Isaiah Berlin Lecture, Riga
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
(Constantin Cavafy, Waiting for the Barbarians)
—
The barbarians are gone. The Soviet occupation of the captive nations is a distant memory and for twenty years now, the Baltic peoples have been resuming their Hanseatic history as free cities and their inter war history as free states. As the 19th century Russian liberal philosopher Alexander Herzen said and Isaiah Berlin liked to repeat, history has no libretto, but you have reason to hope that there will be no turning back.
Now, twenty years later, we can begin to understand why the barbarians were a kind of solution. They forced us to remember what freedom was and to imagine what it could be once again.
Now we face a new challenge: how to conserve liberal freedoms once our citizens feel safe enough to take them for granted. The barbarians are no longer there to remind us how precious freedom is. People’s memories of the barbarians will grow dim; people everywhere may find the liberal state tedious.
This is a challenge not just for newly free states, but for old established ones. The liberal task—deliberation, compromise, respecting rights and due process—often seems uninspiring. What people find boring, they are not likely to defend with any passion and they might throw away from carelessness.
So while the barbarians were at the gates, they reminded us who we were. Now that they are gone, it is up to us all to remember who we are, why liberty matters, why it is a discipline worth keeping to, even when our own sinews tell us to relax.
There is much to give us the feeling that we are free to create our own future. But there are new arrivals in the neighborhood, and no one can be sure that these neighbors will respect our fences and our freedoms.
Liberal democracy’s decisive new encounter is no longer with totalitarianism of the left or the right, which defined liberalism throughout the 20th century, but now with new regimes that have no historical precedent: post-Communist oligarchies—Russia and China– that have no ideology other than enrichment; regimes that are recalcitrant to the global order; predatory on their own society and dependent for their stability, not on institutions, since there are none that are independent of the ruling elite, but on growth itself, on the capacity of the economic machine to distribute enough riches to enough people; regimes whose legitimacy is akin to that of a bicyclist on a bicycle. As long as they keep pedaling, they keep moving; if they stop, they fall off.
In both Russia and China, rising real incomes have replaced ideology as the key to post-Communist legitimacy. Yet wealth is an unstable source of legitimacy. Since both regimes are predatory, wealth is highly concentrated in those with access to power. Ostentatious wealth, built on corruption, power concentrated in few hands and unconstrained by institutions, is not a recipe for stability at home or peaceful relations abroad.
Both China and Russia are societies in which power is stacked: political power confers economic, social and cultural power. They remain single-party states, emptied of the ideology of communism, yet imbued with the same Leninist attitude to power. Leninism dies hard, but sheer ruthlessness is a brittle basis for legitimacy.
Both Russia and China are attempting to demonstrate a novel proposition: that economic freedoms can be severed from political and civil freedom, and that freedom is divisible.
The liberal democratic creed is that freedom is indivisible. What this means is the inter-dependence of political and economic liberty, the inter-dependence of majority rule and minority rights, the interconnection between rule of law and democratic sovereignty.
China and Russia both pose a strategic challenge to this belief, and the shape of the twenty first century will be determined by which side is right.
So a critical question for liberal society becomes how do we define ourselves in relation to these new forms of domination—Russian and Chinese—how do we understand them and live in peace beside them?
We should be asking this question, but instead we leave the answer instead to commerce and capitalism, trusting that as we create contracts and economic relationships, the fundamental question of how liberal societies should relate to non-liberal ones will resolve itself.
The generation that came to maturity in 1945—Berlin’s generation—thought differently. They thought that the question of how liberal societies should relate to non-liberal powers could not be left to fate and the global division of labor, but was a political, strategic, and moral issue to be decided by democratic peoples.
Isaiah Berlin did not live to see these new tyrannies arise in Russia and China and he would have trouble recognizing the world we now inhabit—post 9/ll , post-meltdown, post liberal in so many ways–but he did know a lot about living beside barbarians. His Cold War liberalism has much to teach us still.
The first lesson is that history has no libretto. We should not assume there is any historical inevitability to liberal society, any more than it made sense to predict in 1950, say, that both Chinese and Russian totalitarianism were doomed to crumble. Berlin refused to make any such predictions.
Berlin counsels us to be humble about history. Since no one predicted the direction these societies have taken, no one can be sure that either will evolve towards anything remotely like a liberal democratic order.
To say that history has no libretto is not a counsel of pessimism. Berlin’s historical humility was always paired with a strong belief in the efficacy of freedom. Leadership, he knew, could bend the arc of history, if not always towards justice, at least away from tyranny. While he admired leadership in the exercise of power—Churchill and Roosevelt—his deepest sympathies were reserved for those who used leadership to undermine power.
It matters to give help to those who campaign for the rule of law, not the rule of men, who want poor villagers to be fairly compensated for expropriations of their land, who want ordinary people to have the right to read anything they want on the Internet, who want free and fair elections and an end to the rule of billionaire oligarchs.
History is not necessarily on the side of these liberal values, but fighting for them remains a moral duty. We do this because history is on nobody’s side, and freedom needs all the help it can.
