Alberto Mingardi paints a rose-colored picture.
While no government adhered religiously to the principles of laissez faire, nineteenth-century Europe represents perhaps the best approximation of the ideal. Free trade, championed by England, swept away most protectionist measures; durable goods and people moved virtually freely. Passports were viewed as relics of an odious past—only states like Russia and the Ottoman Empire issued them. A Victorian idea prevailed: individuals should put checks on themselves, without state interference. John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer became household names among the educated class. Europe thrived in a period unshackled by government controls, with millions able to afford new and more sophisticated goods, including products created by an ongoing technological revolution.
Mingardi’s essay reviews Norman Stone’s analysis of the decline of liberalism starting in the 1870s and draws some parallels to the present environment.
Hmmmm…the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier “free trade” treaty set a ceiling of 30 percent on French tariffs on British products and reduced British tariffs to about 5 percent. It only lasted to 1892. “The Myth of Free-Trade Britain” by John V.C. Nye dated March 3, 2003 at the Econlib web site offers useful context in evaluating Mingardi’s claims.
edgar’s reference: The Myth of Free-Trade Britain by John V.C. Nye.
This is the second time recently you’ve posted a link to something you’re talking about. I wish more people would do that.
(Posting a link is easy once you’ve done it five or ten times.)
In Edgar’s defence, there are many good reasons besides knowhow and gumption that keep posters from adding proper links. Responding on a mobile device is a big one since adding angle brackets is a pain in the butt on virtual thumb keyboards. A second is the lack of editing functionality; if you make an error its there forever. A third is the overzealous moderation module that leaves posts in limbo mainly because of links.
Edgar obviously put in some serious effort writing out all the information required for a search. For those of us on a device with a mouse and real keyboard, it only takes a few seconds to add the link in a reply once we’ve opened the article.
In the spirit of State Capacity Libertarianism and/or Informal Institutions, I think it is a positive-sum convention to post without links in hopes that someone in the community will add the link if its convenient for them. I certainly don’t mind doing it.
I didn’t know that about phones (I don’t have one).
I finally got a chance to read the John V.C. Nye piece. My favorite quote from The Wealth of Nations specifically addresses Nye’s cynicism:
The Wealth of Nations, Book IV – Of Systems of Political Economy, Chapter VII – Of Colonies
The historical timelines that Nye chose seem odd to me. Sometime around 1776 the world changed in terms of Nation States and Industrialization. The change was gradual. Global Industrialized Cotton, the true driver of the 1st Industrial Age IMHO, didn’t really hit mainstream growth until around 1830 and the same can probably be said about the importance of the Unites States globally. Focusing on wine tariffs several generations before 1776 seems wrong. Skipping over the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars afterwards seems wrong as well; unilateral free trade normally involves nations not engaged in belligerent wars. We can’t pretend geopolitics didn’t exist. Adam Smith argued for both unilateral free trade and military training so I don’t think he was a pacifist and I don’t think he would have argued for the free movement of goods with an enemy you are at war with.
The early history of the Unites States is filled with events driven by the geopolitics between Great Britain and France. I think Smith’s point about Great Britain being less illiberal applies; the gap between it and the next least illiberal state was much wider than it is now. It may not have been a perfect golden age for free trade but I think something special happened during that time.
While I agree it is completely rose colored picture of the late 19th century Europe, it is important to remember that a lot of the population was comparing their lives to pre-1850 realities.
1) Late 19th Century was the first era in which the working classes saw some wage increases and especially the increase of life expectancy. The pre-Malthus reality is death was constant of life and it is hard to understand that 43% of your children were dead before age 1. So every family buried numerous family members in their lifetime.
2) The post 1848 to WW1 was a relatively peaceful time between European nations and long wars were limited. (Now there was constant colonial wars though.)
3) The one reality I still don’t understand of the era is why so many European nations joined WW1. There are all kinds reasonable theories but the whole continent all decided to declare on each other in the fall 1914. (Most good theories probably have a kernal of truth to them but it really does seem like the government heads were not prepared for the realities of WW1.)
Collin, I always appreciate your focus on the historical context (the path dependencies in my techie-nerd mind).
