Quo Vadis America? (Nov 2016)
I was -4 years old, when JFK held his Inaugural speech in January 1961. Under American and British leadership, freedom and dignity had been restored to Western Europe 16 years earlier, albeit against strident Stalinist opposition, and without being able to bring Karl Popper’s Open Societies to the eastern part of the continent. Nobody was foolish enough to declare the End of History, but the unspeakable evil of Nazism and Stalinism had focused minds, and allowed brilliant economists like John Maynard Keynes, who had criticized the Economic Consequence of the Peace (of Versailles of 1918) with such foresight, to improve on the design of the League of Nations and create the Bretton Woods System of World Bank, IMF and United Nations, to give the integrating world and its many nascent nations post-colonialism a chance to seek a governance system based on sovereignty, pooling of certain decisions, and an over-arching political and economic framework.
JFK, who was a hero to my parents, could not have been more American, more righteous, more messianic, more ambitious in his message to the world:
“We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom—symbolizing an end as well as a beginning—signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three-quarters ago.
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe—the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.
We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
This much we pledge—and more. ”
Having been elected to lead a nation who had fought not one but two world wars, none of its choosing, to help save Europe from self-destruction, he was not a President intent on retreating into the illusory safety of ‘splendid isolation’. Here was the President of a Nation that had come up with the Morgenthau Plan in 1944 to turn Germany into an eternally agrarian country, unable ever to wage war again, only to find the conviction and magnanimity (and sense of realpolitik in view of Stalinist aggression) to adopt the Marshall Plan from 1948, providing grants of USD 12bn (USD 120bn in today’s money) to rebuild Western Europe. The small and initially provincial country called West Germany that I was born into, became a primary beneficiary, and inherited a sound constitution and parliamentary democracy, underwent a (partial) de-nazification process, and was let out of the Kindergarten (occupation) in 1949. That Germany started playing a leading role in the European Coal and Steel Union (1951) and the Treaty of Rome (1957), the founding document of the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the EU, joining together the foes of three wars over the preceding century, Germany and France, to seek to make amends for earlier errors and misdeeds; when I grew up near the French border in the Saar region adjacent to Alsace Lorraine, which had been German, French, and then German again in the preceding 100 years, ‘jumelage’ and frequent exchanges between Germany and French youth, schools, and communities became the new knitting of a new-found neighbourly familiarity. - 59 years later, on June 23rd, the United Kingdom sounded the starting shot to the unravelling of that European integration process, which under American stewardship has brought an unparalleled period of peace, freedom, stability, and prosperity to the European Continent, as forcefully argued by Timothy Garton Ash (Is Europe Kaputt?, Foreign Affairs, 2012)
Despite just having just completed that Herculean piece of work, cleaning up the European Augeas stable, there was no waivering in JKF’s conviction to promote freedom around the world, for which ‘we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe’; rarely has the pursuit of liberty been articulated with such rhetoric elegance.
Thomas Jefferson probably came close, nearly 200 years earlier, in his Declaration of Independence, which articulated that most American of original bill of rights; every one of my four daughters has joined me on a visit to Washington DC to walk across the National Mall (passing memorials to Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and to that greatest of all American Presidents, FD Roosevelt), in order to visit the Jefferson Memorial, imbued with the spirit of 1776:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Eight months after JFK’s inaugural address, Stalin was already 6 feet under, the Soviets forced the building of the Wall in Berlin, the most abhorrent symbol of the absence of freedom, of movement, of thought, of self-determination, of liberty. In 1963, when my parents married, Kennedy duly came to Berlin to show the kind of solidarity and support that America has provided, by and large, to the freedom-loving people around the world since it assumed the mantle of world leadership in the early 20th century, declaring famously ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ Alas, he was not allowed to finish even that first term, my mother always recounting with tears the day in November 1963 when he was shot. - Although cut from a different cloth, Ronald Reagan, at the very same site in 1987, hammered home the point, by asking Gorbachov to ‘tear that wall down’. West-Berlin was my newly-founded Polish-German family’s first home from 1985-91, and we had the passports and ability to cross that Wall regularly to get back to free West Germany, or to pay repeat visits to desolate, drab and despairing socialist Poland; acutely aware that this was one-way traffic, plain to read in the faces of those that could not. The job was arguably finished by an electrician from Gdansk and a trade union that bears a titular word that is at risk of becoming anathema again, ‘Solidarnosc’. On November 9th, 1989, exactly 27 years before the election of DJ Trump to the presidency of the USA, the Wall fell, and with it the 50-year legacy of the Iron Courtain, which Churchill had come to see but could not avoid.
