Life, fate and the assault on liberalism

Both the right and the left are in thrall to identity politics

Gideon Rachman




The liberal tradition is weak in Russia. But I recently came across one of the most inspiring statements of the liberal ideal that I have ever read, in the work of a great Russian novelist, Vasily Grossman. At a time when both the right and left are increasingly obsessed by group rights, Grossman’s argument for the primacy of the individual still feels vital and urgent, 60 years after it was written.

If you have never read Grossman’s Life and Fate, you should. The book, set in Russia and eastern Europe at the time of the battle of Stalingrad during the second world war, was completed in 1960. But it was suppressed by Soviet functionaries, alarmed by its unsparing depiction of Stalinism. Grossman’s magnum opus only appeared in 1980, 16 years after his death, and its reputation has been growing ever since.

The frequent comparisons between Life and Fate and Tolstoy’s War and Peace are apt. The novels are similar in scale and subject matter; and in the way in which fictional characters mingle on the page with historical figures such as Stalin and Napoleon. Both Grossman and Tolstoy also combine their storytelling with broader philosophical thoughts.

At the end of a chapter describing a Russian army tank unit preparing for battle, Grossman reflects that, “Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right.” But this gives rise to a “terrible, fateful error”. “The belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end.” For Grossman, individual liberty was the only valid goal of war or politics.

Life and Fate depicts the terrible evils that Stalinism and Nazism inflicted on individuals in the name of a wider group — the proletariat or the “Aryan race”. But Grossman’s words struck me as still applicable to our own, much milder age. That is because political ideas that emphasise group identity, rather than individual rights, are back in fashion — as both the nationalist right and the progressive left slide towards identity politics.

In the US, President Donald Trump has roused his base by flirting with ethno-nationalism and denouncing Muslim and Mexican immigrants. The far right in Europe has travelled in the same direction. Influential thinkers like the French writer Renaud Camus have popularised conspiracy theories about “the great replacement”, which is said to place white Europeans at risk of cultural annihilation at the hands of millions of Muslim immigrants.

Paranoia about “white genocide” and “cultural Marxism” has also resurfaced in the garbled manifestos of far-right terrorists such as the Norwegian Anders Breivik, or Brenton Tarrant, who staged a murderous attack on a mosque in New Zealand, earlier this year.

The left’s version of identity politics has nothing to do with terrorism. Increasingly, however, progressive politics in America and Britain has moved away from the liberal insistence on equal rights for individuals to an illiberal emphasis on group rights. The motive for this shift is usually a laudable effort to achieve social justice. But the outcomes are, to use one of the left’s favourite terms, “problematic”.

An interesting example of the kinds of problems that are thrown up by group-based thinking is a current lawsuit brought against Harvard University for alleged discrimination against Asian-Americans. The complainants argue that Asian-Americans have to achieve better test scores, on average, to get into Harvard and are often marked down on vague measures of personality. This, it is argued, allows Harvard to boost student numbers from other more favoured groups, such as African-Americans, Hispanics and the children of Harvard graduates.

Harvard contests the charges. Even if discrimination is proved, it will have stemmed largely from a well-meaning motive — to increase diversity on campus. The trouble is that it seems logically impossible to discriminate in favour of one group without discriminating against another. The controversy is uncomfortably reminiscent of an earlier era, when Harvard deliberately restricted the number of Jews. That is now regarded as a disgraceful episode; but it is hard to see why it is much different from discriminating against Asian-Americans.

The whole miserable tangle is an example of the knots that organisations get tied in when they treat people as representatives of a group rather than as individuals with their own multi-faceted identities.

The questions of group rights, anti-Semitism and discrimination are important themes in Life and Fate. One of the main characters, Viktor Shtrum, is a prominent Jewish physicist who finds that his efforts to hire highly qualified Jewish colleagues are blocked because the authorities favour ethnic Russians. Throughout the book other characters run into problems because the Soviet system deems them to have the wrong class background.

It is the achievement of a great novel, such as Life and Fate, to show each character as an individual whose identity should never be reduced to that of a representative of a class, nation or ethnic group. As Grossman insisted: “The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual.”

World Bank boss warns global growth could disappoint

David Malpass blames Brexit, Europe’s recession and trade uncertainty

James Politi in Washington


David Malpass, the president of the World Bank, has warned that global growth could fall short of the 2.6 per cent rate it predicted in June, in the latest sign of concern in multilateral institutions about the direction of the world economy.

In a speech in Montreal, ahead of the World Bank and IMF’s annual meetings next week, Mr Malpass warned that global growth was “slowing” and said he expected it to be even lower than the forecast from four months ago due to “Brexit, Europe’s recession, and trade uncertainty”.

“Moreover, in much of the developing world, investment growth is too sluggish for future incomes to rise in a meaningful way,” Mr Malpass said.

Mr Malpass, a former senior Trump administration official, sounded the alarm as he laid out the main goals of his tenure at the World Bank, which began in April this year after he replaced Jim Yong Kim, the previous president appointed by Barack Obama, who resigned to take a job in private equity.

Mr Malpass said he was encouraged by the potential of digital cash transfers as an important boost to development policy. “We’re almost at the point of having secure systems that would allow poor people to electronically receive remittances, foreign aid, and social safety-net payments as well as their earnings, and then be allowed to save and transact freely. That would be revolutionary because it allows people the freedom and opportunity they need to improve their living conditions,” he said.

In an environment of slowing growth, Mr Malpass said it was essential for countries to have “well-designed structural reforms”, including beefing up the rule of law so private companies can compete with state-owned enterprises.

“For many countries, this means opening up their closed and protected markets, allowing prices to be determined by market forces, and liberalising capital flows. The pay-off is that countries that make this step attract more investment, both foreign and domestic, and can generate growth that benefits a broader part of the population,” he said.

