After Disruption: Reflection and the Road Ahead.
In 2020, the experience of political, economic and epistemic discontinuity that had been stirred up for years has reached a new climax. We feel more keenly than ever that the decline of the liberal world order, irreversible environmental damage, the distillation of a shared societal dialogue, and indeed COVID-19 are jolting a rethink of the certainties of the post-Cold War years. At the end of a troubled and turbulent twelvemonth, we reflect on disruption: what opportunities and pitfalls does it offer? How does progress occur? How do we deal with the dramatisation of disturbance, or conversely, with the backlash of broken promises?
Disruption is characterised by far-reaching disturbance or interruption of the status quo. It can occur and operate in separate domains, but when we speak of societal, public or financial upsets, it tends to rage through distinct interconnected dimensions. In this context, we will defend three core arguments. To begin with, disruption, as unsettling and disorienting as it can be, also offers a unique opportunity to imagine and implement a fresh set of ideas about society, or, more commonly, to throw away apples that are overripe or rotten. From this angle, we will see that disruption necessitates a stress test of the present order, swinging the door right open for a diagnosis of defective details or deeper chinks in the armour.
Yet, and secondly, the process of disruption is complex, elusive, and unpredictable. Even as it invites individuals and societies at large to contemplate alternatives to the status quo, it can be hard to steer clear of stumbling blocks and eventually stem the torrent. We shall see that democratic consensus and coherent actors are crucial in this process of consolidation. Thirdly, assessing the result is difficult in the eye of the storm. Change is opportunity, especially for media whose revenue models are fuelled by chaos or political actors always looking to see their prior world-views confirmed. Events can be bended in either direction towards elite interests, so we should be careful not to over or underestimate the desirability of the consequences.
As unsettling as we find disruption, it also has a positive effect: the unexpected pressure which crises exert on the status quo also serves as a stress test, allowing us to identify weak links which need repairing or replacing. Of course, it equally is crucial that these fresh ideas are well thought-through. As Boris Johnson, an expert on this very subject, once said, “There are no disasters, only opportunities. And indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”
What, then, has our present experience of disruption taught us about how to do things differently? The COVID-19 pandemic offers important examples. Governments in rich countries have been forced to spend enormous amounts on measures to support individuals and businesses, ranging from furlough schemes to tax breaks. According to IMF projections, government debt across advanced economies is set to increase by 20 percentage points in 2020. On the one hand, this surge in borrowing is raising alarm, especially among parties traditionally advocating fiscal prudence. On the other hand, economists point to record-low interest rates across the developed world, making debt unprecedentedly cheap. Indeed, hopes are being raised that, in rich countries beset by rising income inequality and governments hamstrung by fears of budget deficits, the pandemic might yet usher in a new social contract of a government-led, green, and equitable recovery made affordable by newly affordable debt and/or more progressive wealth and (corporate)-income taxes. To prevent this opportunity from turning into disaster, however, governments must avoid the trap of turning to austerity and ‘fiscal consolidation’ too soon. If they tread this line carefully, the damage wrought on the economy by coronavirus might lead to something altogether better.
In short, the process of turning new ideas into positive change is rarely certain and never neat. Even as ideas gain traction, important obstacles stand in the way of progress becoming entrenched. As we look ahead, this middle stage of the post-disruption trajectory is crucial.
The creation of the liberal world order offers important insights. After the Second World War, a sense that drastic change was necessary to prevent such a disaster from reoccurring was prevalent among elites and publics across the West. The foundation of the UN and related bodies, such as the WHO, as well as the Bretton Woods institutions and the European Coal and Steel Community, created the multilateral framework still governing the liberal world order today. The vision of a more peaceful, democratic, and prosperous world which this set of institutions sought to realise succeeded for several reasons. Firstly, there was a clear elite and popular consensus about the need for change, providing the project with legitimacy and a democratic mandate. Secondly, there were powerful and internally coherent actors able to articulate a consistent agenda who had the capacity to implement the desired changes. In the post-WWII context, the United States, then at the zenith of its relative power, was able to play that role. This combination of conditions turned a good idea into a consensus-driven and enduring new order.
