Of course, theory didn't always comport with practice. Locke's eloquent defense of religious liberty was explicitly restricted to Protestants; Catholics and Jews need not apply. The same Thomas Jefferson who penned the Declaration trafficked in slaves, and the French revolutionaries who trumpeted the rights of man were less than attentive to the rights of the wretches carried off in tumbrels to the guillotine. The blessings of liberty were at first restricted to precious few.
But over time their scope widened. Religious freedom became more than the prerogative of Protestants, America commenced a century-long undertaking to extend the promise of liberty and equality to the slaves and the children of slaves, and liberals increasingly came to understand that the rights of man are the rights of women too. Nor was this the drift of happenstance or external compulsion; the theory's own logic of universalism led to its extension.
Communism also was born in opposition to particularist discrimination and exclusionary policy. By definition, claimed Marx, capitalism is predicated on the exploitation of one class by another.
Indeed, the history of humanity has been a continuing saga of exploitation and division, including the division of man from himself. Separate and unequal social classes are grounded in the material conditions of production and sustained through direct invocations of force and less direct but even more efficient institutional devices for inculcating false consciousness. These arrangements are stable in the short run but over the long term carry the seeds of their own destruction. Capitalism is rendered possible through appropriating the surplus value of labor, but this creates a proletariat ever more hard-pressed that is forged by its oppression into a potent instrument of revolution. Ultimately the constraining bonds are burst asunder and the expropriators are expropriated.
Marx presented his account as descriptive social science and was explicitly scornful of bourgeois moralizing. From its first telling, however, the story carried more power as moral drama than as predictive science. For what it anticipated is the overcoming of alienation and the oppression of man by man. Once a classless society has come into being it will no longer be the case that some will labor and others will batten on the fruits of their labor. All people will be equal in the relevant sense: the ability to lead a truly human life. Artificial divisions of wealth, sex, talent, and, eventually, nationality will have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Family fights are often the most intense, and the clash between liberal and Marxian ideals was incendiary. But on the most fundamental theoretical level what they shared was greater than that which separated them. Each proclaimed an all-embracing universalism grounded on a premise of human equality. Each presented a theory explaining its own relatively late arrival on the political scene as well as an account of why the waning of ignorance would inevitably be its own waxing. Each extended its promises to humanity as a whole. Only with regard to the details did they take issue. The family resemblance explains, I think, why so many basically decent people supposed that the conflict could be brokered, why liberals themselves split into opposed camps of anti-communists and anti-anti-communists.
That is not to advocate some specious doctrine of moral equivalence. Communism shared with liberalism the rhetoric but not the reality of universalism. The readers of this magazine hardly need to be told that liberalism's success in bringing practice closer to theory was never approximated, never even attempted by communist regimes. Thus, which would ultimately prevail was no trivial matter. But because the deepest presuppositions of liberalism and Marxism were similar, it is premature to conclude that the demise of the latter signifies a world converging on consensus concerning fundamental principles. The great conflicts of the next quarter century are likely to be waged on the territory they held in common.
For a foretaste of post-communist Sturm und Drang, look toward the Balkans. There blood is being drained not in the service of some comprehensive, cosmopolitan ideal but because the blood in question happens to be Croatian or Serbian or Bosnian. The players are distinctively and ineradicably defined by nationality, and because that is so the game is necessarily one of exclusion. "Ethnic cleansing" isn't, as the commentators would have it, an aberration but rather the struggle's essence. Even if the methods were less sanguinary, the aim would be the same.
A Serbian (or "Greater Serbian") state is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people–but only if those people are Serbs. To be of some other ethnic background is necessarily to enjoy a lower status. Minorities at best enjoy toleration. Note, though, that this isn't "liberal toleration," in which each accords to all others elbow room to conduct their own preferred ways of life, subject only to the requirement that they similarly refrain from infringements. Liberal toleration is symmetrical, given by each and received by each. But the tolerance that one might hope for in a nationality-defined state is a gift bestowed by a superior on an inferior. And it is a gift that can easily be snatched away.
