Ideas - How inequality is undermining liberal democracy

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

With the end of the Cold War, the struggle for peace, equality, and democracy wasn’t settled — it became more complex. As we mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, IDEAS executive producer Greg Kelly interviews Jennifer Welsh about her 2016 CBC Massey Lectures, The Return of History — and how nine years on, the struggle continues. *This episode originally aired on May 9, 2024.

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This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. As you can well imagine, it is a distinct honor to be part of the lineage, the Massey Lectures, a Canadian institution. Jennifer Welsh delivered the 2016 CBC Massey Lectures. but it's also very daunting to be that lecture and given the brief that's given to those of us who deliver the Massey lectures

we're told that we can talk about anything we want and so when you're first given that invitation you spend weeks and months thinking about what it is that you want to talk about but it didn't take very long for Jennifer to know what she wanted to talk about what I really would like to do in the lectures is blend the personal and the professional.

To share with you, to let you see a little bit of the evolution of my own thinking about the development and the trajectory of liberal democracy. The trajectory of liberal democracy has been a focal point for much of Jennifer Welsh's illustrious career. She was the professor and chair of international relations at European University Institute in Florence, Italy, for which she got a lot of hardship pay being in Florence. That's Idea's executive producer Greg Kelly,

introducing Jennifer to the audience at Massey College as part of its 60th anniversary celebrations, which featured past Massey speakers, like Jennifer Welsh. She was educated at Summerville College and was a fellow at the same college, I should say, co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics Law and Armed Conflict has taught international relations at the University of Toronto, the Central European University in Prague.

Jennifer was born and raised in her joining Saskatchewan and is a Métis descendant. She is now at McGill, where she's the Canada 150 research chair in global governance and security. And it's a delight to see you here. It's great to be here. Jennifer Welsh's lectures were called

The Return of History. So your book, The Return of History, begins in November 1989. I'm going to quote you back to yourself. You write that you, quote, jumped aboard a flight to Berlin to be there. That sounds sudden, it sounds compulsive.

So I want to know what drove you to jump on that flight in the first place. You were a student. I was a second year PhD student studying in the UK at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, which at that time featured a number of writers and thinkers with real connections to Eastern Europe, various countries in Eastern Europe, and it was a very dynamic place for discussions of what was going on in the world. And funnily enough,

I had been to the Soviet Union in March of 1989 before all of these tumultuous changes. And I had also been to Prague in 1989 before the fall of the wall. And about six weeks before the Berlin Wall fell, I remember those of us studying international relations in my kind of PhD cohort sitting around and someone said, do we ever think that the Berlin Wall will be demolished?

And I remember saying, not in my lifetime. And, you know, many of us thought the same thing, right? That it was frozen in place. Because especially when you're learning about international relations and big kind of structural forces, you think change is hard. right and we began to watch on the BBC that weekend in November the beginnings of a huge huge global shift that was really beginning with the movement of individual people and their decisions the decisions of those who were wanting to leave but also the decisions of of East European border guards to let them go and so watching TV I said to my friends at the time let's go

Let's go and see what's happening. We've got the time. We don't have the money, but there's cheap flights. And it's a short distance. And one of the three in my group spoke German. And so we went down to what was then called STA travel, student travel, bought tickets. And went the next day with a very small bag and booked into some cheap accommodation, but spent our entire time down by the wall on the Western. Hang on. You're on the flight now. Let's get you on the flight. Okay. You've made the jump. You've bought your tickets and you're en route. What is going through you when you're on that flight anticipating your arrival?

I'm anticipating that it's going to be difficult for us to really understand the monumental things that are happening. I'm worried about, have we made a mistake? Is this kind of a lark? You know, what is, what are we really going to follow? when we get there. So there's a certain amount of trepidation for sure, but also huge excitement, right? Just an inkling that this is the kind of thing you can do when you're in your 20s without a family, without a family of your own, without a full-time job, right? You can do this kind of thing, right? So there was a mixture of, was this a good idea? Are we really going to find anything when we get there? But also, this is amazing that I can do this. Well, what did you find when you go out there. Paint the scene. You finally arrive, a cab or whatever,

you arrive at the wall and it's a total party atmosphere. Amazing. On the western side of the wall, huge celebrations. I remember there were these Lufthansa steward and stewardesses with like trays of food

handing out to people. And you had all of the bleachers with all of the anchor people. You know, ABC, CBS, BBC. and little, I mean, the wall was still largely intact. And there was a couple of places where there were holes. And interestingly, East Europeans came through. They were given money when they came through.

