The news crashes in of the latest terrorist attacks in Europe, this time in Brussels. Earlier this morning I read this piece by George Friedman about ‘illiberal democracy’ in Poland and Hungary:

The point is that liberal democracy as a principle of government has a vast array of possible configurations. It is hard to see either Hungary or Poland as beyond the pale. FDR tried to pack the Supreme Court by expanding it. He was blocked. He was still within the bounds of liberal democracy. Orbán’s policies towards the media, even if it had a political end as FDR’s court-packing did, is also not outside its bounds, any more than requiring tax dollars to pay for programming on public radio or television, which some may find abhorrent.

People may hate and despise the government, but so long as another election is coming and the people’s voice may be heard, you are pretty much within liberal democracy. As for immigration, liberal democracy allows any latitude on that score. This is why Orbán spoke of illiberal democracy. It was not in the sense of the regime, but in the sense of the ideology – a world in which an election is held and liberal programs and values are rejected by the electorate.

Why did the EU establishment become so upset? First, because a trend is developing in the countries made free in 1989, that rejects the ruling ideology of the EU. These nations were the infants of Maastricht, born to be European. The insistence by Orbán that he is Hungarian first, and Christian, deeply offended the internationalist and devoutly secular leadership of the EU. This was deviation from the founding principles, which were less about liberal democracy and more about a certain ideology within it…

… The rise of unabashed nationalist regimes cuts directly against the moral project of the European Union, where nationalism was to be a heritage and European the identity. This nationalism was becoming untenable throughout Europe and had to be discredited. But neither the Polish nor Hungarian government was embarrassed, and that made it difficult to discredit their nationalism…

… I don’t know that I would vote for either government if I were Polish or Hungarian. Since I’m not, it doesn’t matter. But it is hard for me to manage the claim that either Poland or Hungary is no longer a liberal democracy, although neither government is liberal. For the EU, there had been a prescribed ideology and both countries have violated it. But they are merely the ones who have openly violated it. The EU’s problem is that others are following. And it is possible that among them might be Germany.

And that should give the stern critics of Poland and Hungary pause. What do they do if Germany passes from the pale?

The problem in talking about anything like this is disentangling ourselves from teleological reasoning (or instincts). It’s more than tempting to look at the great sweep of human history in evolutionary terms and to assume that there is some distinct destination to be reached. This sort of thinking reached a dizzy height after the Cold War ended. Hurrah. Verily the End of History itself! The West’s sensible, moderate, checks-and-balances policies had swept the ideological tables clean, once and for all.

Some 1400 weeks later the bombs go off right in the heart of Brussels, the post-modern European supposedly liberal capital, and the city shuts down.

The point (I think) is that Western liberalism in its broadest definition has grown during long decades of unchallenged and growing political power and success. It’s a philosophy that winners (and only winners) can afford.

For most of my lifetime the main intellectual challenge to the ‘Western model’ was the dreary brutish Soviet system. That collapsed under the weight of its own stupidity, even if bits of it linger on to be used as sly progressive props by President Obama.

However, something quite new is happening. New explicit challenges to the Western way of things are emerging and launching pinpoint attacks that variously sow violence, uncertainty and malice. The most obvious is militant Islamism, but the virulent intolerance from our own hard Left ‘social justice warrior’ tendency is in some ways more insidious. These attacks use cheap disaggregated technology and loose networking to throw established institutions and ideas into disarray.

When countries such as (say) Poland and Hungary look at what multi-culti Brussels has become, they may well tend to ask themselves what the basic deal is. Does modern Europe mean a huge melting-pot with every country humbly accepting unlimited numbers of immigrants and other foreign influences regardless of their loyalties and beliefs, so that their hard-won national identity is steadily diluted and eventually disappears? Why is it OK for non-EU countries including Saudi Arabia and Dubai to set stringent limits on foreigners gaining citizenship to protect their identity, but not OK for EU countries to do the same? Who decides?

In these confusing circumstances, the rise of some sort of ‘nationalism’ at the expense of ‘liberalism’ is inevitable, as the only available way to choose and maintain basic rules across a defined territory. Each country does represent something – no country (yet) represents anything.

Some of these nationalisms will be more obnoxious and exclusive than others, depending on local tensions. V Putin plays freely on such instincts in Russia and beyond, managing to present himself as a ‘strong leader’ that others should emulate. By contrast those who burble on in a post-modern liberal way about the glories of more or less unconfined migration offer no idea how any rule of law principles or even state control might survive the disintegration of national borders under a devastating combination of technological and demographic pressures.

As ideological globally networked fanatics with explosives blow up or otherwise massacre people at random, the confident Panglossian assumptions underpinning the EU project will retreat, compelling a new way of organising pretty much everything.

What will that be?

The state controls needed to maintain ‘national identity’ also lend themselves to state-sponsored systemic economic manipulation. In short, national socialism 2.0. It’s fascinating how that organising principle and blatant apartheid policies based on mumbo-jumbo ideas about race and blood are always so reviled, yet always so fashionable.