Liberalism has been an unprecedented success story in the western world over the last five centuries, and liberal democracy over the last few decades. The collapse of Soviet socialism owed much to the paradigm shift from collectivism to individualism. However, the global process of opening borders following the collapse of the Iron Curtain has shuffled the...Read More

In this paper (given at a GPI seminar “The Challenge of Populism to Representative and Federal Democracy”, 18 July 2019) I make three main arguments. On Populism I tend to the analysis put forward by Isaiah Berlin, among others, which refers back to ideas of agrarian fellowship and community. Most particularly to pre-revolutionary Russian peasantry...Read More

If Europe wants to maintain its influential place in the world, once again it has to enhance the role of its nation states. ‘Internal diversity and external unity’ would be a viable motto for a rejuvenated European Union to adopt. The dispute over the openness of borders has divided Western societies. On the one side...Read More

The motivation for writing the pamphlet was my concern about the rise of ‘nationalist populism’, partly engendered by the growing marketisation in all areas of our political and economic lives. The popular resentment which underlies this anti-elitism, whereas nationalism is a ‘horizontal’ objection to ‘the other’. (See House of Lords Library Note, 2017). I want...Read More