By the time I was 12 years old, I was embarked on my first school exchange with the United States, visiting Kinderhook near Albany in upstate NY twice, staying with the family of Ben Tuttle, who thanks to facebook is still in touch with me fourty years later; Martin van Buren was the less illustrious son of that town who made it to 8th President of the USA but is not remembered for his statesmanship; still, I became to respect that office early on.
By the time I was 15, in 1981, I enlisted as an exchange student for one year with Youth for Understanding (YfU), one of the American programs created post-WW2 (such as AFS or the American Field Service) created to foster exchanges of teenagers between various countries, facilitating mutual knowledge, respect, and friendship. Fate brought me to the American Midwest, the ‘swing state’ of Michigan, to be exact to the thumb area of lower Michigan some 90 miles north of Detroit and 30 miles east of Saginaw, one of many car company towns in GM and Ford country. It was the challenging early 1980s, the second oil crisis had led to high inflation, stagnating economies, the rumoured and much maligned ‘sell-out’ of US assets to the Japanese, and the laying off of many blue collar car factory workers, among them my American guest father, a hard-working, devout man and part-time farmer. Here I learned what American resilience is, self-reliance, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, and showing character in the face of adversity. I fell in love with that country, and came second in the American history contest at my local High School, learning all 40 presidents of the time by heart and year, amongst others: Starting with George Washington and finishing, at that time, with Ronald Reagan, who had just ascended to the office on the back of support by Reagan Democrats’, a feat now repeated by Mr Trump. When I returned home, it took me a couple of days to find my German language again. The infectious curiosity created by living amongst another people and finding yourself, your communalities, your shared and different values, never left me, and I have been a traveler amongst peoples ever since.
When an opportunity arose to rejoin another Anglo-Saxon community that promoted the values of international understanding and western values of liberty and tolerance, I jumped at the opportunity to become a student at the United World College of the Adriatic in Duino/Italy, in 1983. Here again was an institution, the UWC movement, which had been set up in the shape of Atlantic College in Wales in the 1960s by the German educator Kurt Hahn, with support from NATO (which Mr Trump may give notice to), to foster exchanges between teenagers from many countries with the ideal of mutual understanding, building links and bridges at the personal and cultural level. Kurt Hahn spoke out against Nazis in March 1933, within the first weeks of Hitler assuming power, and after a short imprisonment left Germany for the UK; liberty being provided against illiberalism and racism (Hahn was born in Berlin to Jewish parents). Socialist Poland managed to send some students to the five UWC back in existence then (17 now!), and again an icon of British culture and enlightenment, the British Council, selected a young Polish girl, whose parents were keen for her to leave martial-law-bound Poland in 1982, months after the Poles had preempted a Soviet invasion and arrested the first incarnation of Solidarnosc’ leaders – my wife and I met on the Rilke path, where he had composed the lyric Duineser Elegien in 1912. Was it a coincidence that my sister attended Atlantic College at the same time and met her English/French husband there? It is a coincidence that their eldest son attended AC and was one of a handful of Europeans admitted to a college founded amongst others by a John Harvard in Cambridge MA in 1637 with a gift of 780 pound sterling and 400 books?