I think it was a thousand Deutschmark kind of gift. But also, many were coming through and were going straight to electronic stores in West Berlin. And in those days, the prized possession was the ghetto blaster, right? Do you remember those? And they were buying ghetto blasters and they were going back, right? They didn't think at this time that this was permanent. It was some sort of maybe, maybe for a weekend we're going to be allowed to cross.

I mean, of course, some people did leave and flee. But there was a lot of trepidation that we saw in those East Germans. But on the western side, you know, huge excitement, party atmosphere. even at night, big lights shining on the Berlin Wall. And then we went around, we took the subway, and we went to East Berlin. And one of the things I was interested to do was to talk to those that had been involved in these regular meetings in churches in East Berlin that had been the foundation for the movement to press for change.

And there was a group called Nouveau Forum. And they were meeting in churches predominantly in Eastern Berlin. at the time and we really wanted to talk to some of them to learn about what do you think about all of this and the main thing I remember through my friend who was the interpreter was and I always think about this because I believe fundamentally when we look back at big historical events in retrospect we have a tendency to think that the changes that unfold are kind of inevitable like they were destined to happen right so germany was destined to be reunified to have you know one currency all of that those people in those churches were saying to us we want east germany

to be free but we don't necessarily want it to be a capitalist society we have a different vision we're not sure we want to be unified right away we're not sure but what we do know is we want to be out from under the oppression of a communist system, but we really want to decide for ourselves what's the future we want. But the steamroller of the Deutschemark and unification soon took over. But I always remember that because I think that's the bit of history I wish we paid more attention to, is what people were thinking at the time. And you have a physical reminder of all of this in your possession?

Yes. So it got lost for a little while, but I found it recently. We chipped off our own pieces of the wall. So I have a lovely piece that I didn't buy years later that many people did. I have my own that I have. And recently I was telling Greg, when you have teenagers, they really aren't that interested in you.

But recently, we were having a conversation about the Cold War in my house. And I said to my 14 and 16-year-old, I've got something you might want to see. And for about 10 minutes, I was cool, you know, because I had a piece of the Berlin Wall and I could tell them the story and I pulled out the magazines that I bought from that time

and the newspapers that I had, the German newspapers. It is the United States. conceit of almost every generation to think they're living in extraordinary times. And for my parents' generation, that was the time of the Second World War, the miracle of post-war reconstruction. And for my generation, it was the end of the Cold War. An astute observer of the fall of the wall, the British journalist Timothy Garton-ash referred to it is the biggest street party in the world that weekend in Berlin. And that's how it felt to those of us who were there, who were watching.

And at the time, with not the certainty we have in hindsight, that Germany would be reunified, that communism would fall. But certainly a sense that you were at the center of history. And of course, it was hard for all of us to keep up with what came after, these rolling revolutions, one more dictator falling until ultimately the Soviet Union, as we all know, itself collapsed. And in the midst of those tumultuous events, the American political commentator Francis Fukuyama wrote his now famous essay, The End of History. And it's his article and his predictions that are my dad.

dancing partner throughout these five lectures. Fukuyama's central claim, many of you will remember, was that it just wasn't the end of the Cold War. It was the end of our social, cultural, and political evolution, the end of the clash of ideas, the end of history as he defined it. And as a consequence of liberal democracy's victory, and its diffusion that he predicted,

we would see the waning of power politics and a more peaceful world. And certainly for the initial post-Cold War period, he looked as though he was right. The number of democracies did increase. And there was a decline in the number and intensity of wars that we saw and a decline in mass migration.

