. But unfortunately, it thereby became, after the end of the Cold War, a Fukuyama's end of history project. In other words, the world it presupposed was one in which hard power, military power, the power to kill, the power to destroy, was of declining significance. Which is, I guess, the deep reason why, along with the other reasons, they're there as well, the European Union even to this day has no serious military existence. It's almost militarily non-existent. It has a currency, it has a partial, very partial fiscal integration. It has a now rather partial freedom of movement within itself. Schengen is semi-functional but not fully functional. But it doesn't have the capacity to defend itself separately. Particular nation-states, France, Britain, and now Poland, have significant military power. But as an institution, as a project, the European Union does not have the capacity to defend itself.

And the problem is that acquiring a capacity which would replace the American shield takes a long time. I'm not a defense expert, but I know defense experts. I've asked them and they all say if you're talking about replacing the American shield, you're talking about a decade or two decades or longer. I don't interpret, I don't see Putin as being so patient. I don't think he'll wait that long. I mean, his point of maximum... again, this is what defense experts say, not me, but his point of maximum leverage will be maybe 3 years from now or 5 years from now. Not 30 years from now or 20 years from now.

What can be done is particular countries, as I say, the Swedes, the Finns, the Baltic states and the Poles, can build their defenses as rapidly and as firmly as possible to have a deterrent effect. So, the Finns have a historical experience of that, in which they prevailed against the Soviet Union. Yeah, they won two wars against the Soviet... Against the Soviets. I mean, they know what it means to be attacked and they also know what it means to resist. So, they'll build. The Poles are now perhaps becoming, outside the nuclear sphere, the major military power in Europe. Land army, massive weaponry, building them up every single day, as a deterrent. And the Baltic states are all in residence for some kinds of incursions, which might not take the form of traditional invasion, but of hybrid war. There's already a hybrid war. I mean, from some points of view, I've heard this said by British and other military experts, from some points of view, Russia is already at war with Europe. There are strange balloons floating over airports. There are constant breakdowns in public infrastructure through cyber attack. There are even assassinations and sabotage of various kinds. So, from their point of view, they're waging this hybrid war.

And one thing I would say is that although another world war is not inevitable and can be prevented, the boundaries between war and peace have been irrevocably blurred. Peace as it used to be is an irrecoverable condition. Whatever happens now in Europe and elsewhere, the forms of hybrid war, opinion information warfare, cyber warfare, mysterious breakdowns in public services and so on will continue, whatever else happens.

So, I think a key problem for Europe is building its defenses at least to the level at which they can't replace Americans. I mean, one thing the Americans have, for example, the satellite intelligence. The Europeans have some but not enough. Can't replace that quickly. Takes 10-15 years. But then we get to the second issue, which is that many European states, including Britain and France and I think possibly Spain as well, are fiscally challenged. They don't have the obvious fiscal capacity to spend much more, to double their expenditure on defense, which would be required even to do something quickly to act as a deterrent. So, it's a very perilous, I would say, situation that Europe is in now.

And it will, I'll just add one further thing, it will be made more complicated perhaps by political changes, because many people in the left in Britain now, particularly now that our existing Starmer government is very weak, the so-called soft left is becoming more and more strong, and they're very keen on reuniting with Europe. Well, one contingent aspect of that is: are you ready to reunite with Europe? A Europe which in just over a year from now may have a National Rally president in the Élysée Palace. If Bardella, or, probably rather than Marine Le Pen, wins, which must at least be a reasonable possibility. Are you willing to live in and unite with, to be integrated into a Europe in which one of the great founding powers will have a populist government?

I think you have just touched upon quite an interesting subject, which brings me to a small reflection and then to another question, which is: we're talking about the new breakdown between, on the one hand, the United States and Europe on the other hand. But if we look at it, this is really, you know, a fracture that crosses both the United States and Europe. Which is a political fracture. Yes. Which divides, I mean, a liberal camp on the one side and then a populist camp, right? And I think this is another problem for Europe but also for the United States, because if we talk to American colleagues, you know, they would all say, "Well, this is reversible, you know, Donald Trump may be reversible. We can start now in November, you know, in the midterm elections." So, there's still people with a lot of optimism, right? Which I know you don't share, right?

