Book: The Retreat of Western Liberalism
Author: Edward Luce
Review by: Shelby Grubbs, outgoing executive director of the Atlanta Center for Arbitration and Mediation; managing member, Miller & Martin PLLC.
Edward Luce of The Financial Times begins this book about what he sees as a serious threat to our liberal economic tradition with an entertaining anecdote.
In 1991, along with some other students at Oxford, he drove to Germany to witness the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Certainly, Luce believes the destruction of the wall was for the greater good, but he is concerned that the West has failed to deal with the full implications of its victory in the Cold War.
Principal among those implications: an unprecedented level of competition for work previously performed by a relatively well-paid Western middle class as a result of labor from the Soviet empire, plus pressure from China and India entering a global workforce.
Consequently, Luce notes, “Tthere is no assurance that the circumstances of our children can be maintained, let alone improved.” Nor, in his view, can we be sure “our economic circumstances will inevitably trend upwards; Democracy will inevitably win out…”
The result he sees is an erosion of the confidence among Western voters about the ability of liberal economic institutions to deliver prosperity. To Luce, recent developments – Brexit, autocratic rulers in Eastern Europe, the election of a president arguably hostile our institutions – are symptoms, not the cause, of a growing loss of faith in those institutions.
The Retreat of Western Liberalism posits a lucid argument in favor of rethinking how we equip ourselves to compete globally and how the fruits of globalization are distributed. Luce is pessimistic about whether our present leaders will be up to the challenge, given our divisive and acrimonious politics. His points are crisply and compellingly argued in a book short enough to read – but not necessarily digest – in the course of an evening.
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