And during the 1990s, the United States and Russia began to collaborate on the world's problems, to manage the world's problems. The United States withdrew many of its military forces from Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance expanded to take in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The orbit of the European Union expanded as well, and it took on deepening forms of course. operation, hatched the plan for the euro, and developed its institutions. And of course, the United Nations itself came out of that Cold War shadow, the gridlock that had gripped it through the superpower vetoes in the Security Council. And in the 1990s, some important institutions that we now take for granted were created within the UN. The UN Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights, only created in 1993 in those heady days and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. And why was Fukuyama's thesis so appealing? It was so appealing because it contained within it this audacious notion of progress. And it was based on his reading of the 19th century German philosopher Hegel, who believed in the progress of history in terms of the reconciliation of clashing ideas also propelled by technological change. And of course, he claimed Fukuyama following Hegel that history would effectively end. And liberal democracy would be the guiding ideology for the modern state. And let's remember then what the components of that victory in that model were. It wasn't just freely elected

governments. That was one pillar. but also the promotion of individual rights and the creation of a capitalist economic system with relatively modest state oversight. So the ideal model Fukuyama used to say was liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic sphere.

We also need to remember that the triumph of liberal democracy was by no means a foregone conclusion. It was the product of unpredictable political forces, particular historical moments. Democracy, of course, is a very old principle, one that's based on this deceptively simple idea of rule by the people, rule by the demos. It's central claim that individuals shouldn't be powerless subjects,

subject to the whim of tyrants, but should have a say in creating the rules by which they are governed. In preparation for this, I took a look again at the table of contents. And when I looked at the chapter headings, my eyes seized on the, quote, return to barbarism. And I couldn't help but think of what's going on, Gaza, Israel, Russia's war in Ukraine, and the toxic rhetoric we're hearing all over the place, whether it's getting rid of vermin, this is President Trump.

Trump and the lead up to the 2024 looking ahead and so on. And the rise and the entrenchment of authoritarian leaders all over the place. It's Trump, it's Putin, it's Erdogan and Turkey, Orban and Hungary, Mali in Argentina, and Xi and China. So I'm wondering, when you look around now, and if you were to add another chapter to the return of history, would one of those chapters be, would one of those lectures be the return of the despot, the return of authoritarian yes i think it would make a great addition as a chapter because one of the themes i tried to draw out in the return of history when i was writing it in late 2015 and early 2016 was that democracy is not preordained as a form of government that it's not something that human beings naturally fall into

It's not the natural resting place. It's not a system of government about which we can be at all complacent. And the argument I was making in the book was that our political leaders and our populations in Western liberal democracies had become very complacent. And they were beginning to behave as though they could push their democratic systems to the limit and that they wouldn't fall off a cliff

because, oh, they're so resilient, they can withstand anything. And I wanted to show that when you actually look back in history, autocracy and authoritarianism is still the most common form of government. And even after we had periods of democracy in the early 20th century, we went backwards. And when I wrote the book, you know, Freedom House was beginning to describe the democratic recession that we were starting to see worldwide. Freedom House being.

Freedom House being the organization that tracks, through data collection, the reversals in civil and political liberties and other markers of political freedom. It does it every year. And it was beginning to show that the number of countries that were freer than the year before was beginning to decline and had been declining. And I think that's only continued. And so I think this idea of the return of the autocrat, the return of, and sorry to say,

they are mostly all men, return of the strong man leader, I think is definitely a phenomenon that is widespread today. It's not just Vladimir Putin. We can also think of the president of Turkey. We can think of the newly elected leader of Argentina. We can think of Bolsonaro.

We can think of many others. And just the style of politics, that it's not just sovereignty as authority. I am the authoritarian, I am the source of authority in my state, but it's sovereignty is domination, right? What I'm seeking to do through my rule is to dominate.

And I think that is a really powerful shift that is returning. And it's unapologetic. And I am not surprised to know that a preponderance of men, particularly old men, want way too much power. That's always been around.

