Donald Trump’s policies have upended relations with Europe, with many commentators declaring “the end of the West.” But the end of the West is not limited to geopolitics. Andy Owen argues that the end of the West means the end of a more than 2000-year in the making system of thought: liberal humanism. Liberal humanism has as its features a quasi-religious faith in progress, the power of reason, universal human rights, the moral primacy of Western-style democracy, free markets, and the unbounded potential of technology. This system of thought has its roots all the way back in Ancient Greece. We could be witnessing it end today. Andy Owen here argues for what should replace it.
The international rules-based order that was born from the ashes of the first atomic bombs is fragmenting. The former US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, described this order as: “The system of laws, agreements, principles and institutions that the world came together to build after two world wars to manage relations between states, to prevent conflict, to uphold the rights of all people.” This notion of an “international order”, long seen as absurd in much of the developing world, now seems undefendable by even the most optimistic western diplomat. In his nascent second term, President Trump is accelerating a longer process of the collapse of this order and the more recent post-Cold War American hegemony. Trumpism is accelerating us towards a world where brute force matters more than international law, and how much things cost matters more than shared values. The US is still militarily and economically strong, but the geopolitical system it once supported is increasingly closer to anarchy than order.
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We are now also witnessing a fragmenting of "liberal humanism" the dominant set of Western ideas as to how we should live, leading many to question some fundamental "truths" that Western society, or certainly the English-speaking countries within it, are based on.
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We are moving into what many leaders are calling a "multipolar world", where states cluster around three or more global powers, motivated by survival and mutual benefit rather than ideology. I believe a better description is a “multi-matrixed” world, where states are developing relationships with different partners, who often do not share their values and can even contradict them, on matters of security, trade, and energy. These relationships can be with states or multinational corporations, and partners in one area or on one issue can be direct competitors or adversaries in another. Throughout history periods of transition have created uncertainty and violence. Wars tend to concentrate at these times. This period is unlikely to be different.
This fragmenting, though, is more than the breaking up of political alliances and international norms. Whether justified or not, those states who policed the international order supposedly set a moral example of how to best organise a society within a nation-state. We are now also witnessing a fragmenting of "liberal humanism" the dominant set of Western ideas as to how we should live, leading many to question some fundamental "truths" that Western society, or certainly the English-speaking countries within it, are based on.
5th March 2025
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