If this seems a defiant stance towards the new tyrannies in China and Russia, and it is, then we need to learn from Berlin how to balance resolution toward tyranny with openness towards what these societies can teach us. This balance between firmness and openness is the equilibrium the liberal temperament is always seeking and a liberal foreign policy should always aim for. Berlin is as good a guide as any as to how this equilibrium is achieved and maintained.
Liberalism’s enemies always portray a liberal temperament as quivering equivocation, flowing from an emollient desire to be all things to all people. While liberal tolerance can look a lot like appeasement, Berlin shows us how it is possible to combine tolerance with firmness. The true pairing of tolerance should be with curiosity, with an appetite to learn from beliefs we cannot share. Berlin’s liberal temperament sought that balance but it did not come easily to him. He used to castigate his own desire to please, to see the other side’s point of view. But he did know where to draw the line.
He supported NATO, American missile deployments in Europe and in 1958 told a young campaigner for nuclear disarmament that “ I am not at all a pacifist, and believe that some wars are fully justified, not merely wars of defence. . .. but even preventive wars. . .where the probability of aggression from the other side is very high or where the political system inflicts a very great deal of suffering upon a very great many persons.” He went on: “Unless there is some point at which you are prepared to fight against whatever odds, and whatever the threat may be, not merely to yourself but to anybody, all principles become flexible, all codes melt. . . .”
He also stood against those on the British Left who thought that Communist societies that sacrificed liberty might nonetheless be considered to be progressive to the degree that they delivered to their people the goods of social equality. He would have none of that either. Two Concepts of Liberty”, his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor at Oxford in 1958, has to be read, in the context of his arguments with Western friends on the Left, as the claim that those who are prepared to sacrifice liberty for the sake of equality will end up with neither. As he told his friend, Stephen Spender, in 1958, right after the lecture, “the proposition that I cannot be happy unless everyone else is happy too, or cannot tolerate being free unless everyone else is free too, is to reject freedom ultimately in the face of equality, or else to assume that these things can be married to each other, when no one has any reasons for supposing this to be true.”
If liberty came first, and if it meant freedom from interference—it also had to mean freedom to, self-determination for captive nations. Here his Zionism rescued his liberalism from individualism, giving him special sympathy for the idea that individuals cannot be free—to speak their own language, to worship their own faith, to conserve what is uniquely valuable to them about their heritage and culture—unless they possess self-determination as a people.
But he did not believe that the West needed an ideology or creed to oppose the Soviets and refused to enlist in any attempt to create one. This is because he believed, as individuals, that we identified a number of ultimate, and sometimes competing, ends worth pursuing and even fighting for. The ability to hold onto principles without believing that they were eternally sanctioned by history or by religion, the ability to defend them rationally without succumbing to ideological inflation was for Berlin the mark of a liberal mind.
It is noteworthy that he opposed the Soviet regime without ever losing his admiration for the Russian people and for their art and literature. Cold War liberalism made him more, not less curious about the Russian people, more not less admiring of the heroic resistance of the magnificent few who stood up to Stalin and his heirs.
The larger point is that he did not believe the barbarians were a kind of solution. He thought it was dangerous to organize one’s mind into fixed and immoveable categories of “us” and “them”, still worse to believe that without a “them” there can be no “us”.
Communists divide world into friends and enemies. Lenin famously said that the key distinction in politics is who/whom, hammer or anvil. Totalitarians of all kinds divide the world in this way.
Liberals refuse to treat opponents as enemies. They see their antagonists differently, as persons who must sometimes be opposed, and with force if necessary, but also as persons who might be persuaded to change their minds, and who, in any case, must be lived with, if they cannot be changed.
In the domestic politics of liberal societies, we need to maintain this distinction between opponent and enemy. Democracy cannot function without opposition, and the opposition must be given the presumption of loyalty.
Likewise, on the international stage, observing the distinction between enemies and opponents is vital in any situation short of actual war. In war, we have enemies. Short of war, they are opponents, and we are in the domain of politics, that is to say, in the domain of negotiation, bargaining, compromise and where compromise is impossible ‘agreeing to disagree’.
What Berlin’s Cold War liberalism has to teach us is that in international relations with opponents we should practice politics, not war, politics, not religion.
Nothing is gained by pretending that Russia and China are not the chief strategic threat to the moral and political commitments of liberal democracies. We should understand this threat for what it is. We are faced with political opponents, and if our belief in freedom is grounded in the facts, we will win. We must avoid the temptation of believing that we cannot know who we are unless we have barbarians to define ourselves against. We have no need of barbarians. We have no need of enemies. We know who we are and we know what we should defend by force of argument, and only at the last resort, with force of arms.
Cold War liberalism remains a useable past, even though the Cold War is over and no one would ever want to resurrect it or return global society to the hair-trigger tensions of the era or its bloody proxy wars. It remains a useable past because there is a temperament we have need of: humility about history, firmness to stand against wrong and the openness to engage and learn from those we oppose. Berlin incarnated this temperament, and living within its disciplines, would stand us in good stead as we face challenges from new forms of oppression that he never lived to see.