What I find grimly fascinating is the support from the ground up for these kinds of figures that it is out there, support for democracy worldwide is going down and going down among younger demographics because it's democracy that's a mask for the status quo which doesn't benefit me, I don't believe in it, and this kind of skepticism, it's not necessarily that people are gravitating

in these younger demographics towards a third, but they're kind of checking out on the ideal of democracy. But we've noticed this thing. What do you think accounts for this? ground up ordinary people out there who want the strong men, who want that kind of authoritarian, that kind of despotic presence to be their political voice. What do you think accounts for that? Yeah, it's a good question. It's a complex question. But I think

fundamentally it's about two things, right? One is the capacity of those strong men to identify and verbalize the sense of grievance. that those people have and to say that they have an answer to it. The answer is whatever scapegoat they want to point to, to definitively say this is the reason for the way

why you feel aggrieved about X or Y. But I think the other reason is a little bit more deep-seated about democracy itself. So you're right, Greg, that we are seeing data about democratic values. When you poke at this, and I think it does differ among youth across the world, you see that there's still huge levels of support

for the basic values at the heart of democracy. They're attractive, but there is discontent with what democracy is delivering. And those are two different things. And I think the reason for that is that democracy is fundamentally about two kinds of equality. The first is equality of participation. everyone needs to vote. We need to have freedom of association. We need to have freedom of

speech. But the other is a quality of consideration, right? That everyone's views are considered and taken into account and interests are taken into account in democratic systems. And we can't say that that's any longer the case in contemporary mature democracies, that there are certain sets of interest that are getting prioritized over others. And so I want to shift tonight from the big and sometimes intractable issues like migration and war and talk much more about what's going on in our own cities and our own communities and our own communities and the way that history is returning in the form of extreme inequality. I want to talk about its corrosive effects.

As prominent economists have recently argued, economic inequality is also bad for the economy in ways that neoliberals didn't want to admit. But what I also want to focus on is the way that it affects social cohesion and even individual behavior, it affects our sympathies, it affects our moral sentiments. I want to challenge the myths that continue to circulate, that inequality somehow helps our economies grow, and that it is the just result of hard work. And I want to talk instead about how I think it is undermining contemporary liberal democracy. Grand narratives like the end of history, like Fukuyama's book,

can make us very resigned and overconfident about the stability of our own system. And I think it's time to shake that up. So let me start by talking about the contours of today's inequality, because one of the most often cited benefits of globalization is its fostering of economic growth, and by implication, its contribution to reducing poverty levels worldwide. So Branko Milanovic, who for a decade was the World Bank's chief economist,

has showed us how the mean incomes of countries across the globe have started to converge since the end of the Cold War. So according to his data, the two decades between 1988 and 2008 marked the first decline in economic inequality between world citizens since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. And we've seen a decrease in the number of people living on $1.25, it now is, per day, which is the World's Bank measure of extreme poverty. These figures undoubtedly signify progress.

But globalization has winners and losers. Those at the top of the economic pyramid, those in the so-called global 1% have done spectacularly well. They've increased their incomes by 60%. during this 20-year period. In 2015, the wealthiest 1% of Americans held 35% of the country's wealth. And that concentration actually increased

when you took housing assets out of the mix. And of course, even within that 1%, you have the super, super rich, the 0.1% who take home just over 11% of America's total income. And increasingly, that super-rich is constituting a nation unto themselves. But their affluence is occurring against a backdrop of significant under-employment, stagnating incomes, and declining living standards among ordinary Americans. The hollowing out of the middle class. Now, these trends, among other things, deal a mortal blow to the theory

of trickle-down economics, which was made so popular during the Reagan era, which theorizes that when the rich do well, the rest of the population also benefits. But this pattern of inequality repeats itself to varying degrees in other liberal democracies. So we should be wary of falling prey to this idea of American exceptionalism, that they're the outlier. Yes, they're the most extreme example, but it's happening in many liberal democracies. In Canada, over the past three decades, the top one percent of Canada's income earners captured 37 percent of income growth in this country. But even more alarming for me is the source and the nature of today's inequality, and in particular how it's undermining the meritocratic values that are so crucial

for liberal democracy to thrive. So Thomas Pickety in his book posits that when countries have a high capital income ratio, as they did in the late 19th century, accumulated and inherited wealth becomes the most determining factor of an individual's well-being. And so this is why so many 19th century novels

