resist the temptation of reaction they become vehicles for a progressive agenda that easily degenerates into utopianism.
Thatcher’s career illustrates this development. She never shared the belief that the fall of communism heralded an era of peace, and she ridiculed Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that history had ended. Yet by 1989 she accepted Fukuyama’s view that one type of government was the model for all the rest. Believing that contemporary America embodied the virtues of Britain in the past, she convinced herself thatthe United States could become at the end of the twentieth century what she believed Britain had been in the late nineteenth century –the final guarantor of progress throughout the world. For Thatcher as for Fukuyama this meant that a version of American ‘democratic capitalism’ could be replicated everywhere. From being a reformer she had become an ideologue. This was partly hubris – the inordinate confidence in their own rectitude that is the occupational vice of leaders who have achieved success against the odds – but it also reflected her beliefs. Thatcher was always a firm believer in human progress, and if she had anything like a personal philosophy it was not Tory but Whig. The eighteenth-century Whigs viewed the emergence of English liberty as the result of providential design. It was a belief the Tory David Hume mocked in his
History of England
, where he showed the crucial role of chance events. This sceptical cast of mind was alien to Thatcher, and she came to view the mix of policies she had implemented as a cure for a specifically British disease as an all-purpose panacea. By the time she was ejected from Downing Street the loose set of attitudes and beliefs with which she had begun her career had hardened into a closed system.
The neo-liberal world-view that Thatcher accepted by the end of the 1980s was a successor-ideology to Marxism. Ideological thinking tends to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to society, and so it was at the end of the eighties, when the close of the Cold War gave neo-liberal ideas a catastrophic boost. Led by Thatcher, western governments told the countries of the former Soviet bloc that if they wanted prosperity they had to import the free market. The notion that one set of policies could have the same beneficent results in the widely different countries of the former Soviet bloc was absurd, but it was of a piece with the mind-set in the International Monetary Fund that had imposed similar policies on highly dissimilar countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru. Along with the bureaucrats of the IMF, emissaries were dispatched to post-communist lands carrying the same draft constitution in their briefcases. No matter how discrepant the countries they descended upon these neo-liberal ideologues tried to impose the same model on them all.
While the fall of the Soviet Union was an advance for human freedom, its impact on peace was always going to be mixed. War andethnic cleansing have gone with the transition from dictatorship in many countries. Though the communist collapse itself occurred with remarkably little violence, there was never any reason to think the post-communist world would depart from this pattern. More sober western policies might have mitigated the dangers, but in the triumphal climate of the time there was no taste for realism. Instead a utopian outlook came to be accepted by mainstream political parties.
Utopian thinking is most dangerous when it is least recognized. The emergence in the 1990s of a centrist version of utopianism illustrates this fact. First with neo-liberal economic policies in Russia and then with humanitarian military intervention in the Balkans, western governments embarked on courses of action that had no prospect of success. They were unprepared when the spread of democracy triggered ethnic nationalism in former Yugoslavia, separatism in Chechnya and Islamism in former Soviet Central Asia. Democracy and
Thatcher’s career illustrates this development. She never shared the belief that the fall of communism heralded an era of peace, and she ridiculed Francis Fukuyama’s declaration that history had ended. Yet by 1989 she accepted Fukuyama’s view that one type of government was the model for all the rest. Believing that contemporary America embodied the virtues of Britain in the past, she convinced herself thatthe United States could become at the end of the twentieth century what she believed Britain had been in the late nineteenth century –the final guarantor of progress throughout the world. For Thatcher as for Fukuyama this meant that a version of American ‘democratic capitalism’ could be replicated everywhere. From being a reformer she had become an ideologue. This was partly hubris – the inordinate confidence in their own rectitude that is the occupational vice of leaders who have achieved success against the odds – but it also reflected her beliefs. Thatcher was always a firm believer in human progress, and if she had anything like a personal philosophy it was not Tory but Whig. The eighteenth-century Whigs viewed the emergence of English liberty as the result of providential design. It was a belief the Tory David Hume mocked in his
History of England
, where he showed the crucial role of chance events. This sceptical cast of mind was alien to Thatcher, and she came to view the mix of policies she had implemented as a cure for a specifically British disease as an all-purpose panacea. By the time she was ejected from Downing Street the loose set of attitudes and beliefs with which she had begun her career had hardened into a closed system.
The neo-liberal world-view that Thatcher accepted by the end of the 1980s was a successor-ideology to Marxism. Ideological thinking tends to adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to society, and so it was at the end of the eighties, when the close of the Cold War gave neo-liberal ideas a catastrophic boost. Led by Thatcher, western governments told the countries of the former Soviet bloc that if they wanted prosperity they had to import the free market. The notion that one set of policies could have the same beneficent results in the widely different countries of the former Soviet bloc was absurd, but it was of a piece with the mind-set in the International Monetary Fund that had imposed similar policies on highly dissimilar countries such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Peru. Along with the bureaucrats of the IMF, emissaries were dispatched to post-communist lands carrying the same draft constitution in their briefcases. No matter how discrepant the countries they descended upon these neo-liberal ideologues tried to impose the same model on them all.
While the fall of the Soviet Union was an advance for human freedom, its impact on peace was always going to be mixed. War andethnic cleansing have gone with the transition from dictatorship in many countries. Though the communist collapse itself occurred with remarkably little violence, there was never any reason to think the post-communist world would depart from this pattern. More sober western policies might have mitigated the dangers, but in the triumphal climate of the time there was no taste for realism. Instead a utopian outlook came to be accepted by mainstream political parties.
Utopian thinking is most dangerous when it is least recognized. The emergence in the 1990s of a centrist version of utopianism illustrates this fact. First with neo-liberal economic policies in Russia and then with humanitarian military intervention in the Balkans, western governments embarked on courses of action that had no prospect of success. They were unprepared when the spread of democracy triggered ethnic nationalism in former Yugoslavia, separatism in Chechnya and Islamism in former Soviet Central Asia. Democracy and
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