Although I initially followed a classic recommended German path and completed a two-year bank apprenticeship in (West) Berlin, my English headmaster and director of studies played a key role in my joining the London School of Economics for my two initial economics degrees, straddling the End of History from 1988-1992, according to Francis Fukuyama. My specialty field became the economics of transition, i.e. the study of how one could move a formerly centrally planned and unfree society/economy to a free market economy functioning under the rule of law in a working parliamentary democracy – a field of study that had been collecting dust until suddenly the Wall came down, and theorists were asked to become policy-makers, delving into the unknown at this historic juncture, when liberty was not enough and insufficiently stable without the promise of material well-being and catch-up with the western half of Europe, whom history had treated kinder.
One of the foremost practitioners of the application of the doctrine of free markets and open society to formerly illiberal societies and economies was Jeff Sachs, at the time Professor of Economics at Harvard, and himself branching out into Law and Economics and Development Economics to understand how important institutions, and the rule of law (sic) are as foundations for successful economic activity. So when another traveler between the nations and a friend alerted me to a scholarship programme named after one of the post-WW2 High Commissioners for Occupied Germany, John McCloy, I did not hesitate to seek to return for a second longer stint across the Atlantic to the shores of Massachusetts, to seek to play a role in bringing liberty and the pursuit of happiness to recently freed countries, amongst them Poland and Russia (where I was part of a team of economists advising the Russian government in 1993, directed by Jeff Sachs and Anders Aslund).
Shortly after joining Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 1992, Bill Clinton won the US presidency. It was an exciting moment, a Rhodes scholar, an eloquent, modern, intelligent, worldly US president, with a communicative gift; the Kennedy School lost some of its teaching staff to the administration, amongst them Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and Clinton went on to become one of the most successful American presidents of the last century, securing the transition from the Cold War to a period of prosperity and stability, also known as globalization, that has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty in developing nations and brought the world closer together in more than one way.
That transatlantic debt, that spirit of freedom and responsibility, that regard for dignity, tolerance, diversity and civic mindedness, it is a debt I have been imbued with from the very start of my existence. There have been many instances when I have not been in agreement with US policy, form Nicaragua’s Contras to the Iraq War. But never have I doubted the ability of that great nation to aim to do the right thing, to inspire by example, to selflessly assume the global leadership role that its economic prowess and system of values have propelled it to. Abdicating responsibility is not an American vice, not in my lifetime. Neither is publicly condoning bigotry, racism, misogyny, and chauvinism.
Five months ago the insular people that invented and epitomized the concept of ‘common sense’ showed that a 52% majority was bereft of a sufficient dose to come to its senses. Their judgement was made, in my opinion, on the basis of an ill-informed, misleading and hateful debate that turned matters on their head.
Still shaking from coming to terms with such an about face from the original Empire, exporting its goods and people to the whole world for several centuries, invited or (mostly) not, to now fear the Polish plumber that pays taxes and mends the pipes, we are now (potentially) faced with the biggest dereliction of duty by our American friends, deserting freedom, respect, complexity, and the pursuit of joint, common happiness, all in the vainglorious hope that ‘somebody will fix it’.
We have learned that we erred in taking the President-elect literally but not seriously, whereas his voters took him seriously but not literally. World affairs are too complex to fit into 140-word tweets, so words may not be a good guide to what to expect, and we are still a few weeks away from inauguration. Reading the tea leaves for pointers continues, with hope and disappointment changing hands in rapid iterations.
Let me conclude with a quote from an American President whom I have only come to appreciate in recent visits to that great nation, and one who had to overcome despair and hatred among half the nation, in a situation that was incomparably more difficult than the current division afflicting the USA. He never lost his moral compass, nor his belief in his overarching aims, and sought to bring everybody along by the power of his words and arguments. In this new ‘post-factual’ world, maybe such thing are old-fashioned; if so, I am outing myself as old-fashioned right here.
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
