The act, shocking and brazen even in this bare description, set in motion the series of events culminating in widespread riots inside Israel and a recurrence of the armed conflict with Hamas in Gaza. Disconnecting the loudspeakers was a way to show who the real rulers are, not only in Jerusalem but in the Temple Mount itself. By making it clear that Jewish voices should take precedence, it was a way to put Muslims and Arabs in their proper place.

For a long time, the leading religious authorities in Israel ruled that Jews should not enter the gates of the Mount. There is no way for Jews to purify themselves to enter the sacred square, no way to rebuild the Temple, which is a task best left to God. He alone can send the Messiah, in a future for which the faithful should wait and pray. Shortly after the passage of the Protection of Holy Places Law in 1967, Israel’s then religious affairs minister Zerach Warhaftig said that the Third Temple has to be built by God. The Temple Mount was the property of Israel by biblical right, but the Muslim sites would be preserved. “This makes me happy,” he added, “because we can avoid a conflict with the Muslim religion.”

Unless, as Gershom Gorenberg once put it, the future is now. Unless the waiting is over; unless history is drawing to its climax. The events of 15 April show that the question can no longer be evaded. Jewish sovereignty is now everywhere visible on the Temple Mount.

The road to the Mount has an iron logic and it remains unclear what force could stop it. Liberalism, perhaps, since its strictures separating politics from religion could preserve the religious realm as a purely spiritual aspiration. But liberalism is something that Israel has defeated. It is hardly a coincidence that illiberal thinkers such as Leo Strauss learned their political philosophy in the school of Zionism, since every line of Theodor Herzl is proof of the fact that liberalism failed to solve the Jewish question in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The liberal state could not promise European Jews anything resembling safety or dignity, it failed at the most basic task of ensuring their physical survival — but Herzl went much farther. Liberalism meant for the Jews the very real danger of spiritual no less than physical death. Only in an independent Jewish state could the Jews fully pursue the paths opened by Judaism; only in Israel could they regain their inner wholeness, their own character, free of the fear of making oneself different. Here we can detect the germ of the idea of Israel as a civilisation state, even if Herzl was on this point a very imperfect guide.

The stopping point on the route to a temple and a monarchical government — the restoration of the House of David — remains elusive. If the tradition of the halakha, the body of religious laws, expressed an attitude of distance and sanctity towards the Temple Mount, ethnic nationalism stands for a markedly different goal: the holy site as a totem expressing the ultimate sovereignty over the Land of Israel.

And, as Tomer Persico wrote, who better than Naftali Bennett to serve as a salient model for the shift of the centre of gravity of the Zionist movement from halakha to sovereignty? This probable new prime minister represents a hardline nationalism that leaves religion a few steps behind. “We will consult with rabbis, but we make the decisions in the political arena,” he declared soon after taking over conservative political party The Jewish Home.

History is the struggle to realise a myth in reality, but we now know that the world remains polytheistic. There are many opposing myths struggling for realisation and therefore many opposing ends to history.For the Jewish people, sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and not liberalism, is the logical conclusion to its collective history. At the same time, that moment is also an end, the end of Jewish history, and it is in this context that the many strictures against bringing it about must be understood. In an essay first published in 1959, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism”, Gershom Scholem worried whether Jewish history would be able to endure the entry into the concrete realm of power without perishing in the crisis of its Messianic claim.

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For the Israeli radical right, the inability or unwillingness to take complete control over the Temple Mount is an obvious symptom of a diminished or mutilated sovereignty. Commentators such as Yair Wallach unwittingly add fuel to the fire when they stress that the Muslim sites and the ongoing Palestinian presence above the Western Wall constitute a challenge far more significant than the secular power of the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. The latter also has a clear understanding of these facts and does not miss any opportunity to associate itself with the defence of the Islamic sites on the Haram, as happened again in the latest Gaza war.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that liberals, both in Israel and outside, prefer to appeal to the Jewish tradition of sanctity and distance as a vaguely Rawlsian argument by which to get Jewish conservatives to agree to a general framework of religious tolerance and coexistence. For Rawls, the political conception of justice was the great overlap between different ways of life, but each group has its own reasons to support that conception. A religious group may support the principles of freedom and equality because they are dictated by religious doctrine, while artists and intellectuals arrive at them from the point of view of the eccentric individual. Similarly, liberal commentators have argued that Israel should stop short of bringing the Jewish state back to life for reasons intrinsic to the Jewish tradition itself.

