If history proves freedom enriches, EU oligarchs could impoverish a continent

In the Gulf, Iran shoots down an American drone. In the north African port of Ceuta, Russian warships are permitted by Spain to refuel as they head towards Syria. From the South China Sea to central Asia, a week seldom passes without China asserting herself in new ways.

Lift your eyes above parochial Westminster politics and it becomes clear that a process of geopolitical jockeying is under way. It’s less the Tory leadership contest that should preoccupy us, but the way that new powers vie with America as they challenge an international order that we take for granted.

Why does this matter? Because for the past 40 years the world order has been benign. We have lived through – without always appreciating it – the greatest period of improvement in the condition of humankind ever.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been all sorts of instances of individual suffering, but for most of us, in most places on the planet, life over the past four decades has improved dramatically. We’re living longer: for the first time in human history there are more of us over the age of 60 than there are under five. Living standards have soared. “Post industrial” Brits today are more than twice as rich as our grandparents, and a third better off than we were even 30 years ago.

In the Sixties, China, India and Indonesia could barely feed themselves. Ethiopia had famine 30

years ago. Today, those are some of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Poorer countries have been growing far faster than rich ones – and global inequality has been falling.

The engine of all this progress is our ever-greater interdependence. From Europe to Asia to Africa, incomes have risen in countries as they have moved away from self-sufficiency, importing and exporting more. A process of specialisation and exchange that began in north western Europe in the 16th century – and which was within living memory regarded as being a distinctive characteristic of the Western world – has become a global phenomenon.

But why is it only now that people in places like China or Ethiopia should have started to do what the Dutch and the English began doing three or four hundred years ago?

Extreme poverty is the default setting of every society. Most people that have ever lived only subsisted because most premodern societies were rigged by small parasitic elites. Emperors and pharaohs, princes and priests, lorded it over the productive, extracting what they could. The process of free exchange that today delivers dramatic increases in output per person was inhibited.

This is why few societies before the modern era managed to achieve any sustained increase in wealth. Amid the Malthusian gloom of the Middle Ages, Venice stood out as one such example. Song China and Abbasid Iraq seem to have achieved something similar on a bigger scale – if only briefly. Even further back, there was a significant increase in per capita output in the ancient republics of Rome and Greece.

These societies were exceptional because the power of those at the top was somehow restrained. Greece was a mosaic of separate city states. Rome and Venice had republican constitutions that dispersed power. But as we know, oligarchy reestablished itself and the productive were eventually put at the mercy of the parasitic. Average incomes returned to subsistence levels.

Will the dramatic improvements taking place all around us today continue or will powerful elites reemerge, inhibiting free exchange?

There are some disturbing signs. Russia and Turkey are now essentially autocracies, with all the innovation-sapping implications. Chinese officials behave like Ming mandarins, imposing ever more arbitrary rules, which in time could have a significant impact on growth. But it’s what’s happening in the West that should alarm us most.

Europe is now clearly heading towards a system of technocracy, a tiny elite ordering the lives of 500million Europeans by blueprint. The notion that Europe is democratic by default is starting to look like a polite post-war fiction. Maybe it was just Anglo-American arms that made things that way for a while: half a century on, Europe’s political tradition seems decidedly Habsburg.

Within Britain and America there is a growing insistence that we should order things by blueprint, too. A radical Left now venerates redistributive exchange over free, and climate change is fast becoming an excuse to do things by design. If unchecked, this will serve as a pretext to put more power in the hands of small elites, which is what always ends up arresting human progress.

Douglas Carswell’s book Progress Vs Parasites is published by Head of Zeus.

Lift your eyes above parochial Westminster politics and it becomes clear that a process of geopolitical jockeying is under way