‘Argentina has the world record for longevity of populism, over 70 years.’
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH HISTORIAN AND POLITICAL WRITER TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
The current global ecosystem reflects the triumphs and failures of the 20th century, where the Soviet Union and the United States battled for economic, political, and cultural dominance. Yet, the end of history never arrived, rather, things became even more complex and uncertain. Capitalism overcame Communism, but began to suffer deformations that have created momentous inequality and the concentration and centralisation of power in the hands of a few, a trend exacerbated by globalisation.
Western hegemony is in crisis. Enter Timothy G ar ton Ash,an“historia noft he present” who acutely documented the en doft he ColdWarandt he consolidati onof Europea saunified bloc. Aselfpr oc laimedlib era linterna ti onalist,G arton Ash has continued to ex am in et he defining trends of our times, acknowledging capitalism and globalisation’s shortcomings but still believing them to be a positive force, with some modifications. His research into free speech behind the Iron Curtain also gives him a perfect viewpoint from which to analyze the implications of the rise of Google and Facebook on privacy and freedom.
Garton Ash came to Buenos Aires in the context of Argentina 2030, an initiative by the Office of the Cabinet Chief to generate alternative spaces for dialogue and debate with some of the world’ most renown intellectuals, and sat with the
Times for a chat.
Since capitalism has become the dominant economic system in the world, supported by representative democracies, we have seen a concentration of economic power that has benefitted the wealthy. How do we reconcile liberal global is a ti onwit ha worldt ha ti sin creasingly more unequal?
Well, it’s the key question of our time because specifically western democratic capitalism in its globalised form, what I call ‘financialised globalisation,’ has become two things: it’s globalisation and it’s a financialisation of capitalism, right? So more and more it’s about money and financial products rather than things.
T he effectoff in anci ali sed global isat ion has been to produce increased inequality with the top few percent doing incredibly well,bothwit hinco untriesand worldwide, andan in creas ingc losen essbetweenpoli tic ale lites and financia le lites, an intertwining of political and financial elites. And the people who are voting for Donald Trump or Brexit or the populist parties across Europe are partly protesting about that. That’s what they are very much against. Like Heinz soups there are five to seven varieties of capitalism. And there is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t develop a different model of “There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t develop a different model of capitalism which does not that have that extreme inequality and intertwining of the financial and political elites.” capitalism which does not that have that extreme inequality and does not have that intertwining of the financial and political elites.
How would that happen?
I think that we are in the middle of a digital revolution. This is transforming the world of work, destroying a lot of existing jobs – maybe not creating new ones – and I think we have to think quite radically so, for example, ideas that come from the left like a universal basic income, or a minimum inheritance guaranteed by the state, or a job guarantee, combined with taxes, inheritance taxes, higher taxes on the rich, combined with stricter rules of what politicians are allowed to do and their relationships with business. Enforcing the rules that are there and simply are not enforced. So if you take a country like Britain, where traditionally politicians and civil servants would have a long interval before they went off and did another job, these days they go straight off to work in the banks or the financial services which they were regulating the day before. You can imagine the effects of that. I think that’s part of why people are pushing back against populism – and I know I’m using populism negatively.
Do you think tthe deeper polarisation we’re seeing across the globe is a consequence of liberal globalisation?
Why, in different countries, in different societies, with very different dividing lines, you keep getting these 50/50 splits, these tribal splits, countries keep dividing in halves? Part of the answer is that advanced societies have, in a way, split in half. Half the society went to university, went to live in the city, globalised, cosmopolitan, and really feels they have more in common with elites in other countries than they do with the other half of their societies.
So on et hingwe–lib era linterna ti onalists–gotw ron gisthatwe ha ven eglectedt he otherh al fofo urs ocie ti es inf avo ur of the other half of the planet. But there’s another part of the story, which is the hyper-polarisation of the media. Something has happened to the media so that if you take the American media landscape, if you watch Fox News, you listen totalkra dio, yo ureadBreitbart, yo u have one view of the world, one set of
facts, you think the economy was doing worse under Obama and is now doing well under Trump. If you read the New
York Times, listen to NPR, you think the opposite, one set of facts.
