3
Utopia Enters the Mainstream

A belief that a single economic and political system was coming into being throughout the world began to shape the policies of western governments from the late 1980s onwards. An expression of the Enlightenment faith that humanity is evolving towards a universal civilization that, in a different form, shaped communist regimes, it was strengthened rather than weakened by the Soviet collapse. A confident expectation that liberal democracy was spreading worldwide dominated the nineties, and the events of 9/11 triggered an attempt to accelerate the process throughout the Middle East. If the débâcle in Iraq has undermined these hopes the rise of authoritarian Russia and China has shattered the assumption that post-communist countries are bound to take western institutions as their model. Yet, despite this refutation by history, the myth that humanity is moving towards adopting the same values and institutions remains embedded in western consciousness.

It is a belief that has been defended in many theories of modernization, but it is instructive to recall the many incompatible forms this ultimate convergence has been expected to take. Marx was certain it would end in communism, Herbert Spencer and F. A. Hayek that its terminus would be the global free market, Auguste Comte was for universal technocracy and Francis Fukuyama ‘global democratic capitalism’. None of these end-points was reached, but that has not dented the certainty that some version of western institutions will eventually be accepted everywhere – indeed, with every historical refutation it is more adamantly asserted. The communist collapse was a decisive falsification of historical teleology, but it was followed by another version of the same belief that history is moving towards a species-wide civilization. Similarly, disaster in Iraq has only buttressed the conviction that the world faces a generational ‘Long War’ to defeat terrorism and establish western government everywhere. History continues to be seen as a process with a built-in goal.

Theories of modernization are not scientific hypotheses but theo-dicies – narratives of providence and redemption – presented in the jargon of social science. The beliefs that dominated the last two decades were residues of the faith in providence that supported classical political economy. Detached from religion and at the same time purged of the doubts that haunted its classical exponents, the belief in the market as a divine ordinance became a secular ideology of universal progress that in the late twentieth century was embraced by international institutions.

The conviction that humanity was entering a new era did not begin in the upper reaches of world politics. As damagingly utopian as any earlier grand design for humanity, this late twentieth-century faith in a global free market was born more humbly, in the struggle to replace the failing post-war settlement in Britain.