But there's also a lot of people with... I think there's more pessimism in Europe regarding the possibility of key states falling in the hands of national populists. So, Poland in 2027 seems to be the key year, so next year. Poland has the legislative. Yeah. And then the presidentials in France. Let's see what happens in Germany, because, you know, if they keep the firewall or not, you know, with the AfD. So, what does it make out of the West? Because we were supposed to be a community whose identity was based on principles and values. Exclusively, right? So, if there's no agreement, you know, regarding that base on which we built our common identity, what does unite us? You know, what's the glue that will really make this civilization, so-called Western civilization, survive in these next decades?

Well, there's a political level of this discussion, and then what you've described as a civilizational level. I mean, at the political level, I think there's a deep-seated belief among liberals that what they call populism... I mean, since 2016, when Trump won and Brexit happened in Britain, I think I've heard at least 20 confident media predictions that populism had peaked. So, they think of it as an aberration. And they can think of it as an aberration, an anomaly, which will have a definite period and die out, because they don't understand or deny their, our role in creating it. I mean, my understanding of populism, a kind of rough definition of populism, is that populism is what liberals call the political blowback against the social disruption produced by their own policies.

In other words, they've outsourced, offshored industry, leaving, in the American case, parts of America as post-industrial wasteland. I mean, the employment is just gone. They've removed various controls on banking and a kind of consensus on corporate rewards, so that large parts of the middle classes feel very precarious. They did that. They've also made terrible mistakes, like the one that Hillary Clinton made. And when she did this, I gave a talk on BBC radio about this shortly after she did it, in, I think it was, August 2016. She referred to a third or 40% of the American population as deplorables. Remember that? She said that, this basket of deplorables. So, 40% of the American population were dismissed. What are they supposed to do? Say, "Yes, we are. We'll vote for you. And thank you for telling us. We're very grateful for you identifying our morally atavistic, subnormal characteristics." The moment she did that, I thought the game was up. And I thought then that Donald Trump had the ideal antagonist. One that would guarantee his... The liberals, by what they've done and failed to do, have created the opportunities in which someone like Donald Trump could emerge and could gain power.

So, before the election, I said, "I think Trump's going to win." And I also thought he would win again because the Democrats did not reform their views of the majority of the population. Basically, not only did they deny Biden's evident cognitive decline, but they also put up a candidate who did not move away from the positions that had brought about populism in the first place. So, they need someone much more subtle or substantial than Kamala Harris proved to be. So, the key difficulty, I think, for liberals in understanding the situation is that they're bound to think of it as a sort of almost inexplicable eruption of irrationality, of populist demagoguery, which in part of course it is. But without looking at the underlying structural conditions and the underlying policies which created it in the first place.

So, reformulate your question again. Yeah, the civilizational one. The civilizational one? Well, I think the civilizational one. I mean, the extent to which the West can become again, if it ever was, an integral civilization. We have to remember that before the First World War, America was building itself as a separate civilization from Europe. They called Europe the old world, the dying world, the corrupt world, the world that was passing away. And they were building a city on a hill which would have a different history. And I think this has been revived. It's a very deep element in American culture, a providential view of history. That what came about in America was radically different from what had ever existed before, which is one of the deep reasons, by the way, that Fukuyama was accepted in America.

I mean, when I saw Fukuyama, and I've interacted with him on many occasions, in Europe and in Britain and in China and elsewhere, but when I saw him lecturing in Vienna on the end of history, I thought, "Well, that's a slightly comical episode, if any." He talked to you? Yes. Because he was satisfied... Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes, we talk frequently. We talked in Beijing, and I'd say maybe half a dozen or a dozen times in the last 20 or 30 years. I mean, he's a thoughtful individual. He's a decent individual, and really a very influential individual. With some interesting... His best books are not those for which he's most widely known. I mean, some of his books on the emergence of modern political orders are really very interesting in part. So, I respect him, even though I think he's radically mistaken. And his problem has been somehow to explain why he was either misunderstood to start with, which I don't think he was. I think he meant what he said. Yeah, exactly. What he meant, if you boil it down to a kind of empirical prediction, if you like, he thought that the only legitimate governments in future would be regimes of democratic capitalism.