Mr Malpass’s preoccupation with the European economy echoes broad fears about stagnant and even shrinking growth in Germany and Italy. However, the IMF, in its latest forecast in July, predicted growth of 1.3 per cent for the eurozone in 2019, rebounding to 1.6 per cent in 2020.

China’s central bank continues to load up on gold

Reserves managers around the world are trying to trim exposure to the US dollar

Harry Dempsey in London

The Future of Europe: The Spanish Case

How would a collapse of the European Union affect its member states?

By Ryan Bridges

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What’s Freezing Europe-Russia Relations?

French President Emmanuel Macron is right to worry about the disintegration of the global arms-control regime and a Russia that is increasingly tied to China. But given that the divide between Russia and the European Union is over fundamental values, there is no reason to think that the relationship can be improved anytime soon.

Joschka Fischer




BERLIN – Although the European Union and Russia are part of the same landmass, they don’t have all that much in common. In fact, Russians have yet even to decide where their country resides in the world. The bulk of its territory is in Asia, but over 70% of its people live west of the Ural Mountains. Russians have no interest in associating themselves with East Asia or the Islamic South, so their only choice is to go it alone or orient themselves toward Europe.

But going it alone is risky. Russia is a nuclear-armed colossus, yet it is declining demographically, economically, and technologically. The country still earns its living by exporting fossil fuels and other commodities, which is hardly sufficient for maintaining superpower status in the twenty-first century. It is increasingly at risk of becoming a junior partner to China.

The only alternative, then, is Europe. But both sides are prisoners of their respective histories. Memories of oppressive rule under the czars and the Soviets remain raw in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland and the Baltics, and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and military campaign in Eastern Ukraine have reinforced distrust of Russia across the region.

Russia’s relationship with the rest of Europe is also determined by its history. Reeling from the Soviet collapse throughout the 1990s, Russia has adopted a nineteenth-century mentality since Putin came to power in 2000. The Russian elite, harking back to the Czarist period before the Bolshevik Revolution, regards their country as a European great power – even a hegemonic one, in the case of Eastern Europe – which pits it directly against the EU.

The EU’s raison d’être is to transcend zones of influence in Europe, because that is the only way to prevent a return of the power struggles and catastrophic wars that culminated in the first half of the twentieth century. And yet Russia is simply too large to be integrated into the EU (indeed, it is unclear who would be integrating with whom).

Even if that were not the case, Russia – or at least its leadership – does not share the EU’s values. In addition to championing democracy, judicial independence, and the rule of law, the EU has renounced any revision of borders by force. While geographic proximity demands that Russia and the EU manage their relationship in as mutually advantageous a manner as possible, the Kremlin’s ongoing war in Ukraine’s Donbas region makes this all but impossible.

Nonetheless, French President Emmanuel Macron has made renewed efforts to improve EU-Russian relations, not least by meeting with Putin in the run-up to the G7 summit in Biarritz last month. In Macron’s view, it is not in Europe’s interest to drive Russia further into China’s arms, or to stand by and watch the ongoing disintegration of US-Russian arms-control treaties. With respect to arms control, American and European interests are not the same, and today’s US administration cares little about Europe or its views on any given issue.


But Macron’s efforts raise many questions. For starters, it isn’t obvious what role Europe could play in renewing the global arms-control regime. Without the US, Europe has little to offer Russia on the issue of intermediate missiles. It would be stuck in the position of trying to convince two unwilling parties to reach a new agreement. And that doesn’t even account for China, which has also developed an intermediate-range-missile capacity.

Europe does have something to offer Russia economically. But improving economic relations is simply impossible without verifiable progress in the implementation of the Minsk Protocol to end the conflict in Donbas. It is unclear if Putin would be ready for that.

But the real problem between Russia and the EU is the issue of democracy. Putin and the Russian oligarchy’s greatest fear is that Ukraine’s 2014 Maidan revolution could be replicated on Moscow’s Red Square. The Kremlin does not blame NATO for that possibility; it blames the EU. Anti-NATO rhetoric is a tried and true propaganda trope that exploits many Russians’ ingrained fear of a Cold War bogeyman. But the real threat in the eyes of the Russian oligarchy is the EU and its promotion of democracy and the rule of law.

The Russian and European systems are fundamentally incompatible, representing contradictory values and vastly different approaches to foreign and domestic policy. In the nineteenth century, czarist Russia was the leader of the “Holy Alliance,” a reactionary bulwark against the bourgeois revolutions sweeping in Europe. This dynamic was reversed under the Bolsheviks after 1917, when Russia became the cradle of revolution. But under Stalin, it returned to pursuing essentially the same aims as the czars, particularly when it came to crushing independence movements in Central and Eastern Europe.

Putin’s regime has followed a similar trajectory, retreating to the nineteenth century, allying with the Orthodox Church, and launching attacks on the “decadent West,” with tirades against homosexuality and liberalism. The Kremlin’s active support for illiberal, nationalist forces in Europe and the United States is just one part of this larger picture.

As desirable as an improvement in relations between the EU and Russia would be, it will come neither quickly nor easily. On the main questions of Ukraine and democracy, Europe can scarcely give an inch.


Joschka Fischer was German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998-2005, a term marked by Germany's strong support for NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999, followed by its opposition to the war in Iraq. Fischer entered electoral politics after participating in the anti-establishment protests of the 1960s and 1970s, and played a key role in founding Germany's Green Party, which he led for almost two decades.

Japan’s Shinzo Abe Aims an Arrow at His Own Foot

The imminent sales-tax increase is an unnecessary fiscal move that puts a fragile recovery at risk

By Mike Bird