Whether this strategy can succeed is, to avoid all pieties, rather doubtful. As Jewish religious conservatives will readily point out, there is no reason why the Jewish tradition should be made to fit with liberalism rather than the other way around. After all, Judaism is thousands of years old, while liberalism dates back at most two or three centuries.

The contemporary alternatives to liberalism are quite limited in number. There is the Chinese tradition of imperial power. There is Hinduism, the long adventure of Hindu thought, which no one should take for a strictly religious affair. There is Turkey and the bright lights of Turkic, Ottoman and Islamic history woven together in an impossible whole. And there is, of course, Israel and Judaism. These are the best candidates to be considered civilisation-states in our time.

The concept has little to do with size: Israel is small, but Judaism is old and it has grown both inside and outside liberalism, learning from it while remaining fundamentally unconvinced of its final truth. Nor does the civilisation state have anything to do with race or ethnicity, for civilisation is a concept born of the attempt to rise above these biological realities. The civilisation state is an affair of the mind and the heart, the two together. What distinguishes a civilisation-state is its ability to provide an overarching framework for social and political life and therefore a viable or plausible alternative to liberalism, the general framework we are most familiar with.

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Now, when people talk about Israel as a civilisation-state they usually mean that the Israeli state represents a specific people and does not aspire to the kind of universality that is common with Western democracies: Israel is the state of the Jewish people. Yoram Hazony wrote a whole book decrying the attempt to transform Israel into a neutral state representing universal values. What he defended instead was a national state, a state representing the Jewish nation, yet a national state is a close cousin of the liberal state. The freedom and autonomy of the individual needs to be guaranteed not only against internal but also external threats, and in the latter sphere, this relies on organising the powers of the nation against other nations. The liberal and national states exist on the same plane. One is turned inward, the other outward. The civilisation-state is a different creature altogether.

If Israel were to become a civilisation-state, its anchor would be the long and manifold Jewish tradition. It would be the state which today represented that tradition in all its aspects. Such a state might well have a territory and a people, but it would not be defined by them. Its essence or core would be the civilisation or way of life it had been tasked to preserve and develop. And of course, Israel as a civilisation state would in my view be able to free itself from the logic of an existential conflict with its Arab citizens or the Palestinians outside its borders. These groups may appear as a threat to the idea of Israel as a nation. They would not be a threat to the historical project of carrying Jewish civilisation into the future. A civilisation state, as opposed to a national state, should be comfortable with the existence of many different cultures and peoples in its midst. Civilisations can learn even from different and opposing civilisations.

Is it surprising that religious Zionism ended up as a hostage to nationalism? Hazony struggled against the drift towards a liberal state in Israel, and he certainly can rejoice in contributing to the demise of liberal ideas in Israel over the last two decades, but what he replaced them with was the typical European nationalism of the 19th century, to which Herzl had already succumbed. Was anything gained with the exchange? The result is the same subordination to foreign intellectual fashions which so enrages Hazony.

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According to Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the Land of Israel is one unity, an organic entity connected with the Jewish people, so that the people and the land are in complete oneness as a sovereign historical actor — concepts proper to European nationalism. Amid the growing crisis before the 1967 war, Kook addressed his students in a famous speech: “Where is each and every clod of earth? Every last bit, every four cubits of the Land of Israel? Can we forgo even one millimeter of them? God forbid!”

Hazony is correct on one point. The state of the Law of Return, whose flag includes representations of the Star of David and the traditional Jewish prayer shawl is not and will never become a liberal state. There will be no addition of a crescent moon to the Israeli flag and Arab citizens will never feel that the state belongs equally to them. There will be no new constitutional doctrine whereby the state gets reinterpreted at the highest level of abstraction so that it becomes identical with universal dictates of freedom and democracy.

The new coalition government — implausibly spanning the secular far left, a religious Muslim party and religious Jewish parties — cannot change these realities. But the national state is not the only alternative to liberalism. Ben-Gurion once asked: “Can we become a chosen people? Can we become a light unto nations? Is the redemption possible?” Those would seem to be the commandments of a civilisation-state, a state both sustained by and committed to the flowering of a civilisation.