are about marrying into wealth or the struggle of the poor to reach athletes, as in Mark Twain's book, The Gilded Age. And so ever since, the whole idea of a gilded age has become a metaphor for a historical period in the late 19th century when the United States, as well as Great Britain and France and Russia, saw a combination of materialist excess

and poverty. So on the one hand, this period gave rise to haute couture, Victorian architecture, but of course, on the other hand, it gave rise to the Dickensian slums and the passage of poor laws that tried to limit who could gain economic relief. So in shifting our gaze back to that era, today's economists of inequality,

and there's a growing number of them, have reminded us of its dark underbelly. Contemporary economic disparity is primarily driven by the ownership of assets, much in the same way as it was in the run-up to the First World War, when wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few rich families. And in this era, capitalism was automatically generating arbitrary and what proved to be unsustainable inequalities.

But remember, history never repeats itself fully. It returns with a modern twist. So one of the things that's interesting about our period today, is that more and more people within the 1%, the top 1%, are wealthy both in terms of their salaries, their income, and their ownership of assets. So labor and capital isn't separated in the same way as it was, say, in the era of Downton Abbey.

But the implication remains the same. Individuals will become better off, not primarily through a lifetime of hard work, as suggested by the American dream, but through how much capital they inherit. On Ideas, you're listening to Jennifer Welsh, reflecting on her 2016 CBC Massey lectures, The Return of History.

Ideas is a podcast, which you can find on the CBC Listen app, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're also a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on U.S. Public Radio and on SiriusXM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world, at cbc.ca.ca. I'm Nala Ayed. At Desjardin Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business, to be exact.

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For tickets, go to Shawfest.com. In your 2016 Massey Lecturers, you have one of them dedicated to the... I'm going to start that over because I didn't put on my glasses. That's Ideas, executive producer Greg Kelly, talking with Jennifer Welsh. Their conversation was part of a series of events marking the 60th anniversary of Massey College,

a partner in the Massey Lectures. In your 2016 masses, you talk about the return of inequality, and you tie that to this principle of fairness, which is perhaps an umbrella term for the two points that you just raised, and fairness being a kind of a bedrock, perhaps with soft contours, but nevertheless a bedrock of democracy and support for it. And in that chapter, in that lecture on the return of inequality, you discussed wealth disparities and drew on research from a psychologist at UC Berkeley, and how the richer one gets, the more entitlement one gets, and the more one feels almost ontologically

to be it of a different, more elevated level of existence than anyone else. And I was just thinking of the burgeoning billionaire class. Now, for me, when I hear a billion, it just sounds like a million only more, because they rhyme. You just take the M out and put a B in, and it's not the case. So one of these factoids, how much is a billion,

if I get it right, if you wanted to have a billion dollars and you saved or earned $100 a day, how much time do you think it would take to get a billion? It's over 27,000 years to get a billion. And Forbes magazine for 2023 has listed 195 billionaires who have $10 billion or more. And I'm wondering what this chasm, this almost inconceivable disparity in wealth,

has done to this sense of fairness that you identified in your 2016 lectures. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a really important question. And you're right. I didn't intend to write that chapter when I started. And it was the one that I learned the most writing because I'm a scholar of international relations.

I haven't spent my time studying that much inside democracies. But it became really clear to me that when we were looking at the malaise and democracies, we were overlooking the fact that fairness, is a value that is a precondition, a sense of fairness for a well-functioning democracy. We often point to other values, right?

Again, equality, respect. Fairness and a sense of fairness is a deep psychological need that humans have. Anyone who has children more than one child knows this to be the case, right? Even the primatologist, France? Absolutely.

So I looked at these experiments with chimpanzees, which were exposed to situations of unfairness and how they responded. And one of those was what, one gets a can. One continually gets a grape for doing a good job at an activity, and the other one gets a rock for doing the same activity and gets more and more outraged over time that it's getting a rock and not a grape, right? And I reflected on this a lot because I think the fairness issue is, there's many ways in which it's manifest,

but let's just think about two for the moment. One is that, as I try to show in the book, but I think has become even more clear as we think about the role of property and real estate in our societies, is that while income inequality is a problem in advanced liberal democracies, the much bigger problem is wealth inequality, right?

