I spent time with a book called "Age of Revolutions. Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present" (2024). The author Fareed Zakaria has had two of his books translated into Estonian, the more important of which is "The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad" (2003), which has been published in 20 languages and was a New York Times bestseller. Zakaria has a regular column in Newsweek and hosts his own show on CNN called "Fareed Zakaria GPS."

But on to the book. Over 400 years of revolutions sounds like quite a handful, and there have been hundreds of revolutions during this period. Zakaria has chosen to concentrate on Great Britain, the United States and France, with the addition of Holland. He leaves aside the rest. He justifies this narrowing of the geographical horizon by claiming that major Western revolutions form a kind of main thread which helps explain how societies have changed elsewhere.

Politics is one of the few aspects of human activity to have remained largely the same at its core through the millennia. It is the struggle for power and the question of what to do with it. Still, politics has become ideological in recent centuries, which is something it was not in antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The political scale has also changed. The traditional left-right axis has become decidedly muddled, and so have politicians.

Zakaria gives the example of Donald Trump who is completely ignorant of public policy and brutally ignores democratic norms. His positions are simplified to the point of being primitive and can be reduced to four tenets: "the Chinese are taking our factories, the Mexicans are taking our jobs, I will show them all and make America great again."

And it sells, despite being a far cry from the recent Republican principles, like limited government, lower government spending, a strong military and efforts to spread democracy elsewhere in the world. Also known as the Reagan model.

But Trump is not alone in this. Let us mention if only Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban, Narandra Modi etc. Politicians are once more picking up nationalist, chauvinist, protectionist and isolationist slogans. And the left is keeping up, fighting the establishment and the way things are.

The next great divide in politics is "open versus closed." It is a sign of a revolutionary age when politics starts to follow new lines of force. What right and left-wing populists have in common is disregard for recent norms, the sidelining of free speech, parliamentarism and independent institutions. Zakaria is a proponent of liberal democracy because it concentrates on rules, not results.

We are living revolutionary times as radical change is everywhere. Economic thought has been upended and there is deep uncertainty in a situation where on the backdrop of new political and social revolutions the digital and artificial intelligence revolutions are also happening. The effects of the latter are still unknown.

Zakaria explains the book by suggesting that in order to understand modern changes, one must first understand the past. And he warns that revolutions in states are inevitably accompanied by revolutions in international relations. There is also geopolitical reorganization, such as plans by China and Russia to reshape the world order.

For a quick overview of the past in question, I'll simply mention that Zakaria starts with Holland that experienced the first liberal revolution and adopted a republican form of government. It could have been an isolated incident had Great Britain not followed suit in 1688. From there the liberal practice spread everywhere the Brits put down their boots.

The next two revolutions were the French one, which completely failed, and the Industrial Revolution, which proved a resounding success. Both already worked to shape the modern world.

Looking around today, we might say we are living in one of the most revolutionary ages yet. The changes that are underway might not all happen at the same time, while they have mutual effects and a connection.

Zakaria considers the Industrial Revolution, associated with Great Britain, one of the most important in history. It gave rise to rapid economic growth. It was at first concentrated in the West and took a toll on the environment, while it created the modern world with all its benefits and vices. Industrialization changed the situation of man, our relationship with time and space. Leisure time was also invented. The changes came with plenty of dark sides of course.

Jumping forward in time, it was the Second World War that brought the new liberalism into the limelight, more specifically its social democratic variant as well as strong multilateralism, cooperation and globalization in general. Economic and political liberalization took place hand in hand, the growing middle class demanded democracy. But then came a setback we can still feel today. Putin's Russia, Orban's Hungary, Erdogan's Turkey, Modi's India. The setback of globalization drove a wedge between those who have and those who do not.

The populists started selling forward-looking nostalgia, setting the modern day in contrast with alleged golden ages. Under the glittering surface of digital wonders it is a time of confusion and riots. New forms of communication created by the digital world have worked to accelerate social decay, with young people increasingly inhabiting the online world. The smartphone has lent itself to the realization of inequality, the democratization of information has altered politics and the spread of misinformation is the number one problem. Where we go from here could be quite terrifying, down to a new understanding of what is characteristic of humans.

Two simultaneous revolutions are happening right now: the return of the politics of world powers and the fall of the liberal order. The relationship between the two will determine the future of the world. Russia and China would like to have the West's technological achievements but not its society. The greatest challenge is America's growing inability and reluctance to serve as a hegemon, while the first task is to stand up to Russian aggression. The crisis of liberalism did not appear in a vacuum. It is the consequence of rapid changes and leaders who take advantage of the fears this creates.

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