In the grand narrative the West tells about itself, liberalism is the hero. It is the benevolent ideology of individual freedom, free markets, human rights, and a “rules-based international order.” It is the world of John F. Kennedy, the West Wing, and NGOs working for a better future. It presents itself as the universal destination of history, the final form of human political evolution. But for much of the world—the Global SouthGlobal South Full Description:The Global South is a term that has largely replaced “Third World” to describe the nations of Africa, Latin America, and developing Asia. It is less a geographical designator (as it includes countries in the northern hemisphere) and more a political grouping of nations that share a history of colonialism, economic marginalization, and a peripheral position in the world financial system. Bandung is often cited as the birth of the Global South as a self-aware political consciousness. Critical Perspective:While the term implies solidarity, critics argue it acts as a “flattening” concept. It lumps together economic superpowers like China and India with some of the world’s poorest nations, obscuring the vast power imbalances and divergent interests within this bloc. It risks creating a binary worldview that ignores the internal class exploitations within developing nations by focusing solely on their external exploitation by the North.
Read more in particular—this story is a fairytale. For them, liberalism has not been a liberator, but the “moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs.”

This profound disconnect is the central theme of the work of the brilliant public intellectual Pankaj Mishra. As discussed in a recent Explaining History podcast episode exploring his anthology Fanatics, Mishra’s writing forces us to confront the dark, imperial underbelly of the very ideas the West holds most dear. He reveals how the “bland fanatics”—the well-meaning technocrats and commentators who champion liberalism as a universal good—are often blind to its violent and hypocritical history.

The Original Sin: Liberalism’s Entanglement with Empire

The contradictions were there from the very beginning. As the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson acidly observed of America’s revolutionaries, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The champions of freedom were simultaneously the masters of slaves. This was not a bug in the system; for a long time, it was a feature.

This hypocrisy is starkly visible in the writings of liberalism’s founding fathers. John Stuart Mill, the great 19th-century philosopher of liberty, saw no contradiction in advocating for despotism when dealing with “barbarians,” so long as the ultimate end was their “improvement.” His supposedly enlightened view was inseparable from his role as an administrator for the British East India Company. As the literary critic John Carey argues in his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, the liberal veneer of many of Britain’s greatest thinkers, from Dickens to Virginia Woolf, often concealed profoundly reactionary and racist views on empire and class.

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, celebrated for his insights into American democracy, was an unabashed supporter of France’s brutal colonial project in Algeria, viewing it as a “glorious enterprise.” The freedom and rights celebrated by liberal thinkers were never intended to be universal; they were privileges reserved for a select group, while the subjugation of others was seen as a necessary, even civilizing, mission. The intellectual historian Domenico Losurdo, in his devastating Liberalism: A Counter-History, systematically documents how liberalism historically coexisted with, and often depended upon, what he calls the “exclusion clauses” of slavery and colonialism.

The Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other. Mutation and Neoliberal Imperialism

In the 20th century, this imperial logic mutated. During the Cold War, “liberalism in its own snare,” as the podcast describes it, became viscerally anti-communist. Following Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance”—the idea that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance—Western liberals justified the support of brutal dictatorships and the overthrow of democratic governments across the Global South. Any national liberation movement that sought to control its own resources or pursue a non-capitalist path was conveniently tarred with the “communist” brush, providing a pretext for CIA-backed coups from Iran to Chile.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 did not end this dynamic; it supercharged it. This was the moment of triumph for the “bland fanatics,” who now saw their worldview as the undisputed “final form and norm of human existence.” The Cold War liberal framework seamlessly reincarnated itself as neoliberalismMonetarism Monetarism is the economic school of thought associated with Milton Friedman, which rose to dominance as a counter to Keynesian economics. It posits that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon and that the government’s role should be limited to managing the currency rather than stimulating demand. Key Mechanisms: Inflation Targeting: Using interest rates to keep inflation low, even if high interest rates cause recession or unemployment. Fiscal Restraint: Opposing government deficit spending to boost the economy during downturns. Critical Perspective:Critics argue that monetarism breaks the post-war social contract. By prioritizing “sound money” and low inflation above all else, monetarist policies often induce deliberately high unemployment to discipline the labor force and suppress wages. It represents a technical solution to political problems, removing economic policy from democratic accountability. , offering a one-size-fits-all prescription for the world’s “stragglers.”