That you can work and work and work, and earn an income in a good job, but not have the same level of capital level of wealth that others have. And that wealth inequality, which is, I think, your point about the billionaire, then the question is, what does that translate into? And I remember very well when Tony Blair was elected in the UK as part of new labor. he and his cabinet ministers, you know, said very loudly, Labor doesn't care anymore if people get stinking rich in the UK.

That's okay. But what we don't want to see is that unequal wealth translates into unequal power, unequal political access, right? And so I think part of the problem with the billionaire class, but also just the way that contemporary democracies are responding unequally to sets of interests is that the interests of the wealthy are being acted upon much more consistently

or it's perceived to be the case by our political systems. And that's where the sense of fairness comes in. I also think, just as a last point, that fairness plays out in terms of our crisis in representation, right? So our traditional liberal democratic, electoral systems are delivering political results in terms of in our system seats and where

they're from and who forms government that are increasingly not perceived, and I use that word, to be fair. And that's all part of this piece. And so a lack of a sense of fairness erodes liberal democracy from within. And I really believe that's a big part of what we're what we're witnessing now. And this crisis, that was your word, this crisis that we're facing now. You know, I know that in your lectures, the return of history, Francis Fukuyama

is referenced a fair bit, you know, the end of history. I think originally an article with a question mark at the end of it. Did I get that right? But then it became the mantra that we're at the end of history, liberal democracy is triumph,

there's no other option. And so for a while, it looked like 1989 was maybe like 1789, only without the blood and the guillotine and so on. But in retrospect, is it more like 1848, which is often nicknamed the year in which history failed to turn? It's a great question.

One of the people I talk about in the beginning of the book is Timothy Gartonash, who was one of the chroniclers of the changes in Eastern Europe at the time. And he said a few years ago, you know, there's a segment of the population who are the 1989ers, right? who are the people who came of age in this period of optimism.

And, you know, I have to admit, I'm a 1989er, right? When he said it, I thought, ah, that's me. I very much was caught up in that period of euphoria, believing that this was a change that was going to be progressive and that it was a sustainable change. And I wouldn't go as far as to say it's 1848. I think many democracies are proving to be resilient. But, you know, one of the messages is you can't count on them to be resilient on their own. There needs to be not just the stewardship of great leaders.

There needs to be the activism of ordinary people. And the engagement that you were speaking. And to realize that traditional politics, traditional democratic politics, is incredibly important. And we have, I think, vast segments of our population and our younger population who no longer believe that. They are much more attracted to another kind of politics,

which is also important, but I don't think can come at the expense of traditional politics. What is that politics? It's more a politics around specific issues. It's also politics of identity, which is incredibly important in terms of what it's achieved. An example?

You know, the politics around particular segments of society, right? But my wish is that we don't pursue those at the expense of traditional politics as well, where we have to come together to talk about how we're going to reach consensus on big societal challenges. And I don't think they need to be mutually exclusive at all. I think they can be pursued together. We talked just a little while ago about the return of the despot, the return of authoritarianism. I wonder if there's another kind of return of. And that is when I look around and see the rolling back of abortion rights, Trump's infamous comment that's still

pings around the internet of grabbing women and by extension an entire country by the private parts or Miles in Argentina swinging around his chainsaw or Putin with his bare chest on the horse or playing hockey at which he's excreble and being allowed to score a whole

bunch of goals. There's a lot of machismo or fake machismo and it's ridiculous but it's also quite dangerous. We see it in the rhetoric and I'm wondering if in some sense that we may be heading back into a kind of return of unapologetic patriarchy, this kind of chest-beating politics that has mileage?