All the rest would be rejected. That's what he thought. Now, it's almost the opposite of that which has happened. What's happened is that what legitimates the government now is economic growth, the ability to achieve peace. But I think above all, continuing growing living standards. And this is and law and order. And in this respect, Western countries have not been the most successful and are not the most successful. I mean, if you like, the underlying assumption of many Western liberals is that the whole of the rest of humankind longs more than anything else to be like them. To be like the liberals. Do they anymore? Do they, when they look at capital cities, when they look at how people actually live, when they look at levels of Western debt, when they look at education, do they really? I doubt it.

But your question was, can there be an integral Western civilization? Not in the old sense, I don't think. Not in the old way that it was. First of all, the Americans have again rejected that. When they talk about Western civilization, they mean American nationalism. That's what they mean.

I remember when Professor Huntington published his book in the early '90s on The Clash of Civilizations and Global Order, I think it was called. I don't know if many of you remember this, Professor Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political thinker. A very controversial book, but very influential as well. I read the book twice. And I read it with a question in mind: what is a civilization according to Professor Huntington? Religion? No, well, every civilization is an American minority. It was an entirely parochial contribution to an American debate about multiculturalism. The civilizations that were represented were ones primarily that were active in this debate. If there are other civilizations which weren't there, you never heard anything about them. So it was a sort of parochial debate. What he meant by civilization was America.

And so already that's a fundamental difference, a difference between the rather complex and older civilizational matrix or matrices of Europe, which included Eastern and Western Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire, nation states, modern radical republicanism, Jacobinism in France, counter-revolutionary movements. That is in many respects a different civilization. And of course, it's also been changed by large-scale immigration. So I don't myself see that a project of revitalizing an integral European civilization can be made to work, and in that respect I'm more skeptical, if you like, or they would say more pessimistic, than many of my friends on the post-liberal right.

What we can think about is how what was and is valuable in the various elements, traditions of Western civilization could be, which I think still could be, preserved or extended, because elements of it, I think the old practice of tolerance that we had in many countries, in which disagreement about certain fundamental issues was regarded actually as normal. I mean, what I think is a very... to regard disagreement on some important values and issues as abnormal is dangerous, and yet there's the other side of it.

The philosopher Wittgenstein said in order for there to be disagreement there has to be first agreement. If people don't agree on the terms they're using, on the ideas, the concept, you can't even have disagreement. I put that slightly differently myself. Unless you have an idea of truth, you have no use for doubt. Unless you have an idea of truth which we can approach or move away from, all there is is what you think or want or feel.

And that's one of the great dangers now, I think, which is a kind of subjectivism, when people, well, I just don't feel like that. Well, then we can't talk to each other, we can't learn anything from each other. Then you get the great danger that the ultimate form of conversation is violence. The only form of conversation left is violence. And even politics, I mean politics, if you like, traditionally in the views of thinkers like Hobbes or Ortega y Gasset, was actually a kind of alternative to war. Or a mild form of war, if you like. But if you remove any possibility of discourse among people who differ in some fundamental respects, if you take the kind of Manichean view that one view on abortion is... I'm pro-choice, that's for the record, but if you take the view that one view on abortion is the only view that can possibly be right, anything else is diabolical or a monstrous violation of human rights or the sanctity of life, then you can't live together.

And that's what happened in the United States in the early '90s. I wrote an essay suggesting, which was then considered slightly crazy, I said if America really descends into a period of deep internal culture war, deep cultural divisions, the trigger may well be abortion. And the reason is that the Americans constitutionalized law on abortion so that it became a right. Now, if you constitutionalize a freedom or some particular moral position in a society in which maybe a third or forty percent or at least a quarter regard that as completely diabolical, you can't have social peace anymore.

And you also have another possibility which I predicted then. I said the result of this will be that the American judicial system will become an object of political capture. If you create a Supreme Court which implements these rights, these supposedly fundamental rights, what will happen, it took over 30 years, is that the parts of American society, of American politics, which reject these rights, which regard them even as the work of the devil, will gradually over time formulate the project of taking over the Supreme Court, which Trump did in his first term. No. So, now it's a question, no one knows actually anymore how the Supreme Court is going to react. Whereas earlier on the Supreme Court was seen as an embodiment of liberal values. It no longer is.

