The lost paradise has been a place of longing for humanity since Adam and Eve – and is gaining increasing political popularity in the 21st century, among the Greens as well as the AfD.
Everything used to be better: This refrain is currently dominating more than just Donald Trump’s election campaign.
Giorgio Viera / AFP
«Make America great again» has backward orientation in its name. But which America and what size was it? The America that won the Cold War under the Republicans Ronald Reagan and George Bush, with whom the Trumpists no longer want anything to do? Or the America that won World War II under the hated New Deal Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt? It is unclear, but not so important for the MAGA movement.
The same applies to the Brexit motto: «Take back control», whatever control that is. As things stand, Brexit certainly shows that paradise was not lost.
But the longing goes further, much further: Vladimir Putin himself has acted as a historian and, in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, he presented a long paper entitled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” which denied Ukraine the right to be its own state, referring to the Kievan Rus of the 10th/11th century. With his own contradictory logic, Putin relates his policy to a supposed natural territorial state of the Tsarist Empire, which in turn was the result of conquests. Here, too, historical precision tends to be a hindrance in the search for paradise.
Xi Jinping is pursuing a historical revision program as the goal of the “great renewal of the Chinese nation”: the renaissance and resurgence of China after the “century of humiliation” by the Western powers and Japan between the beginning of the first Opium War in 1839 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The historical pattern of this renaissance is called “Tianxia”: the idea of a harmonious order under the leadership of China as the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of the universe. Whatever this means in concrete terms in global politics, “Make China great again” certainly contains the claim to a sphere of imperial supremacy.
Backward-looking claims to supremacy are also being pursued by those Islamists in the Middle East who not only want to establish a caliphate, but also restore the rule of the prophets in the 7th and 8th centuries – and thus abolish the separation of church and state, democracy, human rights and the rule of law – and actually everything that modernity has produced (apart from its technological blessings).
But going back before modernity is also a temptation in the middle of the West, on the right as well as on the left. Maximilian Krah, one of the leaders of the AfD, bases his “politics from the right” on the pre-modern natural state of an ethnically homogeneous “community of the similar”. In doing so, he creates a romantic image of a village community based on solidarity, which certainly does not depict one thing: the reality of the rural pre-industrial village characterized by hard work and existential deprivation.
In this, he meets the romanticism of climate activists; what Krah sees in the revision of pluralism, they see in the reversal of industrialization – which, of course, meant liberation from scarcity, crop failures and the Malthusian trap of demographic growth and food-related population shrinkage for their less prosperous contemporaries.
Krah and the climate activists are united by their vision of historical times: a glorified past, a present in which it is five to or already one past twelve, and a dystopian future.
Whether the longing for the lost paradise is a reaction to the uncertainties of a radically changing present and whether it leads to dystopian or euphoric expectations of the future: firstly, the political recourse to the glorious past is almost always historically wrong. And secondly, it contradicts the historical paradigm shift of modernity. Enlightenment and industrialization led humanity from a supposedly predetermined future to an open and shapeable future. The place of individuals in society no longer depended on their status and origin, but on their education, their performance and their free will. Modernity unleashed the dynamics that made its societies the freest and most prosperous in history.
Creating an open future is the approach of a civic understanding of how to deal with historical change. In the last two centuries, at least, this has worked considerably better than the nostalgia of a lost paradise that almost never was one.
Andreas Rödder is Professor of Modern History at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and director of the think tank Republik 21 for new bourgeois politics.
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