Globalisation of ideas

Is global nemesis an idea whose time has come?

In a discussion with an American on the issues facing their imminent elections, they said, “It is our democracy; it is ours to lose!” I responded as follows.

No, it's not yours to lose. It is ours as well. You perhaps, through modesty, I might add, underestimate the extent to which democracy in the US is held up as a model for the world. If democracy were to fail in the US, many another democracy would fail in its wake and many of us would get wet with the enormous splash that would be created.

“I repeat, it is ours to lose. You disagree?” they asked.

“Yes, I disagree,” I said. “Ukraine's war is not Ukraine's. Roe v Wade was not an American court case. The Spanish empire was not Spain's. And American democracy was a major mover in the French revolution that sought democracy, and that gave birth to the 1848 revolutions. Because these things are not just an election, or a war, or a court case, or an empire, or a revolution; they are ideas, and ideas spread like wildfire.

“The Ukraine war is being fought by much of the world against much of the rest of the world, not just between Ukraine and Russia.

“The Spanish empire gave birth to the French empire, the British empire, the Portuguese empire, the Belgian empire, the Italian empire, the German empire.

“Roe v Wade spurred abortion legislation across the world, including Belgium, where I live. What will its reversal bring I wonder? Hungary spends 5% of GDP - 5% if you will - on encouraging women to marry and have children. Childless couples are now social pariahs there.

“The big shift to the right in politics is the product of right-wing dictatorship no longer being a notion restricted to banana republics in central America, it's now a recognised legitimacy in countries like Italy, Sweden, Hungary, and in many places where it hasn't yet declared itself as such, but where the enemy of the state has become the state.

“If the USA allows democracy as an idea worth upholding to perish to where it is nothing but a vague label, then not only will you Americans have a job of work to re-establish it in the USA, we will all have a job of work to re-establish it across the globe.

“Yes, I disagree: America's democracy is the world's democracy and, aside from Switzerland, virtually the first one ever to appear on the Earth's surface. Don't let it go from us.”

I referred them to this piece, which I wrote on 5 August 2022:

“Abortion is not an issue in Belgium. It is allowed, under certain medically assured conditions. In a country in which the predominant religion is Roman Catholicism, with a Roman Catholic King, whose uncle abdicated for a few days to allow the legislation to be passed. Baudouin was religiously conscientious enough to be unwilling to sign the abortion law into his country’s legislation, and constitutionally unwilling to decree against the will of his people’s duly elected representatives. It’s vaunted as the great “Belgian compromise”, as a win-win; on another view, it was a compromise, yes, but a lose-lose. A compromise is, after all, always a lose-lose, otherwise where's the compromise? The introduction of abortion rights into Belgium came, however, in a move by this country to align with thinking that had gradually pervaded much of the rest of the world: it was not a go-it-alone initiative by the Belgian legislature, of that I am reasonably certain.

“Abortion rights are big news elsewhere in the world. As is war. As is gas, and fuel bills and the cost of living, monkey pox and Covid-19. It would have been a brave man who, when all these issues started to become of concern, would have contended that they exclusively affect “a far-off country of which we know little” (as Neville Chamberlain described Czechoslovakia in 1938, with Nazi troops marching into the Sudetenland). We have learned in the intervening 80 or so years to be more reticent about denying that events in one country can affect circumstances in another. For now, abortion rights appear to be safe and secure in Europe, or as safe and secure as they ever were.

“A week ago, I attended a semi-open-air performance of the Verdi opera “La Traviata”, at which I shared the experience with a young family who had ridden in on their “bakfiets” – a cargo bike that held the parents and their young 2-year-old daughter. A second child was on its way, still in mum’s tum. I offered congratulations. They were a mixed family of German and Flemish parents, the daughter yattering away in German and Flemish and French, Belgium's three national languages: an ideal picture of the modern Belgian family, riding to an opera on a bike. The couple had not availed themselves of the right accorded to them by law to abort their second child; it would have seemed tasteless, to the point of causing offence, to have enquired why they had waived that right, a right being fought for so very vehemently in another part of the world. In two months’ time, all being well, the baby will be born, and I guess a second bike will need to be acquired.

“On one side of the Atlantic, and in Kansas in particular, women are fighting tooth and nail for a right – not an obligation – but a right to do with their bodies as they please in terms of child birth; and on the other side, mothers are happily waiving these rights – by their own free choice. The only question in all of this is whether the moves being made on one side of the world could at some time come to affect circumstances as they exist on the other. Effectively, does globalisation affect not just trade and commerce, but does it have a more insidious subliminal effect on matters not directly related to trade? I have no assurance that it doesn’t, and no particular view that it does – only time tells in these things. The globalisation of trade has certainly affected the entire globe; the war in Ukraine may yet spread - whether around the globe or in a more localised fashion remains to be seen. Covid-19 turned global, just as monkey pox is doing; the shift to the right in politics is rising from the localised to the more generalised. For now, the only reassurance in all of this is that the “Fallen Woman” was on that day merely a character in an operatic work by Joe Green. On that day.”

King Baudouin of the Belgians (reigned 1951-1993)