Progress falters when one or more of these conditions is absent. Recent attempts at political transformation across the Middle East and the post-Soviet space have either fizzled out or turned into chaos. Even as the idea of revolution inspired millions, it failed to maintain its momentum as sectarian or ethnolinguistic divisions fractured a brittle consensus, or as opposition leaderships — or foreign powers — failed to set a clear agenda for the way forward. If history teaches us anything, it is that no universal recipe for progress exists. But a recurring theme is that ideas, however imaginative or pertinent, will not lead to progress if they lack democratic sanction and, more prosaically, the power to back them up. This observation is positive inasmuch as lasting, material progress can still happen anywhere; but it should also tell us that, counterintuitively, escaping a quagmire requires not a brash sprint into the unknown but consensus-building and agenda-setting.
Even as wanted or unwanted changes occur, awareness of the gaps and discrepancies between perception and reality is crucial. This misbelief works twofold: we overestimate the insights and progress that crises may or may not deliver, but we equally unduly dwell in doom rooted in exaggeration.
Let us proceed with a word of caution against excessive optimism. In our personal life and our societal dynamics, we tend to overestimate positive trends and extrapolate them into the far-away future. These are the animal spirits that gave rise to the dot-com bubble as well as naive expectations of democratisation and peace in the wake of the Arab Spring. Opportunistic elites can easily exploit this flaw. As Bas Heijne, a Dutch writer, noted in the surge of idealism following the pandemic, hardly anyone asks how they themselves can and should change; the prophets of progress instead focus on the direction in which the misty, blurry ball of society should roll as a result of recent revelations. It should not surprise anyone that usually their compass coincidentally and conventionally fits their precedent ideas or interests. The hodgepodge of excitement and hope of a new future, often accompanied by little critical scrutiny, inevitably results in disappointment, disenfranchisement and distrust when the world turns out to be far less linear and much less buoyant than the carpetbaggers’ greasy rhetoric had indicated. One merely needs to take a look at Tunisia’s Freedom House score to see that fluctuation is as common as continuity, and merely needs to stay one weekend in Sunderland, which overwhelmingly supported Brexit, to recognise that large groups of Britons yet have to taste the sweet fruits of globalisation.
Still, as we temper our initial optimism with these words of caution, we equally feel that anxieties are subject to careless extrapolation and are often overstated as a result. Over two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus famously warned for population growth to outpace agricultural production, causing large-scale famine and war. Instead, income per capita increased with a full order of magnitude and famine numbers in recent decades make up only a tiny snippet of that in preceding eras. Nowadays, fear or perception of disruption still leaves our worries vulnerable to exploitation. Disruption sells; the revenue models from media are powered by clicks and chaos. As a result, the lens through which we perceive wider societal developments is often manipulated by a gloomy filter. On any given day in the past century, it is possible to find a newspaper article telling us the end is near. Placing all of this ominosity into a broader perspective is a great challenge for the individual, but awareness of how the media win their bread is a good first step.
In the coming months, as the whirlwinds of 2020 disperse and we survey a moonscape littered with craters and with plenty of comets still cruising menacingly nearby, it will be tempting to seek security in a restoration of the status quo ante. That would be a mistake. Without being carried away by an abstract idealism or paralysing anxieties, we should continue to believe in real progress whose quality we measure not in terms of speed, or even sweep, but the soundness of the ideas that nourish it and the strength of the coalition that sanctions it. This is not a simple defense of moderation for its own sake; rather, we see an urgent need for change, and believe that this is the best way to overcome disruption and achieve it. The articles contained elsewhere in this edition exemplify a willingness to critically examine our present reality. That is a good start, and we are quietly confident that it will lead somewhere better.
Written by Maurits Westbroek and Simon van Teutem for Idee, the social-liberal journal from the Mr. Hans van Mierlo Stichting.