Figures like the influential columnist Thomas Friedman lectured the Global South on the virtues of “hard work, thrift, honesty,” while prescribing a bitter medicine: privatizationPrivatization Full Description:The transfer of ownership, property, or business from the government to the private sector. It involves selling off public assets—such as water, rail, energy, and housing—turning shared public goods into commodities for profit. Privatization is based on the neoliberal assumption that the private sector is inherently more efficient than the public sector. Governments sell off state-owned enterprises to private investors, often at discounted rates, arguing that the profit motive will drive better service and lower costs. Critical Perspective:Critics view privatization as the “enclosure of the commons.” It frequently leads to higher prices for essential services, as private companies prioritize shareholder returns over public access. It also hollows out the state, stripping it of its capacity to act and leaving citizens at the mercy of private monopolies for their basic needs (like water or electricity).
Read more of state companies, deregulationDeregulation Full Description:The systematic removal or simplification of government rules and regulations that constrain business activity. Framed as “cutting red tape” to unleash innovation, it involves stripping away protections for workers, consumers, and the environment. Deregulation is a primary tool of neoliberal policy. It targets everything from financial oversight (allowing banks to take bigger risks) to safety standards and environmental laws. The argument is that regulations increase costs and stifle competition. Critical Perspective:History has shown that deregulation often leads to corporate excess, monopoly power, and systemic instability. The removal of financial guardrails directly contributed to major economic collapses. Furthermore, it represents a transfer of power from the democratic state (which creates regulations) to private corporations (who are freed from accountability).
Read more, shrinking subsidies, and “more flexible labour laws.” As the podcast powerfully argues, this was simply neo-colonialismNeo-colonialism Full Description:A term popularized by Nkrumah to describe a state that is theoretically independent but whose economic system and political policy are directed from the outside. It describes the continued dominance of African resources by former colonial powers and global financial institutions. Critical Perspective:Nkrumah’s focus on neo-colonialism explains his radical foreign policy and his eventual overthrow. He believed that formal independence was a “sham” if the economy remained tied to Western markets, a belief that put him in direct conflict with the United States and other Cold War powers.
Read more. It was a recipe for asset-stripping. The structural adjustment programsStructural Adjustment Programs Full Description:Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) are the enforcement mechanism of neoliberalism in the developing world. When countries face debt crises, international lenders provide bailouts only if the government agrees to restructure its economy according to free-market principles. Consequences: Erosion of Sovereignty: National governments lose control over their own budgets and priorities. Social Impact: Requirements to cut deficits frequently lead to the introduction of user fees for health and education, excluding the poor from essential services. Export Orientation: Economies are forced to focus on extracting resources for export to pay off debts, rather than growing food or goods for domestic consumption. Critical Perspective:Critics describe SAPs as a form of “debt peonage,” where developing nations remain perpetually indebted to Western financial institutions. The programs often result in a net flow of wealth from the poor global South to the rich global North, exacerbating underdevelopment. forced upon developing nations by the IMF and World Bank led not to prosperity, but to an explosion in poverty and the collapse of public health and education systems, causing millions of preventable deaths. This economic model, as thinkers like Walter Rodney argued in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, was designed to lock the Global South into a permanent state of dependency, exporting low-value raw materials (like Kenyan green beans) while importing high-value Western goods, thus replicating the economic relations of empire.

The Inevitable Collision: Democracy vs. Global Capital

Mishra’s most vital insight, echoed in the podcast, is that there is a fundamental antagonism between true representative democracy and global capitalism. Genuine democracy empowers ordinary people to demand the things they need: healthcare, education, clean water, and protection from the predatory whims of the market. Global capitalism, however, requires the opposite: the endless pursuit of profit, which means breaking down national protections, privatizing public goods, and driving down the cost of labour.

When a democratic movement in the Global South rises up to reclaim its national resources—be it oil in Iran under Mosaddegh or water in Bolivia under Morales—it immediately comes into conflict with the interests of global capital. At that point, the West’s commitment to “democracy” mysteriously vanishes, replaced by a swift and often violent intervention to restore a “market-friendly” regime. As Naomi Klein documented in The Shock Doctrine, crises are often exploited to force through these unpopular neoliberal policies that could never be passed under normal democratic conditions.

The crisis of liberalism that we see today—from the rise of the far-right in the West to the global rejection of its moral authority—is a direct consequence of these unresolved contradictions. The “moral mask” has slipped. Pankaj Mishra’s work is essential reading because it forces those of us in the West to see liberalism as it is experienced by the majority of the world: not as a universal dream, but as the parochial ideology of a historically rapacious and powerful minority, one that has consistently set money free while putting humanity in chains.

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Further Reading

• Pankaj Mishra: From the Ruins of Empire, Age of Anger, and Bland Fanatics are essential for understanding his critique of the West.
• Edward Said, Orientalism: The foundational text for understanding how the West constructed a view of the “East” as inferior and in need of colonial domination.
• Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History: A deeply researched and powerful indictment of liberalism’s historical complicity with slavery, colonialism, and genocide.
• Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism: A crucial investigation into how neoliberal policies have been violently imposed around the world under the cover of crises.
• Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism: An intellectual history showing how neoliberal thinkers sought to create a global system that would protect capitalism from democracy.
• Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: A classic work of dependency theoryDependency Theory Full Description A school of thought in development economics and political science, associated with Raúl Prebisch, André Gunder Frank, and Walter Rodney, arguing that global poverty is not a stage in development but a structural consequence of the capitalist world system. Dependency theorists argued that the “core” (developed, Western nations) maintained their prosperity by systematically extracting surplus from the “periphery” (developing nations) through unequal terms of trade, debt, and the suppression of industrialisation in the Global South. Critical Perspective Dependency theory identified real structural inequalities in the global economy that mainstream development economics ignored, and its influence on anti-colonial political movements was enormous. Its critics argued that it provided an external explanation for underdevelopment that neglected internal factors including governance, corruption, and policy failures. The East Asian “miracle” economies (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) appeared to refute the theory by achieving rapid industrialisation within the global capitalist system — though dependency theorists replied that their success required exceptional state direction and American strategic support that was not available to most developing nations., explaining how the economic structures of colonialism created lasting poverty.
• Noam Chomsky, Year 501: The Conquest Continues: A sweeping account of 500 years of Western imperialism and its devastating impact on the Global South.

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