Was the world of the 1990s better than today’s?

It is a fundamental question. Had we (as the world) gone somewhere very wrong and ended up in today’s very bad situation? To many young people it might seem a strange question to ask because the world of the 1990s is a faraway world of which by experience they know almost nothing. But they do know the terms of the Global Financial Crisis, liberal imperialism, and Washington Consensus.

While one cannot say that today’s word is “better”, I think that one can rather confidently affirm that the world of the 1990s was a world of unmatched hypocrisy and ideas that almost all turned out to be wrong. I will review them in a moment. To start: what did Hannah Arend say about hypocrisy? “What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and criminal confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” (On Revolution)

Arendt might have exaggerated because hypocrisy is a necessary condition for any society to exist: too little of it makes society violent and rough, but too much –and there she was right—makes it rotten.

What were the nostrums of the 1990s?

Financilization is good. It was thought that both domestically and internationally greater financialization would make individuals and countries grow faster. It was a substitute for economic equality: everybody who wanted to study or had a good idea could easily borrow and become rich. Individuals could do it within a country, and poor countries could do it within the world. As John Rawls wrote in his very nineties The Law of Peoples, poor countries could easily borrow from the “Society of Nations” and solve their problems. A deep financial sector was a cure-all. Did it really cure all? Not really. Free movement of capital between nations brought about the Asian financial crisis which led to large income declines in South Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, and Indonesia, and later spread to Russia and Latin America. Then, in 2007-08, unchecked financial liberalization in the West, combined with high inequality, caused the Global Financial Crisis with a recession. Those responsible for the recession were bailed out by the government; those who lost were left out to dry. So the truth of the 1990s turned out to be wrong.

Multiethnic societies are good. While this was affirmed in public, the elites and the media supported the break-up of multi-ethnic formerly communist federations in Europe and Africa (Ethiopia). How was it that multiethnicity in one part of the world was good while in the other part of the world it was bad? The answer is that the theory worked only if you thought of it in terms of naked political realism: let’s break those whom we consider enemies so that we can become stronger. It was a sugar-coated lie. And as multiethnicity became a problem in the West, increasingly strong obstacles to the free movement of labor were set up. Most notably so in Europe that surrounded herself with electric fences (that were ostentatiously destroyed in 1989 on the border between Hungary and Austria) and fast boats in the Mediterranean to protect herself against what its elites ideologically sad they supported: multiethnicity. The truth of the 1990s turned out to be wrong.

Poor countries can easily become rich and they should do so. The claim was that rich countries and the elites there were keen to help poor counties grow out of their poverty. Poor countries were poor because they were corrupt and unable to use technological knowledge that existed in the world. The transfer of technology, and the application of the principle of comparative advantage were desirable; only the corruption of the less-developed countries prevented both. But when China used that worldwide technological knowledge and got ahead of the rest of the world, suddenly the story changed: now the poor were stealing the technology that rightly belonged to the rich. The truth of the 1990s turned out to be wrong, or more exactly, what was claimed was not sincerely believed.

Government is the problem. Everything could be done better by the private sector. Except when the combination of the private sector and the state reshuffled the cards in the world and made China grow at two-digit rates, the mantra changed: the state should implement industrial policies, erect security barriers and defend itself.

Thus almost all that was believed in the 1990 was either proven wrong, or was self-serving. Hypocrisy’s uncontested rule relegated any daring or alternative opinions to the lunatic fringe. Freedom of expression in the ideologically dominant part of the world was not controlled by the thought police but was controlled by the mandarins of knowledge and requirements for success. They asphyxiated the thought and created a wooden language that distorted reality. Everybody knew what to think (or at least what to say) to get ahead. It was ideologically a barren period where clichés were regarded as ultimate accomplishments of human thought. Today’s world may not be better but is certainly intellectually freer.