Some countries were praised for the way they were able to flatten the curve. Others seemed to compete only to avoid being last. There were long debates about the most appropriate metrics to evaluate relative performance and elaborate explanations of why some excelled while others failed. For a while, Sweden seemed to be a winner. Months later it was declared a loser. Germany went from exceptional to average, but New Zealand kept surpassing itself, announcing by the end of the year that it was now reaching the benchmark for coronavirus elimination. One newspaper wrote about Italy, in lines evoking a story worthy of the Olympics, how “Spooked by the dramatic death toll in the Lombardy region, the government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte sprang into action, using the license he won through emergency decrees to get the country’s famously sclerotic administration moving. That helped Italy flatten the curve more quickly than anyone thought possible.”

Morbid league tables multiplied. They were criticised, of course, but most often because the picture they offered was too static to reflect the realities of the ongoing competition. With the arrival of the vaccines, state competition took a new form, but not a milder one: an ugly global race for enough doses in which the losers are denied a quick path out of the pandemic.

Suddenly, the laggards from the previous iteration of the game seemed for the first time to be ahead. The United Kingdom was the first jurisdiction to approve the new vaccine and quickly pulled ahead of other large advanced economies in the race to vaccinate its population, a rare pandemic success for the country. The United States followed, with the European Union falling behind, but none could match the success of Israel. In just two weeks in December the state succeeded in vaccinating close to 20% of its citizens, leading the world by a very large measure and drawing on its origins as a tightly-knit small nation fighting for survival. The country is now very close to the 70% mark that experts deem enough to put an end to infection growth.

The vaccine wars quickly escalated. When the European Union received a string of bad news about interrupted or reduced supplies from both Pfizer and AstraZeneca, it responded by threatening to block vaccine exports across the channel (a plan to reestablish a hard border in Northern Ireland was later dropped). This was the perfect background for the intense competition between the two jurisdictions that Brexit had set up in advance. On 29 January, a febrile day in European politics, Brussels put forward a legal mechanism requiring that vaccine exports be subject to an authorisation by member states.

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Without the production of a valid authorisation, the export of such goods will be banned. The instrument states that it was “not the intention of the Union to restrict exports any more than absolutely necessary”, a stirring admission that it can in fact be used to stop the flow of vaccine doses to the United Kingdom. More damaging, the measure was intended to win a political or even an intellectual dispute, but it promised little in terms of actually delivering more vaccine doses.

It was surprising to see such a carnivore approach from a political bloc that detests carnivore behaviour and, more important, has never excelled at it. It could have been avoided had a forceful approach been adopted much earlier. There is a lot that went wrong with the European Commission’s vaccination strategy. But before everything else, there was complacency.

Back in the summer, the predominant feeling in Brussels and many European capitals was that the virus could be controlled through savvy policy measures. The contrast with the health calamity in the United States made European officials forget that the pandemic was in fact a state of emergency requiring a decisive approach to vaccination. Instead, most believed that vaccines would eventually be needed to root out the problem, but the process could be conducted against the background of a waning pandemic, at least in Europe. There was no urgency in signing the necessary contracts with the most promising manufacturers, with protracted haggling over prices further delaying the process.

We now know that time was of critical importance and that the sooner procedures could be tested and perfected, the sooner a high yield of vaccine doses could be expected. The lack of urgency was also reflected in the attempt to bring a number of exogenous considerations into the process. For many months the European Union seemed more interested in scoring political points on solidarity, market power and negotiating clout than in focusing laser-like on the task at hand: getting as many vaccines as fast as possible into the arms of its citizens. It was easy to see all these problems coming. They were like bad omens and they kept piling up.

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The vaccine wars are an instance of the broader genus of technology wars. The reason one could easily guess the European Union would struggle to find its footing is that the bloc has an old-standing problem with technology, seeing it more as a threat than an imperative. And it misses the fundamental nature of the imperative.

First, advanced technology is by definition scarce and competitive. It cannot be normalised: there is always a better way to obtain the same outcome through superior methods. The pandemic was a great teacher in this respect, showing that technology can always move faster and achieve more, or that we are chasing a moving frontier — but the lesson is applicable to normal times as well. During a pandemic, it makes a vital difference whether vaccines are available now or in two month’s time, both in terms of saving lives and resuscitating the economy. This was never understood in Brussels, with the Commission insisting it had secured billions of doses but forgetting to consider when these doses would be available. Even in normal times, being able to lead in key technological areas will sooner or later be translated into more visible forms of global power.