Yeah, this brings us to another question. So, I want to bring in two more subjects. First, the crisis of democracy, and then we have to say something about China. So, I'm interested to know what you think about it. So, regarding the first issue, I remember the words of a French professor who started a lecture saying, "I have bad and good news." So, the bad news is that democracy is in crisis. The good news is that it has always been in crisis, right? So, the question would be how deep is the crisis now, and can we glimpse something like the ending of what we now call liberal democracy and a switch towards something that we may still be calling democracy but that won't be democracy anymore as we understand it?

I think the change that has occurred is that when Fukuyama said in future there'll only be one legitimate political system, liberal democracy, he crystallized an almost universal consensus in the West. But democracy is actually not... liberal democracy is not fundamentally different from other modes of government in that, I mean, all modern modes of government are forms of popular government. There's nowhere in the world any longer in which government is a matter of divine right or pure legitimacy. They all turn on delivering benefits, whether they're the benefits of peace, which Hobbes called commodious living, or the arts, he said, and science, but crucially prosperity, safety in the streets, but what we now call economic growth. They're the conditions of legitimacy of every form of government now. And in that respect democracy is not... I don't think it has any unique priority. It's one of the competitors.

And the main weakness, I think, in democracy, the functional weakness, is that its capacity for growth, and even now, I would say, in Europe for technological innovation, has been surpassed partly by America, even Trump's America, a sort of post-liberal majoritarian democracy almost, and China. To get to China, because if these non-democratic, in the case of China, or illiberally democratic...

Imagine if Trump were succeeded... Imagine if Trump gets to the end of his term, hard to imagine, but again, and there is an election and he's replaced by J.D. Vance. It's one possibility, not maybe the most likely, but one. Then America will, I would suspect, then become even more of an illiberal democracy. It would still be a democracy in the sense that, for example, Viktor Orbán's Hungary is a democracy, in the sense that you can imagine circumstances in which he will fall. I would think that's even not unlikely in the next few years. But it's not a liberal democracy in the sense in which we use it, because there have been... Orbán's Hungary, Viktor Orbán's Hungary. It's not a liberal democracy in the sense that we're used to it, in that there have been many changes in the constitution, there has been concentration of media power, there have been various changes which have turned it into a... It's still democratic in the sense that the government can be removed by the vote. But in other respects, it does not embody what I would call liberal democracies.

And that's a possibility for post-Trump America. But there's also China itself, that it could move on, under this state-led type of capitalism it has, to ever more rapid and substantial and consequential forms of technological advance. That it can surpass the United States, as maybe it already has done through DeepSeek, the chat system it's developed in AI, artificial intelligence, in quantum computing, in bioengineering, in many areas of science-driven technologies. It's catching up. It's a peer or even is perhaps overtaking.

And that's where the danger for democracy... Democracy can't survive as a system for long if it becomes a backwater of poverty, even relative poverty. It can't survive for long because of course as part of that it will produce internal movements which are very unhappy with this. The parts of the populations that are becoming poorer or becoming more precarious or more indebted or more taxed will resist, and then there will be anti-democratic movements, as there were in Europe in the '30s. It's not like Europe in the '30s in many ways, because what happened in Europe in the '30s was, I think, very largely the impact of the First World War, which destroyed the preexisting patterns of society, destroyed the old imperial structures and so on. But something like that can be happening. So I guess the way that I would think of it is that democracy is one of several contenders for legitimacy in the modern world.

And nothing guarantees that legitimacy even in relatively long-standing democracies. If long-standing democracies suffer from apparently insoluble problems of overspending and debt, if they suffer from internal cultural divisions which seem intractable, if they suffer from... if they can't afford to be militarily strong anymore, then they'll become more and more marginal, and the more marginal they are in world affairs and the poorer they become relative to other countries, the more they're threatened, the more there will be internal challenges to these failing democracies. So I don't think the future of democracy is guaranteed.

