Philip Cunliffe explains why nation-building is the solution to the impasse in Western politics identified by Perry Anderson as the Regime.
In a recent essay for the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson plots out the deadlock confronting political parties of both left and right across Western states, and notes that this deadlock paralyses both insurgent as well as establishment parties. With his characteristic sweep, Anderson provides a stark image of political impasse across the mature democracies of the Western world. Entitled ‘Regime Change’, Anderson’s essay invokes the multiple meanings of the term. The first meaning of ‘regime’ is its conventional sense of the political power that is more deeply embedded at the domestic level than any single party or government. The second meaning of ‘regime-change’ is the militarised overturn of a state as experienced in America’s imperial crusades during the 1990s and 2000s. Finally there is the third, scholarly meaning of ‘regime’ as the matrix of transnational institutions devised in the aftermath of the Second World War, explicitly intended to enmesh states and coordinate their policies – echoing the original meaning of regime, but boosted to the transnational rather than the domestic level.
It is the latter regime that is the central focus of Anderson’s argument—the Regime that has intertwined domestic and international politics in the core of the world order for decades, and has been far more consequential in its global effects and historical legacy than the shabby regimes in the Ba’ath party states of Iraq and Syria, the Taliban’s backwater emirate of Afghanistan, or the Americans’ misguided campaigns to overthrow them. The transnational Regime subsumed them all, as the regime-change wars of the 2000s were intended to punish, discipline and then integrate recalcitrant national regimes into the global Regime by imposing rule by non-governmental organisations, human rights, international courts, international trade and transnational networks onto the so-called rogue states. Imperial war was an integral part of this larger transnational Regime.
If US-led regime-change notoriously failed in the Middle East in the early 2000s, regime-change is now also failing in the Western world. As Anderson points out, populist incursions at the domestic level have been contained at the transnational level. The neoliberal Regime has so far remained intact despite political revolts and ambitious but failed efforts at economic reform and revival. This is no accident. As Quinn Slobodian has shown, from their origins in inter-war Vienna, neoliberals identified supranational and transnational structures such as treaties, federations, international organisations and international law as the means by which they could contain popular sovereignty and democratic power, thereby compensating for the end of earlier ways of containing sovereign democracy: empire and the gold standard.
Surviving the contradictions
The strength of the neoliberal Regime is measured in the fact that it has withstood recurrent revolts, raids and sieges over the last two decades since the Great Financial Crash of 2008. Many populist insurgents have either failed to take power, or they have been contained once in power. On one end of the ideological spectrum, Anderson notes the abject surrender of the Greek Left populist government Syriza to the European Union in 2015, and on the other, Donald Trump’s underwhelming first presidential term, which promised national renewal for America’s workers while lavishing tax cuts on the wealthy.
While Anderson leaves open the possibility of Trump’s second term marking a new departure, he notes that we have solid reasons to expect that neoliberal doctrine will survive around the world. Anderson shows that neoliberalism continues as the default paradigm despite consistent recourse by neoliberal parties and governments to policies that violate its precepts. He notes that both the neoliberal critics of current policy and the critics of neoliberalism as such have plenty of evidence to support their case that neoliberalism remains the only coherent paradigm for government. In particular, Anderson cites former US president Bill Clinton’s economic adviser Jason Furman to note that the most decisive and conscious effort to break with neoliberal policy in the Western world – the policies of the Democratic Biden administration in the US – has only led to higher debt, higher inflation, higher interest rates and higher rates of poverty.
The contradictions of Trump’s first few months in office would seem to bear Anderson’s analysis out. While Trump’s trade war on the world certainly has no grounding in neoliberal economics, the efficiency drive embodied in Elon Musk’s DOGE project is very much consistent with the classical neoliberal drive to curb state spending and instill competitive practices in the public sector. Tariff barriers are unlikely to stimulate the much-vaunted re-industrialisation of the US without state capacity to guide industrial policy. While Trump may politically succeed in balancing the tension between the different wings of his MAGA coalition, Hamiltonian trade policy abroad and techno-libertarianism at home do not constitute a consistent political package, let alone embody a coherent new paradigm of government. To be sure, Trump is trying to consolidate the democratic basis for this project. As Adam Tooze has noted, in calling for ordinary American consumers to make material sacrifices in the interests of the trade war, Trump is breaking with the neoliberal order in a way that no president has so far managed. Trump has since gone even further, floating the possibility of more taxes on the wealthy.
