Sir Ralf Dahrendorf Interview:Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Given the conflicts of the sixties and seventies that we've gone through and the reassertion of a conservative agenda by Thatcher and Reagan, what is the Liberal agenda today in your view?
The 1980s as I see it (and most of the these things which I associate with particular decades started a little earlier in the United States than in Europe), were characterized, in the terms which I have just used, by an attempt on the part of some leading politicians to extend the range of choices for those who can make it, never mind the citizenship rights of everybody. So they have encouraged a new Darwinism, a new struggle for survival of each against everybody, and the sort of "casino capitalism" which we have seen in this decade. This decade has forgotten the need to make sure that every human being in our societies has to be a citizen with full access to economic, social, and political opportunities. And so the agenda for liberalism today is, in my view, to correct the one-sidedness of the 1980s by a better combination of opportunity and access, a better combination of, as I put it in my new book, The Modern Social Conflict, of provisions (that is, choices) and entitlements (that is, citizenship rights). And so to balance the one-sidedness of the 1980s.
What about an issue like the environment? How does that fit into this equation?
That's a very good and a very important question. What we are discovering in the late 1980s is that there are two, and perhaps three, issues which seem to override everything and which defy traditional categories of analysis. One is the nuclear issue, which is very much with us to the present day, and more so at a time at which it looks as though more and more countries are getting nuclear weapons. The second is the environmental issue, not in any manageable, regional sense but in a global and extremely threatening sense, for which we may see first indications possibly in certain changes of climate. And the third may well be the biological issue arising from genetic engineering. And I would agree that they are very much on the agenda of the 1990s and perhaps transcend the sort of analyses which I just offered, and which I used to offer in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Is there any particular problem that comes to mind with regard to international affairs? I know at St. Anthony's College, where you were the warden, there has always been a commitment to concerns with international matters. What are your thoughts there, coming from this particular background, having focused on these particular problems? What are the liberals' concerns about international relations?
The main concern of the liberal with international relations is the maintenance, or defense and extension, of multilateral institutions and rules. That is to say, the search, if this doesn't sound too utopian to our audience, for a world order -- the search for ways of creating international constraints on the action of companies, countries, and ultimately, individuals and groups. Now, this is not a very popular issue in the 1980s, and I doubt whether it's going to be very popular in the 1990s, because we've really gone through a phase since the 1970s in which some of the international institutions we had have been, if not destroyed, then, to some extent, dismantled. And I'm afraid the United States has been very much a part of that, if you remember the sudden termination of the Law of the Seas conference, or leaving UNESCO, or threatening the World Bank, and every single year regarding the United Nations as essentially an enemy of the U.S., or disregarding decisions by the International Court of Justice. There's a whole string of anti-multilateral, anti-international actions by the U.S., and other countries haven't done much better. But the liberal agenda would be: let's hold on to what we've still got and let us find ways of making sure that we can create effective international, multilateral institutions by the decisions of which we all abide. Incidentally, we won't even begin to come to grips with the nuclear, the environmental, the biogenetic issues if we don't create international institutions of that kind.
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