I tried to answer your third question in response to Robin Hanson’s post Will War Return?. Hanson is fully convinced that Peter Turchin’s secular cycles theory of war is correct. Steven Pinker describes this type of belief as the “hydraulic theory of war”. I don’t dispute Turchin’s data but I think its predictive power of his theory borders on numerology given the impact of the twin mega-trends I describe: 1. Nation-State Formation, and 2. Industrialization.
I fleshed out my ideas a bit more in a response to a second post by Hanson a few days later Big War Remains Possible.
Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday said similar things about the Europe of that period, but more from the perspective of the artistic community, which benefitted from the freedom of movement that prevailed in that era. Onerous manifestations of nationalism, such as passports, were a sorry consequence of WWI.
Zweig: “As never before, thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million, in that hour felt that they were participating in world history, in a moment which would never recur, and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another on the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning.”
Zweig says in a letter (to Kippenberg, 1914) that his greatest happiness would be to ride as an officer: “My great ambition, however, is to be an officer over with you in that army, to conquer in France–in France particularly, the France that one must chastise because one loves her.”
In his first attempt he’s rejected as medically unfit. Rib surgery.
So he needs to use his connections. He gets a uniform after all, and serves in the War Archives Office.
Zweig: “I have no hatred for Russia, for she, like Germany, is fighting for an enlarged nationhood; but France fights for her image, her frivolity, and England for her money bags.”
Zweig’s nationalism is also anti-American: “America is the source of that terrible wave of uniformity that gives everyone the same: the same overalls on the skin, the same book in the hand, the same pen between the fingers, the same conversation on the lips, and the same automobile instead of feet. From the other side of our world, from Russia, the same will to monotony presses ominously in a different form: the will to the compartmentalization of the individual, to uniformity in world views, the same dreadful will to monotony.”
Reading Zweig is useful for putting ourselves in the shoes of those who, unlike Zweig, never published or even set down their thoughts.
Zweig: “The characteristic habits of individual peoples are being worn away, native dress giving way to uniforms, customs becoming international. Countries seem increasingly to have slipped simultaneously into each other; people’s activity and vitality follows a single schema; cities grow increasingly similar in appearance. Paris has been three-quarters Americanized, Vienna Budapested: more and more the fine aroma of the particular in cultures is evaporating, their colorful foliage being stripped with ever-increasing speed, rendering the steel-grey pistons of mechanical operation, of the modern world machine, visible beneath the cracked veneer.”
These are fantastic quotes. It emphasizes the formation of new nation-states as a key mega-trend of this period but also clearly demonstrates the nature of the bottom-up national sentiment that enabled their military power.
I think we take for granted that modern day nationality is synonymous with citizenship. This was not always the case.
Wow, good stuff. Perhaps I misread The World of Yesterday, or, perhaps Zweig was a more complex, contradictory character than I’ve had chance to discover.
I’ve been reading up on World War One to mark the 100th anniversary. One hundred years ago now it was 1920, so time’s up, apparently. Time to start reading about Prohibition, probably.
Lately I’ve been reading Tim Blanning’s _The pursuit of glory_ in which he mentions, among other things, that the unification of Germany around Prussia by Bismarck, and the German vs. French grudge matches, can be treated as a non-linear consequence of Louis the XIV’s exacerbation of the 30 years war, and then Napoleon’s finishing off of the old Holy Roman Empire.
My professor used to say things like “In the Germanies at that time…” The Germanies ended up becoming the Second Reich in 1870, if I’ve got my facts straight.
In terms of World War One, I’m a fan of James Stokesbury’s book of a few decades ago. Stokesbury (no longer with us) seems to have perfected writing brief lively histories of various wars.
It appalls me that many people these days seem to know almost no history while at the same time they are confident in their abilities to improve current arrangements through tampering. If nothing else, the study of history should bring humility. Lots of smart people have made things worse while trying to make things better.
The late Robert Conquest liked to quote Thomas Jefferson’s claim that education for a democratic polity such as ours should be “chiefly historical.”