On the other hand, we have to remember that authoritarian regimes do make gigantic mistakes. The mistakes of authoritarian regimes are often larger than the mistakes of democracies. For example, Xi made a gigantic error, I think, over COVID, not only in incubating it, it probably was incubated in Wuhan, but also the shutdown in China was even more harsh and brutal. During the pandemic. During the pandemic. I mean, that was an overreaction on his part. The problem: democracies often repeat the same error. But authoritarians do the same, but often, sometimes, on a greater scale. Democracies repeatedly made the error of regime change. They kept on trying to do it.

I remember when, after the Iraq war, which I opposed before it started and said it would be catastrophic. It was worse, by the way. People say I'm pessimistic. I'm never as pessimistic as what actually happens. I was surprised that it was even as bad as it was. What I said would happen in Iraq, and I said this in the New Statesman before the American invasion, I said, "What will happen is the breakup of the Iraqi state, because if you remove a dictatorial regime which has identified itself with the state, then if you remove the dictatorial regime, you destroy the state." That is what happened. But it was worse than I thought. There was ISIS, there was the attempted genocide of the Yazidi people. The only winner at that time from that disastrous intervention was Iran, actually, which grew stronger. Everyone said at the time, "We'll never do this again." Then they did it again in Libya. Some people pointed out, not just me, but others, "If you topple Gaddafi, what happens?"

Well, but they learned something, you know, if we look at what happened in Venezuela, right? They learned not to do regime change.

Yeah, exactly. But they're talking about it in Cuba now. And some people are talking about it in Iran. Yeah, but Cuba is breaking down by itself anyway.

That's true. But some people thought the regime, which is a terrible regime, of course, in Iran was breaking down. But it still has the capacity, which maybe it doesn't in Cuba, for ferocious repression. It can kill thousands of people. So, there was a very narrow or limited learning process. But in authoritarian regimes, which is the weakness of authoritarian regimes, it's a slower process and the mistake can be gigantic. I mean, think of, if you think of it as an error, think of the Cultural Revolution. Think of the Great Leap Forward. Millions and millions, tens of millions of people perished in those disastrous... because under an authoritarian regime, there's no way for feedback to become relevant.

And that's a risk, by the way, that the West faces insofar as it in a sense tries to emulate the authoritarian regimes. And this is a tendency, of saying, "Well, shouldn't we control the social media and so on so that what they call disinformation is limited?" Now, there is disinformation on the social media. There are terrible things on the social media. There's been a reversion all over the American social media to, for example, hideous forms of anti-Semitism that have reemerged and become popular on the American... So there are serious concerns. But imposing a single narrative or a single type of opinion, a single version of progressive opinion, on the social media is dangerous, because you don't actually understand then the underlying dangers that are emerging. You don't understand that there may be some serious social roots, not for anti-Semitism, but perhaps for anti-immigrant sentiment and so on, that will be problems in social services, problems in housing, problems in education and so on. That there's maybe real problems. If it's all blanketed and all censored, you can't find out about those issues.

So no form of government is perfect. No form of government is free of these dangers. And then it becomes a balance of relative benefits and costs as perceived by the population on which it depends. And then liberal democracy really doesn't... it has no unique priority, I think, then. It has no unique claim to be always more successful. It's certainly not always more successful in terms of...

No, China is the counter example. I mean, it's a big...

China is the big counter example. China is the big counter example because the Soviet Union was not an economic success in general. There was significant growth in the defense industry and parts of, the Sputnik and various technologies it copied or stole from the West. But parts of the Soviet Union really never regained the level of prosperity they had under the Tsars,

actually. The economic growth was rapid in the late Tsarist period. It was not an economic— China is an economic success. And it hasn't stopped being an economic success since it's become more authoritarian.

One of the predictions, by the way, that people like to make in the West was that to the extent that China became more authoritarian, as it has done under Xi, technological progress would slow down. Has not happened. It's a kind of myth, a Western myth, that in order to have consistent economic, technological innovation and progress, you need a kind of entrepreneurial liberal market. It's falsified. As Popper would say, it's falsified. It's a falsified theory. And yet, it's what Western countries cling on to because they've got nothing else.