How do you imagine that liberal globalisation can be implemented in a country like Argentina such a large welfare state which we can’t pay for? Can globalisation work for a peripheral nation or is it only for the rich countries?
It’s nota ver ygood idea to divide up the cake before you have a cake, I was talking about a situation where you have a lot of cake and the question is how do you divide it up. So first you’ve got to have the basic structure of wealth creation. About Argentina, economists have this phrase: ‘The advantages of backwardness.’ I’m not saying by that that Argentina is a backward country. What I’m saying is, you can learn from other people’s mistakes and see what they got right. There’s a famous joke about an American tour iststopp in gata cross roads in rural Ireland and asking for directions and this old farmer he stops his bike and says ‘If I was you, I wouldn’t start from here.’ In a way, that’s your problem. You wouldn’t want to start from here to get there.
What is your take on Peronismo?
Probablyth el ongest-r un ning popul is mint he world. Yo uh a vea world record for longevity for populism – I can’t think of another country in the world where populism has been keeping going for so long, 70 years. It’s obviously been a deep, historical problem for Argentina. You ha veto reform–an das fara s I can se e, I think what President Macri is trying to do is the right way togo– butdon’tneglect the other half of your society, don’t neglect your people along the way and don’t make the same mistakes that dynamic, Western economies have made in recent years. Also, you mentioned ‘peripheral,’ now an economic historian would call it peripheral but we’re in a different world now where the geometry is kind of different because there’s no longer this one single core, the West, whi chis prospero us andmodern,th ere arecomp et ingmodernities. T her e’ sC hin a,whichi sin ves ting in Argentina and elsewhere, it’s a question of where do you position yourself.
But how would you pitch liberal globalisation to a middle class Argentine who hears the Western powers speak wonders of President Macri, yet sees inflation is worsening, a deepening re- cession, the dollar becoming ever more expensive?
I don’t have an easy answer for that. But I think one of the mistakes we made over the last 40 years is what I might call ‘scientism’: believing that running economies or running societies is like a computer science and that economics is the science that tells you how to do it. And what you’re seeing here is the human factor, everything you dislike – the problem with the currency, the problem with foreign investors – is about the human factor. It’s about trust and imagination, people have a certain distrust of what’s going to happen in Argentina because of that long history that we’ve described. So you have to take into account that human factor.
Do you believe profit-seeking firms like Google and Facebook could be harming free speech while generating the conditions for manipulation?
I spend every Summer at Stanford University in Silicon Valley and I work a lot, particularly with Facebook, so I’ve just come a few days ago from Facebook where I was talking to them about these is su es.Stepbackfor amo ment.Forh und red sof ye ars,thequ es ti onoff re es pee ch was about the state, political power. Before that, it was the Church. It’s been the state. What does the state allow me to say? And what doesn’t it allow me? Now, yo urf re es pee chand mine is as mucha product,a con sequen cesofwhatF acebook allows meto sayas muchaswhat a government allows me to say. And the position until now is that Facebook has been making non-transparent, non-accountable, non-appealable decisions about what I can say on Facebook for more than two billion people. And that’s completely without precedent. That’s not satisfactory.
They’re quasi-monopolies. So here I agree with you too. We were originally on content, but the other part of it is competition. What you can’t do then is have them just buying up the competition. Facebook and Google now own WhatsApp and Instagram and in my work on free speech I’ve travelled all over the world - Asia, Africa, Middle East, the Americas - and wherever you go, it’s the same story: People in their 20s and 30s are on Facebook and if they’re younger they’re on Instagram and WhatsApp, right? So I absolutely think we should think about creating more competition. And the first thing to do would be to take apart Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram etc.