In the 21st century that old spell of universal progress – whether through Western-style socialism, or capitalism and democracy – has been decisively broken. If we are appalled and dumbfounded by a world in flames it is because we have been living – in the East and South as well as West and North – with illusions: that Asian and African societies would become, like Europe, more secular and instrumentally rational and less religious as economic growth accelerated; that liberal and enlightened middle classes created by capitalism would pave the way to democracy, and so on. What this fantasy of inverted Hegelianism disguised was a sobering fact: that the dynamics of Western nation-building through rapid industrial growth were not and could not be replicated in the non-West.  

The political and economic institutions and ideologies of Western Europe and the United States had been forged by events – revolts against clerical authority, industrial innovations, capitalist consolidation through colonial conquest – that did not and could not occur elsewhere. Not surprisingly, religion in the non-Western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism. Not only Islam, Hinduism and the Russian Orthodox Church, but also such quietist religions as Buddhism have experienced militant revivals as ideologies, often simultaneously, for oppressive regimes and the wretched of the earth. The middle classes, whether in India, Thailand, Turkey or Egypt, betray a greater liking for authoritarian-minded leaders as Erdogan and Modi than for the rule of law and social justice.  

But then Western ideologues during the cold war absurdly prettified the history of capitalism in the West, eliding its umbilical link to imperial conquest and widespread coercion, apart from a few clear-sighted observers, such as Raymond Aron, who knew that nowhere in Europe, "during the long years when industrial populations were growing rapidly, factory chimneys looming up over the suburbs and railways and bridges being constructed, were personal liberties, universal suffrage and the parliamentary system combined."

As the Russia of Yeltsin and now Putin confirm, a market economy always was compatible with the denial of democratic rights. China, too, has achieved a form of capitalist modernity without embracing liberal democracy. In fact, the overall scorecard for the nation-states of the mid-20th century can only embarrass those daydreaming about a worldwide upsurge of liberal democracy in tandem with capitalism.  

Nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined – Myanmar and Pakistan come to mind – could not break free of their flawed beginnings, and have kept lurching for much of the last half-century between civilian and military despots. Until the Arab Spring, ruthless despotism kept a lid on sectarian animosities in the nation-states carved out of the Ottoman Empire. Today, as the shattering of Iraq, Libya, and Syria reveals, it is no longer a reliable bulwark against militant disaffection.

Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions – such as China, Vietnam, and Iran – look stable and cohesive when compared to a traditional monarchy like Thailand or a wholly artificial nation-state like Iraq and Syria. (The undemocratic small nodes of global capitalism – Singapore and the Gulf kingdoms – are also less prone to violent anarchy than their neighbors.) The bloody regimes inaugurated by Khomeini and Mao survived some terrible internal and external conflicts – the Korean and Iran-Iraq wars, the Cultural Revolution and much fratricidal blood-letting – partly because their core nation-building ideologies secured consent from many of their subjects.