Whether or not Trump manages to reshape public perceptions of tax in America is an open question—what is certain is that he will struggle to take even the MAGA Republican party with him. The deadlock arises, Anderson suggests, because Left and Right hold individual pieces of the political puzzle. Their mutual antagonism means that there is no coherent way to piece together the jigsaw. On the one hand, the Left, unlike the Right, has the political willingness and theoretical depth and intellectual tradition to remake the economy that underpins the current Regime. On the other hand, the Right, unlike the Left, has greater democratic legitimacy, especially because of its stated willingness to meet working class concerns about stemming mass migration. This deadlock reflects the fact that both the Right and the Left cooperated to build the Regime: the Right to champion the market, the Left to delegitimise the nation-state as incorrigibly racist and parochial. The result is that open borders are now an integral part of the Regime.
Even though open borders were not seen as foundational by the original architects of neoliberalism, actually-existing neoliberalism—the neoliberalism of practice rather than the neoliberalism of theory—has been heavily dependent on importing cheap labour to hold down wage growth and inflation, as well as diluting union density in the national labour forces of the advanced economies. This has enjoyed the support of the business class by keeping wages low, and the support of the left by diluting the supposed parochialism of the nation. According to Anderson, the Left can have no truck with any of the proposed measures for stemming mass migration without ceasing to be Left. Hence the Right will retain popular democratic momentum even as it remains incapable of overturning the Regime that keeps on drawing in cheap labour to prop up sagging economic growth and substituting for indigenous populations that are increasingly refusing to reproduce.
The iron triangle of neoliberalism
Anderson sees both Left and Right trapped within a neoliberal triangle whose three corners are constituted by inequality, oligarchy and factor mobility (that is mobility of factors of production, capital and labour). These form the three corners of an ‘interconnected system’ according to Anderson: the iron triangle of neoliberalism. The problem for existing political parties is that Left and the Right can only take two of the three corners at best. The Left can tackle oligarchy and inequality, but not factor mobility because they are committed to importing cheap migrant labour that reproduces the inequality that underpins oligarchic rule. The Right can tackle oligarchy and labour mobility, but not capital mobility, leaving them unable to address inequality, and correspondingly, oligarchy. As long as one tower of the neoliberal citadel is left standing, the other two are always retaken.
Whatever nuances and complexities may exist in the context of individual states, there is no doubting the basic thrust of Anderson’s argument: the populist Right remains too attached to business elites and neoliberal capitalist economics to remake the political economy of the Regime, while the populist Left remains too attached to the professional middle classes and neoliberal cosmopolitanism to remake the politics of the Regime. As a result, the Regime survives – its walls may have been scaled and even breached, its gates may have been shattered, but it remains standing, and it continues to extract tribute and dominate its hinterland by default.
For this reason, Anderson suggests that we should not expect world-historic change to follow the lines of twentieth-century history, where the post-war Keynesian consensus was replaced by the neoliberal consensus. In this model of historic transformation, political change and conflict was ideologically infused, punctuated with great intellectual jousts and the eventual displacement of one paradigm by another among the political elite and intelligentsia. Instead, Anderson suggests that change might come as it did in Brazil in the 1940s and China in the 1970s—through desperate improvisation rather than ideological evolution and the conscious embrace of one paradigm over another. Yet what is striking about Anderson’s essay is that it does in fact inadvertently imply a new political paradigm that would be able to break the Left-Right deadlock, assemble the various pieces of the puzzle, and thereby achieve the decisive break that has so far been lacking. That paradigm is the Nation.
The paradigm of nation-building
As Anderson notes, the original regime of the postwar order, built up in the aftermath of the Second World War, was expressly intended to coordinate and restrict the behaviour of nation-states under US tutelage. This transnational Regime expanded to absorb the territories of the former Eastern bloc at the end of the Cold War, even as its vice had become tighter with the establishment of neoliberal institutions and policies from the 1970s through to the 2000s. Given that the Regime was established at the expense of the sovereign nation-state, building up nations is the most obvious first step in suppressing the rights and power of the Regime. Restoring popular self-rule at the national level necessarily means casting off the fetters of so many supranational court rulings, international treaties, regional free trade blocs, institutions and transnational structures that are intended to make global governance function more efficiently at the expense of national democracy.
It is precisely because the Regime could suppress but never eradicate nationhood that the Nation has been the political heartland of anti-globalist insurgency and rebellion. So far, however, the idea of the Nation has been poorly articulated politically. The populist rebellion has not taken the form of seeking to rebuild strong political nations, but has appeared rather as tentative sallies, sometimes by charismatic demagogues, mostly by incompetents. These interventions break either Left or Right, thereby undercutting the reach of their electoral appeal and dispersing their momentum. They can take one or two points of the neoliberal iron triangle, but not all three simultaneously. Trump relies on the Silicon Valley oligarchs to prop up his coalition. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party harks back to Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni supports the transnational forever war in Ukraine. Hungary’s Viktor Orban promises to capture and reform the supranational Brussels bureaucracy. Jeremy Corbyn pines for the post-war national health service while supporting the open borders that makes social citizenship rights impossible. Yannis Varoufakis fantasises about a democratic EU. None of them has the ideological vision or political momentum to break up the Regime.