Second, the European Union as a whole — its officials, politicians and organic intellectuals — seems unable to understand that technology is political. You cannot keep it out of politics and this means that politics must adjust to technology at least as much and probably more than technology must adjust to politics. There is no way to be a technological leader without taking risky decisions, without embracing the possibility of failure and without being generous with money and rules — two higher divinities the European Commission will never sacrifice.

It is revealing that, while Britain placed a venture capitalist at the head of its vaccine programme, the European Union opted for a trade negotiator. It was a puzzling choice. What does vaccine procurement have to do with the creation of legal rules? Or consider the news report about how Matt Hancock was impressed by the end of the movie Contagion, in which vaccines are not enough for everyone and have to be awarded by a lottery. One advisor told Sky: “He was always really aware from the very start, first that the vaccine was really important, second that when a vaccine was developed we would see an almighty global scramble for this thing.” You may smile, but whether it comes from movies or scientific papers, a “technological imagination” is the necessary beginning of good policy today.

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The main question posed by the pandemic will be the one concerning technology. The responses adopted by governments around the world seem to fall into two main categories. Those countries able to leverage new and emerging technologies to fight the virus have done better in limiting the number of cases and fatalities, while managing to keep most of their economies and societies operational. The countries unable to use technology had to rely on lockdowns, quarantines, generalised closures and other physical restrictions — the same methods used to fight the Spanish Flu more than a century ago and, in many cases, with the same slow, painful results.

I now fear that the European Union will find itself in the impossible situation of having to prolong some of the existing restrictions beyond the summer, while both Britain and the United States start to normalise. That is the cost of the vaccine delays: a very high cost in lives, prestige and further economic losses.

The current crisis has the potential to spiral out of control. The imperative was to reduce the risks of that happening, no matter what the immediate financial cost. But again, to think technologically rather than legally is something that Brussels struggles with. Economies of scale, exponentials, tail risks — all foreign concepts. If we come out of this crisis with a single widely shared belief, if some previously ignored idea could become a new consensus, it will likely be a recognition that the history of technology is far from concluded.

There is no way to stop technological progress, even if, by hypothesis, one were happy with the current plateau. How these troubling facts force a revolution in our political ideas will be an interesting story to follow. Nowhere will it take sharper tones than in the European Union, where politics and technology continue to be at loggerheads.

Globalisation repeats itself, first as farce: remember how thirty years ago some seemed genuinely to believe in the end of history and the onset of universal harmony. Today it comes as tragedy, with a wave of violent protests that have left dozens dead and many world capitals roiling from widespread destruction.

That these demonstrations across different continents share some common motifs and causes seems obvious, and those taking to the streets often appeal to the actions of their intuitive comrades thousands of miles away. As the Yellow Vests in France like to proclaim, the globe is rising in unison and “Peoples around the world are waking up”.

This may have some elements of exaggeration. It is difficult to see what protestors in Catalonia and Iraq have in common; the former are restricting political ties to ethnic identity, the latter are expanding them. But even when distinct, they march together, and ultimately the uprisings of 2019 have a common thread that links them, tied together by technological change, economic pressure, and the shifting axis of power from West to East.

Protestors across the four continents are linked, for one thing, by a common enemy: things as they stand, the status quo and the hated establishment. They are also linked by the new technology, so that as the news of their actions fills broadcasts worldwide, they acquire a much larger significance; there are echoes here of the Springtime of the Peoples, the Year of Revolution, the improbable series of political upheavals that spread throughout Europe in 1848.

That year new inventions such as the railway, the steam ship and the telegraph proved a boon to revolutionaries, who could now travel across Europe much faster than before and spread their ideas and programmes with far greater ease.

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Today social media has had a similar effect, catching the scions of the old order off guard and allowing for what is doubtless a brief interlude when revolution has the upper hand. The 1840s was also a period when technological change was for the first time being applied on an industrial scale, leaving many segments of the population behind; around 10,000 workers were laid off in Vienna alone in 1847. Here too there are obvious similarities to the present, where globalisation has enriched many but also increased job insecurity.

Yet there are differences. In 1848 the peoples of Europe rose in the name of a vision of the future. That vision could vary, but all or almost all the revolutionaries knew where they were going, a vision of creative destruction. The old order of priests and monarchs had to be destroyed so that in its place a new world could be built, one of bourgeois parliamentarianism for some, something decidedly more popular for others.

