The Second Coming has caught the mood of a political era brimming with crises.
This poem, written by WB Yeats in 1919, reflected the tone of a time of war and death. The first World War had just ended, the Russian Revolution was raging and the fight for Irish independence was about to intensify. His pregnant wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, contracted the Spanish flu amid the pandemic and nearly died.
Yeats wrote “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. This tone of imminent apocalypse has felt appropriate as we respond to modern wars, crises and pandemics.
Fintan O’Toole, in this paper, proposed the ‘Yeats Test’. This is “the more quotable Yeats seemed to commentators and politicians, the worse things are”. As this test was proposed before Covid and the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, I fear it has been passed on many occasions.
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The latest work to nod to this poem is The Centre Must Hold, a collection of essays edited by Yair Zivan.
The editor is a “committed centrist” who served as a foreign policy adviser to Israel’s largest centrist political party and as media spokesperson for President Shimon Peres. This collection is inspired by his experience in a “quintessentially centrist” coalition government.
Describing a political philosophy with a formula is an impressive intellectual trick. One of the early essays in this collection attempts to do so by defining centrism as “moderation + heterogeneity”.
Moderation in outlook and tone requires constraint, humility and a recognition that no one has a monopoly on truth or compassion. Heterogeneity is the acceptance that any solution can combine differing political perspectives.
‘Faith, Philosophy and the Foundations of Centrism’, by the philosopher Micah Goodman, is a beautiful essay on the intellectual and spiritual roots of this outlook. It suggests two different frameworks for politics of the centre.
The first is the “golden mean” model, developed by Aristotle, where “the middle, the point between the extremes, is the path one should follow”. A second model is that of yin and yang. In this approach, balance is not in the middle of extreme views. In this model “the truth is not found in the midpoint between extremes, but in the whole that contains both extremes within it”.
Zivan adopts a more practical approach when he writes that centrism is based on a clear set of principles. They include: an acceptance of complexity and a rejection of simple solutions and a commitment to equality of opportunity. Centrism also views pragmatism and compromise as the means of achieving progress and not as evidence of a sellout or the betrayal of a pure vision.
This collection analyses the great challenges confronting democracies and centrist solutions to these problems.
A very welcome feature is a global approach. An exploration of these issues in India, Latin America and Japan complements more familiar analysis of Europe and United States.
Authors include Tony Blair, Michael Bloomberg and the former prime minister of Italy, Matteo Renzi. All of the writers are frank in their acknowledgment of the challenges. The rage and might of populism can make moderation appear insipid. A political approach that seeks to combine different views can appear rootless and easily shaped by ever moving extremes.
So, is centrism any more than opportunism wrapped in elegant sophistry?
Philip Collins, in his essay, acknowledges these issues, when he writes of the risk that centrists “sit happily in the middle, sure in geometric certainty, with no beliefs to speak of. Centrists share a method at times, but nothing else.”
He, and other contributors, refute this criticism as they describe centrist policies on issues ranging from national security to foreign policy and energy.
Economic issues do not receive adequate focus in this work. The challenges of economic inequality, affordable housing and the availability of good jobs are central to the work of governments. These issues, and their solutions, deserve more attention.
This is a curious omission, as an economic approach that combines the strengths of markets and the state is frequently associated with a centrist approach to politics.
The policy detail of other papers reminds me of a criticism that Bono once made of moderate European politics. He argued that pro-EU politicians might have the best lyrics, but our opponents have better tunes that can stir the public mood.
This risk is acknowledged. Some of the concluding papers recognise the importance of empathy and public tone, in campaigning and in governing. This is easier written than achieved.
The Centre Must Hold is a wise, important and timely book. Elections in France and the election to come in United States raise fundamental questions about the relationship between societies and democratic politics. This book will stiffen the centrist spine, and remind the reader of the value of moderate answers and the role of the state in positively shaping our futures.
The role of the state has also been considered during a distinguished career by the British economist Paul Collier. His work, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2007), described the development challenges that the poorest societies confront and the role of good governance and trade policy.
Recent works have considered the failings of capitalism and the need for a new approach to market-orientated economies. The latest in this sequence is Left Behind: A New Economics for Neglected Places.
It “is about places that once felt prosperous but now have fallen behind”. Whether it is Lusaka in Zambia or the city of Sheffield, the author poses two questions: Why have these places fallen behind? What can they do to catch up?
Collier contends that centralised political decision-making, combined with blind faith in the operation of free markets, has created “hidden despair” in communities.
The solution is simple and demanding, to devolve decision-making and to build up private and public capital at the local level. This should be combined with the creation of stronger civil institutions, such as local government or universities, embedded in communities.
Such an agenda can “bring some oxygen into the claustrophobic little world of orthodox economics and liberate public policy from beliefs that have repeatedly failed”.
The author assembles a catalogue of failures. He analyses the growing divergence between the poorest and wealthiest billion of our global population. In 2020 the average value of assets for each person in the top billion was valued at half a million dollars. The poorest billion owned assets valued at one thirtieth of this, with their wealth growing at a slower pace.
Within developed economies Collier points to persistent income inequalities and limited social mobility. He attributes many of these difficulties to educational policies that cannot mitigate the consequences of inherited status or wealth.
In a nice turn of phrase, the “levelling up” agenda is replaced by “spiralling up”. Good leaders are needed to take “dramatic actions that reset how people see the future”. The impact of Lee Kuan Yew in building the stability and prosperity of the state of Singapore is an example of this leadership.
The character and skill of leaders is fundamental to the creation of coalitions that can consistently implement effective policies. This must be accompanied by similar efforts at the level of the “grass roots”. The work of “little platoons” in a wide variety of settings, from late 18th-century Netherlands to postwar Germany, demonstrates this approach.
This analysis concludes that “modest people can nonetheless ignite processes as inspiring as any claimed by the greatest leaders”.
The purpose of this agenda is to build a more inclusive prosperity, where the redistribution of income is accompanied by interventions to make prospects in life more equal.
To achieve this, the state needs to be bigger, well-funded with large tax revenues with independent and powerful regulatory agencies. This is a slightly more social democratic approach, a little different from the centrist recommendations of the other book in this review.
The breadth of examples of the success and failures of states points to a difficulty. Stories include experiences from Uganda and Yorkshire, but offering the same advice to such diverse geographies is a little blunt. The experience and challenges of development are very different in such places.
Similarly, the advice on specific challenges is too brief as this work aspires to be so general. Sections on land taxes, building standards, international co-operation and the development of natural resources are underdeveloped. The reader might gain from the breadth of issues that are reviewed, but loses the additional insights that an eminent economist can bring to these subjects.
This is an important work, the latest in a sequences of works that not only diagnose our discontents but offer advice for a better and safer world.
Our world is volatile and dangerous in parts. We need more than hope. We need advice.
These works, in their own way, offer both.
Paschal Donohoe is the Minister for Public Expenditure and President of the Eurogroup
Further reading
Twilight of Democracy, The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends (Penguin, 2020) by Anne Applebaum is a beautiful reminder of the consequences of the complete failure of moderate politics. It charts the rise of populism through the lens of the loss of friendships.
National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy (Pelican, 2018) by Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin analyses the causes of the growth of populism and offers a prophetic warning of underestimating the strength of this movement. It wears great learning very lightly.
Everything in Moderation (William Collins, 2020) by Daniel Finkelstein is a great collection of articles from The Times by one of their leading columnists. These articles excel in their humour and insight on the issues of the day. A wise appreciation of gradual change and moderate politics is sprinkled throughout these pages.