What can carry the Nation to victory beyond the limited sorties of the populists, however, is that the Nation can politically subsume and control each corner of the neoliberal iron triangle identified by Anderson—namely, inequality, oligarchy, factor mobility. Extreme inequality violates the political solidarity and cohesion necessary for national-self government; the Nation must therefore contain and repress inequality and foster social solidarity. Oligarchy substitutes minority rule for the popular self-government that is required for a nation to rule itself; the Nation must therefore suppress oligarchs and cultivate the representative institutions that will block oligarchy from recurring. Global capital mobility allows for capital strike that sabotages national economic plans while global labour mobility dilutes the value of national feeling and citizenship that makes national independence achievable and appealing; the Nation must therefore assert its rights over capital and labour mobility.
The Nation can both enact and transcend all the various remedial proposals that Anderson lists as appealing, but intrinsically limited, policies – Medicare in the US, citizens’ incomes in Italy, public investment banks in the UK, Tobin taxes in France, and so on. The Nation offers the ‘general, interlocking alternative to the status quo’ that Anderson cannot see in the offer of any political party, or indeed his own framework. The Nation not only offers a base to overthrow the Regime: the condition of its emancipation requires breaking apart the transnational Regime, because the Nation requires inter-nationalism – national economic prosperity requires international cooperation between sovereign nation-states that would eradicate tax-havens and coordinate policies to curb capital mobility.
Nation-building failed in the imperial regime-change wars of the unipolar age. But this failure was pre-programmed into the structure of the Regime itself. Given that the Regime was built on the suppression of national independence, it was never going to be able to build functioning institutions of independent nationhood at the periphery of the global order. Now as the globalist order crumbles away under Trump’s rule, the possibility opens up of nation-building in the core of the global system—North America and the old nation-states of Europe.
The fact that Anderson overlooks the potential of national renewal implicit within his own analysis is ironic, given that Anderson and his late collaborator Tom Nairn placed national decline at the core of their analysis of the British state that they dubbed ‘Ukania’. From this perspective, Britain’s precocious seventeenth-century agrarian revolution pitched Britain into a global imperialism that would overshoot its Continental rivals in reach and power, but would also strengthen its pre-modern political spandrels that would restrain modernity. The aristocracy and the money-lenders of the City pursued colonial expansion abroad at the expense of the industrious entrepreneurs and popular self-rule at home, delaying the prospect of working-class emancipation. For Anderson and Nairn, the plodding bourgeoisies of Europe had the advantage that they could build functioning nation-states through belated but correspondingly more solid and consistent processes of national modernisation.
Whatever the theoretical merits of the Nairn-Anderson thesis as an explanation of Britain’s relative decline, the project of national renewal implicit within it could only ever exist as a belated process of catch-up: with the West Germany and France of the 1960s and 1970s, or the surging economy of Italy in the 1980s. It was a model that made both Nairn and Anderson early partisans of European integration as a force of modernisation for stagnant Britain, and in Nairn’s case a supporter of Scottish secession backed by North Sea oil as a way of shattering the imperial Ukanian state. Today, with German factories shuttering and the collapse of the Iberian power-grid, few would look to Europe to offer a model of functioning modernity, let alone modernisation. (Anderson himself gave up on it some years ago.) Similarly, given that the Scottish National Party has plumped for the vagaries of wind over oil and staked the fate of the Scottish people on rejoining a sclerotic EU, it is clear that they are trans-nationalists rather than revolutionary ones. But while the lack of current models or precedents weighs down the Nairn-Anderson thesis, it is no drawback for twenty-first century nationalists – for it means the Nation has to be made anew, drawing its poetry from the future rather than the past.
Until independent nation-states with fully sovereign rights are restored, the politics of Left and Right in all of their varieties and shades can only recreate globalism—whether that be of a conservative, Christian Europe; a Fortress Europe; a Green liberal Europe; a renewed Atlantic alliance; a revitalised Judeo-Christian Western civilisation; a Global Intifada; climate justice for all; overthrowing the racist imperial patriarchy. Any political option is available, as long as it is a globalist one based on the assertion of performative global solidarities, transnational connections, and the suppression of individual nations’ distinctive national interests and the national solidarity that is the real basis of democracy. The Regime will persist. For those looking actually to change the Regime, to move beyond the senescent politics of the long, superannuated twentieth century, beyond the decline of globalisation, a new era of nation-building beckons.
The Northern Star 
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