Yeah, I think it has mileage in some contexts, right? And particularly it's part of a package of things that some of these leaders appeal to. You know, when you, when you mentioned it, I thought of, you know, the picture of Vladimir Putin, bare-chested. Was it a tiger? I can't remember or a horse or whatever he was riding, right? Well, it's been meaned a billion times. Yeah. And so this, you know, this image of strength, again, of domination, right? And so I definitely believe that that and particularly when you consider the degree to which social media as a platform today,

if you talk to female journalists or you talk to politicians, is proving to be an absolutely, lethal environment, right, where it's fair game for women in particular to be harassed and attacked on that medium, right? So I think what you describe in some contexts is absolutely a form of return. Again, you know, when I write in the book about democracy's progress, one of the things that is part of that progress is the extension of political rights to the identity groups I talked about a moment ago, right? That is incredibly important. We can't see the reversal of that. Again, not be complacent about them

because they can be reversed through legislation as we're seeing in the United States, right? I see this kind of pubescent machismo with the privileged classes we just were talking about where you see yourself so very differently when you have a lot more than other people. I think that UC Berkeley psychologist did some research where when it was the honor system

to give the right-of-way to pedestrians, and it was the lined crosswalk. And overwhelmingly, statistically, the number of cars that violated that rule were high-status cars, or monopoly or that kind of a game fixed, and certain players got a lot more than others, and they became more bellicose, more aggressive.

And then I think in a sort of parallel universe to the geopolitical sphere, this kind of pubescent, since want to be macho man, ethos, that ridiculous cage match that was proposed and then called down between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And I've just, it's the unapologetic, the kind of nakedness of this, that you can score points with your crowd or with enough people out there. And it's like a 12-year-old barking.

But it's also the scale of the adventures, right, that I think are so prevalent. Yes. And even, you know, I remember the period in which the, was it the Titan that exploded on the bottom near the Titanic? And I just remember the juxtaposition of that adventure. Yes, someone was seeking out, you know, the thrill of a lifetime at huge expense. But at the same time that, you know, public money, I believe, was being invested in rescue. that crew, we had hundreds of people dying refugees on the Mediterranean

at the same time. And what story got told? And what story got told? And it just shows you of the attention and mindshare that we give to these huge displays of adventure and status. And for me, that was the message I took away from that whole episode. Not that, you know, I felt bad for the families of those

who were on the floor of the sea next to the Titanic, but I just remember thinking 600 people died on the Mediterranean at the same time who were not rescued. You know, in retrospect, we learned they could have been. You know, there were Coast Guards that knew where they were, but there was no investment in rescuing.

Or even individualized. It was the split screen between those two things that made me sit back and ask, you know, where are our priorities, where are we allocating our mindshed, or even individualized, the 600. I don't believe much or any of that actually happened, but we got profiles of the people in the sub that met its untimely end.

We were brought up to use a media cliche up close and personal in some of these profiles, but there was, it was a number when it came to the refugees, you know? And so if we're looking at that kind of return of the privileged class, I wonder to introduce another potential addition to the return of history. we might be on the cusp of the return to empire. I'm thinking of, look at China's posturing in Asia, in South Asia. A perennial member on that list of empire

is always the United States. And of course, Russia, it's war in Ukraine. Do you sense that we're on a kind of trajectory or are we on a cusp of the return to empire? I don't think we're going to see a return to empire as a general rule, right? I don't think it's going to be a widespread practice. But I think we are seeing, particularly in the case of Russia

and to a certain extent China, a conception that I mentioned earlier of sovereignty as domination, right? That other entities on your periphery are not really sovereign, right? Are not really independent. And it's interesting because, you know, when I look back at this book, And I have the chapter on Russia's invasion of Crimea. And I tell the story of the beginning of that war and the challenge that it posed to international order at the time.

But yet as we know, the response was all told fairly muted. And I remember citing a phone conversation between Angela Merkel and Barack Obama, where she is reported to have said after Russia's invasion of crime. Crimea, that she had spoke to Vladimir Putin and that he's living in a different world, right? Well, he's not living in a different world. This is the world that we're living in, that he's living in. She had a perception that somehow through economic interdependence, you could actually change Russian behavior.

