Age of Revolutions Part II: Chapters 8 & 9 Summary & Analysis

Part II: Revolutions Present
8. Revenge of the Tribes: Identity
9. The Dual Revolutions: Geopolitics

In Chapter 8, Zakaria begins to argue more deliberately for the thesis of the Introduction, that after two centuries of broad acceptance, classical liberalism is facing a backlash. Paradoxically, liberalism itself created (according to Zakaria) the conditions for the backlash, namely sufficient material prosperity for people to start concerning themselves with nonmaterial values, now under threat. (In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, these are values near the top of the pyramid.) Most of these values have to do with group identities of one form or another, including racial, sexual, or religious identities. In the 1960s, the United States’ social landscape was transformed by the Black civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, loosening standards of sexual behavior, and plummeting church attendance.

The backlash was a drawing of battle lines between Blacks and whites, between women and men, and between social and religious conservatives and a growing population of the liberated nonreligious. This dynamic was much the same in Europe, except that instead of Black versus white, there was immigrant versus native-born. Since the 1960s, there has been a turning away from classical liberal values, toward intolerance of religious, intellectual and ethnic differences, and toward resistance to free trade and foreign immigration. In the United States, Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich were early instigators of these developments, but today America’s leading anti-liberal populist is Donald Trump. Zakaria briefly gestures at what he sees as extremism and illiberality on the Left, but his account of the anti-liberal backlash is dominated by purported misdeeds of the Right.

Read an explanation of a key quote from Age of Revolutions (#4) about the rise of populism.

Chapter 9, “The Dual Revolutions,” is about two global developments. The first is the fading of America’s status as the world’s sole superpower and “the return of great-power politics”—that is, the resumption of the position-jockeying of multiple world powers competing more or less as equals. China now has the world’s second-largest economy and is increasingly assertive about its claims and prerogatives as a geopolitical actor. Many other nations, less powerful than China but with growing economies of their own, are behaving more independently than before, with less deference to the United States. Zakaria calls this “the rise of the rest.”

The second revolution in Chapter 9 is the continued, albeit recently sputtering, advance of classical liberalism as a template for international relations. Zakaria traces the spread of this model from its beginnings in the writings of the Dutch stateman and political theorist Hugo Grotius through its later championing by Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The liberal international order is characterized by respect for liberal values in the domestic sphere. In the international sphere, it is characterized by peaceful, mutually beneficial participation in trade, treaties, and multinational organizations such as the United Nations. Thanks to the spread of the liberal order, the percentage of countries that are electoral democracies grew from roughly 25 percent in 1980 to roughly 50 percent in 2010. Over the same time frame, the percentage that are closed autocracies declined from 50 percent to about 15 percent.

Since 2010, however, the advance of classical liberalism has stalled. China, under the leadership of Premier Xi Jinping, has according to Zakaria become repressive in its domestic policies and confrontational in its dealings with other nations. Meanwhile Russia, seeking to recover some of its faded glory, has reasserted a long-standing territorial claim by invading Ukraine. In countries around the world, including India, Turkey, and Brazil, Zakaria sees liberal values in retreat. The question Zakaria poses, and does not try to answer, is which of the dual revolutions described in Chapter 9 will prove more lasting. Will the return of great-power politics in the long run mean the end of a liberal international world order? Or will the liberal order hold and keep international relations mostly (though not entirely) peaceful?

Previous section Part II: Chapters 6 & 7 Next section Conclusion