This tells you, by the way, that in terms of its internal self-belief, it is quite weak in the West. There's no longer a theological basis. There's no longer even a strong philosophy of history. Secretly, I think many Westerners, particularly in Europe, regard their period of global domination or global power as an accident, a historical accident, which I think it was.

But that doesn't stop us from trying to preserve what we inherit. That is still a value, and I think it cannot only be tolerance. You can't live on tolerance alone. You can't live on irony alone. You have to have some commitments to things that you value, and I would say, actually, myself, that human individuality is an important property, which is why I'm rather critical of some post-liberals who say that we must all be part of integral communities. Well, what happens if you belong to more than one, or what happens if you fall between these communities? Where do you end up then?

I think that value has to be reasserted, and we need a certain confidence in reasserting it. But we can't any longer think that there is a recoverable integral Western civilization when quite clearly there's not. And even if there could be, its future would be contingent partly on the type of life, including material life, including peace, including what Thomas Hobbes called commodious living, living in peace with each other and able to trade and interact with each other, intellectually and in economic ways, and thereby benefit from each other. Unless there are these material benefits, social benefits of Western liberal democracy, it will disappear.

Thank you very much. Well, I wish I could end on some note— Yeah, I wanted to mention tremendous optimism of— I wanted to ask you if you have a last statement that can give us any hope.

[laughter]

Well, I think there's one very hopeful thing, which is that if we're returning, as I think we are or have already returned, to the normal pattern of human existence, in which every society contains conflicts, in which the world contains many different regimes, and they're not tending to convergence on a single regime, if we're returning to that or have returned to it, many, many people have lived worthwhile lives in those periods. Some have suffered badly, many have been underprivileged; women and other groups have been shut out and so on.

But countless millions of people have lived— I mean, the plays of Shakespeare show people falling in love with each other. They still had deep passions back then; it could end in tragedy, as it always does, or comedy, as it often does. But the richness of human life has not actually been diminished. The richness of human life and of human possibilities is what it always was. In other words, we shouldn't make the meaning of our lives or the richness of our lives depend on a rather shallow narrative of progress.

I remember reading a memoir by a woman writer who wrote of her time during the Second World War, and she said, "Well, what I did during the Second World War was dance for 5 years. I enjoyed dancing. I had the best dances of my life during that period." Now, luckily— I mean, the experience of many people in Europe was different and much worse. But even very trying circumstances can bring out not only the best in people, the most courageous, but also the happiest in many ways. We shouldn't be possessed by an idea of progress or happiness which makes everything that we live a kind of prelude to something later that often doesn't come. It's better simply to deal with the circumstances as they exist now, cope with them, enjoy them, and don't make the whole of one's life a bet on some future condition of happiness or progress that is hypothetical.

I've written a little book on cats called Feline Philosophy. And it's my best-selling book probably ever.

[laughter]

Which tells me something about cats. Cats certainly don't live on the basis of an expected utopia. They certainly don't live in the belief that some future state of their lives will be better than their lives have ever been before. They live predominantly in the present. And they don't live either— they're not haunted by bad things that have happened to them. I mean, one of the difficulties of being a human being is that we have not just conscious but unconscious memories which frame our way of viewing the world. I don't think cats— cats aren't like that. They can be reminded of traumas, but until they actually are reminded, they don't think about them. So, maybe we can learn from other animals, and from cats in particular, perhaps.

My wife and I, our last cat died recently at the age of 23, and I think it had 23 happy years, which is a long life for a cat. So, we can learn from other species as well as from the wise writers in our own species. One writer I learned a lot from was Isaiah Berlin, who I knew well. Another was Michel de Montaigne. Oh, yeah. Of course. He lived through a dangerous time, a dangerous time. And yet he was able to be happy in a dangerous time.

So, that's optimistic, which is that the possibilities of happiness and of fulfillment have not disappeared. What's simply vanishing is a certain myth, a secular myth of progress, that whether or not— people adamantly cling onto it, they insist upon it being absolutely essential without that day. I've had many people say when I've given talks, "Well, if I believed what you did, Professor Gray, I'd stay in bed." To which my reply is, "Well, stay in bed." You shouldn't really need a myth to get you out of bed. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[applause]

Mhm.