There is a certain grim nostalgia in watching Paris burn, accompanied this week by the distinctly less romantic spectacle of looters smashing shopfronts in Leipzig. The continental commentariat, which regards public outrage with the bewildered disgust of an Edwardian butler discovering a dead badger in the drawing room, has predictably blamed fringe agitation and the rising price of bread. It is an old habit, this insistence that the public only ever revolts out of temporary confusion or external malice, as though the relentless erosion of living standards across the West were merely a clerical error rather than a deliberate policy choice.
What we are witnessing from the boulevard Saint-Germain to the shopping districts of Saxony is not a sudden spasm of anti-social delinquency, but the natural culmination of a decade spent telling ordinary citizens that their impoverishment is a moral duty. The continent’s governing caste, having decided that energy must be made prohibitively expensive in the name of the future and defense outsourced to an increasingly indifferent Washington, now expresses polite horror when people refuse to freeze in the dark without throwing a paving stone. That the unrest spreads unchecked while Brussels issues another circular on harmonised packaging regulations tells you everything you need to know about the current distribution of European priorities.
Across the Atlantic, or rather across the conference tables of the G20, the theatre of managerial impotence continues in grander fashion. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a man who has made a career of looking earnestly distressed in expensive suits, has spent the week attempting to herd foreign ministers into the usual pious consensus. He appears genuinely astonished to find that the rest of the world—which has spent the last five years observing the erratic spasms of American governance—is no longer interested in signing Washington’s pre-drafted communiqués. There was a time when an American envoy could command a room simply by raising an eyebrow; today, Rubio looks less like an imperial proconsul and more like a harried hotel manager attempting to appease guests whose plumbing has irrevocably failed.
Meanwhile, in a development that would be hilarious were it not funding the development of ballistic missiles, North Korean hackers have reportedly carried off billions from the world’s pre-eminent cryptocurrency exchange, with the victims consoling themselves that the loss is mostly covered. Here we have the modern international order distilled to its purest essence: a totalitarian hermit kingdom, which cannot reliably feed its own children, effortlessly pickpocketing the Silicon Valley libertarian vanguard to build thermonuclear warheads, while Western regulators bicker over compliance forms. The triumph of technology has not democratised finance; it has simply automated tribute.
Everywhere one looks, the institutional scaffolding is groaning under the weight of its own irrelevance. In New Delhi, the opposition rallies in the streets because it no longer trusts the apparatus that counts the ballots, while in Belgrade and Budapest, the predictable exhaustion of personalist regimes proves only that corruption, like empire, eventually becomes too expensive to maintain. Yet the prevailing dogma remains that these are disparate, unrelated fires, each to be extinguished by better public relations, a minor subsidy, or a stern speech delivered to an empty hall in Geneva.
The truth, which no one in a tailored overcoat wishes to utter aloud, is that the social compact of the post-Cold War era has quietly dissolved. The public was promised prosperity in exchange for docility, and competence in exchange for technocratic rule; having received neither, they are perfectly entitled to withdraw their consent, whether via the ballot box in Hungary or a shattered boutique window in Frankfurt. The ruling class will continue to convene summits, issue sanctions, and express pious shock at the unruliness of the rabble. But the illusion of control has evaporated, and no amount of diplomatic scolding from Marco Rubio will put the genie back into the bottle.
Rupert Halloway