Today the dialectic of revolution is very different. Rather than starting from the heavens and trying to bring them down to earth, protestors everywhere fill the streets to seek redress for a specific grievance: the extradition law in Hong Kong, the fuel tax in France, the price increase of the Santiago Metro ticket in Chile (the 30 pesos which cannot but remind us of the 30 pieces of silver for which Judas betrayed Jesus).

In Iran, violent protests triggered by the elimination of fuel subsidies resulted in hundreds of dead, a level of violence not seen in previous upheavals, dwarfing the numbers killed in 2009-2010. India is the most recent case, with a new citizenship law being met with widespread resistance.

And yet the specific grievance is never a cause. To see it as such would be a serious mistake, one that authorities all over the world are prone to make, but which we can and should avoid. In all these demonstrations ,the protest is an occasion, a beginning, an incitement, a vehicle for a much deeper urge. Once the protests start, they take on a life of their own. Sharper collective awareness and a growing list of political demands are a consequence rather than a cause.

In Hong Kong, the protestors started by demanding the withdrawal of the extradition law. When eventually it was withdrawn, going back to normal life felt like a defeat. Today, nothing less than independence seems acceptable to many of those protestors because only a complete break with the status quo could ensure that the past would not quickly return or reassert itself.

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Protests need to anchor themselves in a specific grievance but often the underlying cause is the unbearable lightness of the existing order. In France the Yellow Vests represent the inability of the Fifth Republic to convince anyone that current French society is the best of all possible worlds, but it illustrates a wider problem in the West.

It was always a dangerous gamble for European societies to bet everything on the end of history; if the eternal present fails to measure up, citizens will embrace a different future, any future. Today neither politicians nor intellectuals have much of a vision to offer, and indeed regard any vision as an authoritarian sin.

For centuries we grew accustomed to think of the world as existing on different time scales. In the West, and only in the West, societies could be found that had already gone through their modernisation process; other societies have merely to retrace their steps.

Perhaps it is still possible to find those who believe this is what is taking place in distant parts of the world, when people protest on the streets; that those young protestors are entering history and at last making the effort to rejoin their Western brethren at the end of the tunnel. But fewer and fewer people believe this.

Instead something else links the current wave of protests happening in both France and Moscow, in Hong Kong and Algeria. Protestors everywhere look to the future and see only empty space in front of them.

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And the Western vision of the future is receding, something particularly obvious in India. The consensus around a Western, secular model for the country has collapsed, but how can Indians agree on a new path to be built from scratch? Cultural and political independence have an irresistible appeal, but with independence comes a life of danger.

In Istanbul, where I now live, the mood is increasingly febrile as Turks collectively realise that, rather than living a few decades behind Europe, they are in fact more firmly planted at history’s crossroads. Turkey is starting to test what it means to enter history in order to shape it; the more actively they exercise their powers, the less they look to Europe or America to point the way.

I will conclude with Iran because it was in Tehran, three years ago, that the themes of this essay first presented themselves to me. Spending a few weeks with contemporary artists and gallery owners, I realised two things, seemingly contradictory. First, that Iran has not stopped moving on the path of modernisation and that the ruling clerics have no chance to survive its dynamics.

Second, that the most vibrant segments of Iranian society — including the radical artists I was meeting — no longer look to the West to provide a model for Iranian society. Why not? I am sure there are many reasons, but the main one is likely the simplest: Western modern societies, so young and beautiful in their youth, have aged since. Everyone and everything ages, so why should they be an exception?

I wrote in a book published last year, called The Dawn of Eurasia, that “to become modern is no longer equivalent to becoming Western. Talking to young Iranian artists, I learned one important lesson. While they were rebelling against the confined spaces of life in Tehran, they also insisted that they did not want to follow the same path as Europeans or Americans. Contemporary art had taught them that there is always a different way of seeing. Art must foresee other pictures, other worlds. Western modernity is for them just another form of tradition to be uprooted and overcome.”

Have no illusions: this is a much more chaotic and much angrier world. It is also unpredictable, radically so. Protest and rebellion are no longer organised from above because they are no longer organised with the future in mind. We are aware that nothing is permanent. Unlike those before us, we no longer believe that historical change has a meaning and direction. We are revolutionaries who have lost the faith in revolution.