And, you know, I recently took another trip. The beginning of November, I was in Ukraine just a few weeks ago. And what profound message I took away from that visit, which was really designed to examine how internally displaced peoples are faring as a result of the war, was that this is not just a war for territory, although it is that. It's a, in the spirit of empire,

it is designed to change borders, to bring back, into the Russian state, not just into the Russian sphere of influence, but into the Russian state, Ukrainian territory. It's a war to degrade the Ukrainian people. It fundamentally views them as not worthy of their own sovereign state. And I emerge with the sense that they are in a fight for their survival as a people, right? So many people have left.

They have a human capital short. They lack the resources. They need to continue to develop their population. They're a highly educated, highly skilled population. But they're in a fight for their survival, not just of this wonderful land that they have, which, by the way, contrary to some American lawmakers who I've listened to, is not a small landmass.

Ukraine is a huge country. And in the American discourse, you might think it's just some small, you know, far away. but it's really aimed at the Ukrainian people. And I find this, you know, what's fascinating about that is that this is a war of the 21st century and the 20th century. Russia is fighting a 20th century war that believes that if you fight

to destroy civil society of your opponent, that that is going to weaken their resolve and that they will eventually give up. Now, funnily enough, we learned in World War II, that that doesn't fully work, but nonetheless, that's the war they're fighting. And Ukraine, by proxy, is fighting much more the 21st century war of Western armies,

professionalized, highly strategic, but they are bogged down in a very 20th century battle along a front where the Russians are deeply entrenched and where there's very close, combat, even in a world of drones and missiles. I mean, that juxtaposition. Absolutely.

And so it just demonstrates to us that those kinds of battles are not over. And I think it was so difficult in 2014 for Western leaders to realize what the end game really was. And it was in part the nature of that response and also the nature of the West withdrawal from Afghanistan that I think. think, sent signals the wrong signals to Putin, but signals nonetheless that this might be an act that would go relatively unpunished. I began this conversation by quoting you back to yourself from the start of the return of history. So I'm going to end by quoting you back to yourself

from the end of the return of history. In a liberal democracy, if we want that deeper transformation, we have to initiate it ourselves. That is what the history of the 20th century revealed. Individuals stepping up to draw attention to injustice, to demand greater equality of participation and to stand up for fairness. And they did so knowing that their demands would likely involve some personal sacrifice. The crises facing today's liberal democracy suggests that we need to reread our history to learn more about how our societies coped with both global and domestic challenges and about the particular battles fought in the name of creating the world's best political system.

then we need to take that history into the present and give it our own modern twist. Well, given everything that's occurring now and in the intervening year since your 2016 Masses, what would that modern twist look like to you now? Oh, it's a great question you end with. I think that modern twist has to be a renewed capacity for democracy to deliver.

fairness and justice. But it has to do it in a much more modern way, right? So in the past, fairness and justice was about extending the franchise. It was about extending political rights

to the entire population. We have that almost complete. I wouldn't say fully complete because I think we have all kinds of populations in our Western liberal democracies living in the margins

that do not. have full rights. But I think now we have to think about our systems of representation and how they can deliver a new sense of fairness, but also respond to those wider, you know, calls for justice. And particularly, at least in the Canadian context, you know, it involves our ongoing reckoning with our history, with our history of colonialism, with our history, with First Nations and Métis people. But I think that's the modern twist. And it's a modern twist that has to be led by those who were the age I was when I went to the Berlin Wall, right? They have to be engaged in this game, much more than I see them as being.

I'd like to see them feel that there's more at stake in their own democracies to feel like they have to fight for it every day. And really contribute to shaping the institutions that are going to carry us into the future. future. Jennifer Welsh, it's always a pleasure and a privilege to jump onto any conversation with you. Thank you. Thank you. You were listening to Jennifer Welsh, speaking with Ideas executive producer Greg Kelly. She was the 2016 Massey Lecturer. In our next episode, we'll have an encore presentation of her fifth and final lecture, The Return of Inequality.

This episode is part of a series of conversations with and about former Massey lecturers to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the Massies. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly with a division. help from Sean Foley. Thanks to Massey College and former principal, Natalie de Rosier. Technical production,

Danielle Duval, with help from Joe Costa and Philip Coulter. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. The acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayad.

For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca slash podcasts.