Stokesbury is here–if I can get the links to work.
curses, foiled again. How about…
https://www.harpercollins.com/author/cr-106309/james-l-stokesbury/
Mingardi states, in the City Journal essay linked by our host:
“Populism, at least in Europe, is a call against the idea that we need competent people to manage government.” [8th paragraph]
Mingardi offers no evidence to support such an arrogant and tendentious statement. That one sentence summarizes the essay, in which Mingardi argues that the current EU political class should be empowered to “competently” manage the economic– and political and social– lives of Europeans (and everyone else, really) without any elbow-joggling from the ordinary people whose lives are so “managed.”
Mingardi does not explain just why, if the EU political class is so “competent” at “managing government,” it has driven so many people into opposition. Mingardi just calls such opposition “populism,” which is a propaganda term that denotes any political appeal to the interests of people outside the present ruling class.
Mingardi also repeats the stale propaganda line that ordinary people object to policies imposed by the EU political class only because of “the difficulty” [loc. cit.] EU mandarins encounter when they try “to communicate the ever more complex policy questions of the day” [loc. cit.] to less (Mingardi suggests) competent people. Ah, sighs Mingardi, if only the rubes could properly comprehend why a self-perpetuating aristocracy led from Brussels must receive huge tax-free pay packets and expense accounts while it “manages” the EU economy into perpetual recession.
Mingardi writes to comfort the political class and help reinforce their perimeter. For decades the EU political class has been “competent” mostly to feather its own nest at the expense of the peoples it rules while insulating itself from democratic rebuke. Now that the mandarins’ declining competence in economic and social matters (that is, their incompetence to promote general welfare as opposed to their own) has finally provoked some opposition, they have summoned syncophants like Mingardi to propagandize those at the margins of the ruling class. Mingardi’s job is to persuade the specialists who keep the lights on to side with the ruling class against the unwashed masses. That is a delicate business– people usually prefer to adhere to those currently in power, who offer better pay and respectability in the short term, but people who serve on the periphery of the ruling class are liable to sympathize with the oppressed masses to which they themselves may be relegated at any time and are correspondingly open to prospects that they might do better under a new ruling class– if they help throw down the incumbent one.
Mingardi’s paean to “competence” appeals to those at the edge of the ruling class; the sort of people who read City Journal, justifiably proud of their own intellects. The ruling class, Mingardi says, are like you and me, we are all “competent” and together we recognize “the riskiness of reforming government machineries that are so complicated that nobody can make sense of them.” [loc. cit] That is why we (rulers and loyal clients) must unite to support the present regime. To oppose it would be “populism” and that is shameful– ordinary people are not “competent.”
Nearly forty years ago Mancur Olson gave us a better guide to today’s EU politics than Alberto Mingardi offers us in the current year. The EU political class has exhausted the possibilities of reasonable governance subject to all of the cross-reinforced rent-seeking accomodations which it has accreted over more than sixty years. Mingardi’s own description, “government machineries that are so complicated that nobody can make sense of them” [loc. cit.] inadvertently testifies to this. Unable to make any further reasonable deals, EU politicians have veered into the unreasonable, such as Ponzi finance and astonishingly-counterproductive green-electricity subsidies.
What Mingardi derides as “populism” is actually a struggle to realize more “competent” governance. Success would necessarily discomfit many of those satisfied with the rents they extract from the current scheme so they oppose any change. Many of the agitators simply want to insert themselves into the ruling class, some others have goals a technocratic economist like Mingardi would regard as foolish. All large political movements are messy. That does not mean they all stem from a lack of “competence.”
The EU mandarins seem more eager to try to defeat “populism” than to satisfy the justifiable concerns of the people by internal reform (Mancur Olson explains why). They appear to have chosen a broad strategy of many tactics: divide-and-conquer, as by inviting large numbers of violent unemployables into Europe to subsist on the EU’s dole while harassing and demoralize Europeans; straightforward oppression, as by jailing for “hate speech” anyone who objects to EU policies; and making ordinary Europeans poor and dependent so they experience the EU dole as salvation, as by regulating out of existence the industries which would otherwise employ them. (The situation in Scotland, where huge numbers of the unemployed are keen supporters of the EU, shows some of the appeal of the latter tactic.)
The EU’s problem is not ignorant opposition to free trade, it is well-informed opposition to ruling-class rent-seeking.