As the overworked folks at Rand McNally will testify, the process of comprehensive polities splintering into their component nationalities is well under way. The fissioning force (or fusion when, as with the two Germanies, a nation had been artificially divided from itself) seems to be irresistible. I don't mean to suggest that this is altogether a bad thing. By and large, the regimes that have expired were dreadful. Their demise was long overdue. But even if the successor states are more congenial, there will be bumps, some severe, along the way.
Most obviously, political restructuring will engender wrangling over who gets what. Even when a divorce is amicable, the parties may not see eye to eye concerning where the cutlery goes. If property settlements involve geographical boundaries, Black Sea battleships, or multibillion-dollar debts to foreign bankrollers, establishing appropriate terms will be especially tricky. And that's so in the best case, the one in which the parties are inclined to bargain rationally and coolly. If instead they view the breakup as an opportunity to consummate vendettas extending back to the Middle Ages, they will not only bloody each other's noses but also generate carnage and refugees that overflow onto neighbors. Hatreds will be contagious: Witness, for example, the current vicious outbreak of xenophobia in Germany. It is safe, therefore, to conclude that massaging trouble spots will be a growth industry during the next 25 years.
More subtle but potentially even further reaching is the fact that in an order of competing nationalisms the rights of individuals inevitably are subordinated to the claims of the collective. When private aspirations conflict with state imperatives, or even when they simply take another direction, people will be pressured to conform to the allegedly greater overarching good. To cite just one instance, elevating to a constitutional level the goal of nurturing French culture in an autonomous or independent Quebec will be bad news for anglophones and others who happen not to be wedded to a Gallic conception of the good life. Group rights and the obligations they impose are inherently illiberal. They are, however, likely to be in vogue over the next several decades in a world that increasingly honors the particular over the universal.
Recently de-Sovietized Eastern Europe and Asia may be the frontlines of the struggle for a free international order, but First World trends are also worrisome. Free-trade agreements increasingly take the form of clubs for the well-connected rather than, as with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), domains open to all. As the Common Market evolves toward a United States of Europe it simultaneously embraces and repels. Constraints on economic activity and population movement are eliminated within the Lucky 12 nations but reappear as barriers proclaiming "Keep Out!" to non-members. Partly in self-defense the North American three establish their own freetrade (but not free migration) agreement.
It's not impossible that the process will work out well, that these various partnerships will extend themselves and eventually merge into one global free-trade zone. But the more likely scenario is competing blocs playing negative-sum games against each other. Last year Europe and America briefly bobbed and weaved over grain and white wine tariffs. Fortunately, they blinked before threats turned truly nasty. Next time–and there surely will be next times–the game may be played to a conclusion, as indeed it was in the 1920s, when the Smoot Hawley bill helped precipitate the stock market crash, a decade of economic depression and, ultimately, war. A world of haves jockeying for position while chanting "we've got ours" to hungry faces pressed against the window pane is a dubious prescription for peace or prosperity.
The epoch that ended when the Wall came down and the Soviet Union filed for bankruptcy witnessed the most sustained challenge ever launched against human aspirations for liberty, against the right of all individuals simply to be left alone to pursue their chosen ways of life. That assault, thankfully, has now been beaten back. The preceding remarks should not be interpreted as some kind of perverse longing for the "good old days" of the Cold War.
Rather, they are meant as a peek at new times, new foes. As fiercely waged as the challenge of communism was, it did not dispute but rather attempted to co-opt the liberal's ideal of universal equal rights– grotesquely transfigured, to be sure, into effective slavery for all. Now that ideal itself is under duress. We don't, for better or worse, find ourselves at the end of history but rather at the opening of a new chapter. How the narrative progresses and who gets to write it will have momentous global consequences. At any rate, there will be plenty to do for a not-so-modest-as-it-once-was journal dedicated to the cause of free minds and free markets.
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