Mr. Rachman signals, with his reference to his conversation with Fyodor Lukyanov in Moscow, as the reification of his status as well traveled ‘expert’ . The subject of Lukyanov’s contemptuous laughter is Boris’ notion of a “liberal Brexit”. Mr. Rachman’s observation is predictable:
Viewed from Russia, the idea that Brexit is anything other than a savage blow to the liberal cause evidently seemed absurd.
How might the reader define for herself the idea of ‘liberal cause’? Monnet’s Common Market that ‘evolved’ into the E.U. ? The Marshall Plan of 1948,The founding of NATO in 1949? Kennan’s Long Telegram of February of 1946, that became Mr. X’s essay published in Foreign Affairs entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” ? that advocated Kennan’s idea of Containment, later abandoned by him? The Atlantic Council ‘Think Tank’ founded in 1961? Might that reader consider that another place holder for actual thought? ‘Post-War Liberal Order’ is an integral part of that ‘liberal cause’? A collection of the Mr. Rachman’s uses of the word ‘liberal’
“liberal”, liberal internationalism, liberals, liberals , traditional liberals, “era of liberal democracy is over”, liberalism,liberalism, liberal freedoms, liberalism, liberal internationalism, institutionalisation of liberalism, liberal cause, a liberal, “liberal”, liberal nationalism
A collection of the Mr. Rachman’s uses of the word ‘liberal’ , in its nominal and adjectival senses, is used by Mr. Rachman seventeen times in his essay. And Mr. Rachman’s statement below is the weakest kind of rhetorical armature to hold his essay together. Have I strayed too far?
The question of whether Mr Johnson and the Brexiters can, in any way, claim to be “liberal” is of more than academic interest.
Of interest is the book mentioned by Mr. Rachman by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes book, The Light That Failed,- another essay that evolved in a book suffering from rhetorical/intellectual bloat? The original essay here, or at least one of its iterations :
This section of the essay engages in the most blatant kind of obfuscation, about one of the root causes of the rise of the dreaded populism in Eastern Europe. A collection of ‘reasons’ , (I have put them in bold font) but the naming of the actual culprit of Neo-Liberalism is never proffered as one the ’causes’ of the rise of this ‘Illiberal Democracy‘ .
The striving of ex-communist countries to emulate the west after 1989 has been given an assortment of names – Americanisation, Europeanisation, democratisation, liberalisation, enlargement, integration, harmonization, globalisation and so forth – but it has always signified modernisation by imitation and integration by assimilation. After the communist collapse, according to today’s central European populists, liberal democracy became a new, inescapable orthodoxy. Their constant lament is that imitating the values, attitudes, institutions and practices of the west became imperative and obligatory.
There is another historical source, rather that the melodramatic kitsch of ‘The Light That Failed’ and it is ‘Europe Since 1989, a history’ by Phillip Ther
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167374/europe-since-1989
This book explores the role that Neo-Liberalism as one of the causes, in the economic/political policies, adopted in Eastern European countries after 1989.
Old Socialist
https://www.ft.com/content/2867d79e-1fe4-11ea-92da-f0c92e957a96
StephenKMackSD's Blog 