Not, however, in the way we expected. There has been no revulsion against its excesses, nor at its far-fetched and impossibly exacting conclusions. It has become pointless not because it has been applied to ludicrous ideas nobody believes in, but because it is applied to everyday notions in support of any and every belief.

People still believe in it, but the ideology has become useless – precisely because it’s become pervasive and all-powerful. It can be used to argue for anything; as a result its proponents have started to splinter into opposing groupings and factions, always a prelude to schisms, like those that used to be notorious among Marxist groups.

Consider what happened when the French national team won the World Cup. The polemic that followed was rather more surprising than the outcome on the pitch. Rushing to score political-correctness points, some commentators noted that most of the players were of African descent.

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After all, what better way to celebrate racial equality than to point out the achievements of African players? And what better way to celebrate immigration than to note that without its African players, France would never have won.

The progressive position here is that we want to be recognised as equals, but also want to be valued as individuals with unique selves. Otherwise, equality will feel like self-sacrifice, served in unequal doses, because the point of arrival is much farther away for those with the ‘wrong’ skin colour or the ‘wrong’ accent.

Interestingly, just as this set of commentators was rushing to make their ‘PC’ remarks, another set quickly argued the opposite. Rather than celebrate the African origin of so many of the players, they maintained that we should ignore it. They were French, as French as anyone else, and to single them out on the basis of their skin colour or where their parents or grandparents were born was exactly what Marine Le Pen would do, in order to divide France into first and second-class citizens.

There was passion on both sides, the kind of passion that comes when you know you are making a morally educated point and advancing the cause of the oppressed. And yet both sides were all arguing opposing things. The cacophony came to a pitch when the comedian Trevor Noah and the French Ambassador to Washington Gérard Araud exchanged angry barbs on the matter.

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Can anyone remember on which side of the debate either stood? I can’t. They are both perfectly respectable progressives always ready to take the side of justice against darkness. But what I do remember was the surprise shown by each man at the other’s approach. After all, the whole point of taking a politically correct position is supposed to be that you don’t have to argue for it, that it presents itself as self-evidently true. But now two opposite views were both claiming the mantle of indisputable truth – something that rather defeated the point of the exercise.

A few weeks later a second episode caught my attention. After it came to light that the new hire to the New York Times editorial board had tweeted violently racist messages in the past, it seemed obvious that the newspaper would have to rescind the appointment.

Yet it did not and Sarah Jeong, a tech writer, kept her job. Why? Because her tweets were directed against white people. Since whites are deemed to be the origin of racism, to fight racial hatred is to fight against white identity, even if that also looks a lot like racism.

The contradiction here is in the thinking that you can only affirm a relation of equality if you do so against an existing or potential inequality. But if that’s the case, you will never be able to rely on equality alone, without a context, and your argument will lose the self-evident character of political correctness.

The problem is that equality is formal. You can draw relations of equality almost arbitrarily. Dogs have four legs. Cats have four legs. That doesn’t mean dogs are cats, and it doesn’t tell you whether dogs are better than cats.

Both are statements of equal truth, but equality alone is no help. In Jeong’s case, it’s wrong to be racist, but it’s also wrong not to privilege minority experience. Political correctness can’t moderate between the two ‘wrongs’, and if its only point is that it’s obvious to any right-thinking person, it has failed in its task.

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In the example of the French football players above, are we equal because where our family comes from does not matter, or because it matters equally? The two sides in the public argument disagreed violently on where to place the equality sign. They had both made their remarks assuming that their own view was the least controversial thing available, but ended up being swallowed by a bitter controversy.

While political correctness was fighting an external enemy, its internal contradictions remained more or less hidden. All the energy was placed in the service of “crashing the horror” or “smashing the rogues” to use two translations of a famous sentence by Voltaire, perhaps the intellectual father of political correctness. Now that the enemy has been soundly beaten and political correctness has become a mass movement, everyone feels free to be politically correct in his or her own way. But the method is so empty that it can allow you to reach any conclusion whatsoever. You can even, like Sarah Jeong, become a politically correct racist.

No one knows how to be politically correct anymore. You might argue that this is true of every ideology. These days, we are not sure how to be liberal or conservative either. But political correctness was supposed to be different. The whole point of the enterprise was that you would know immediately and without effort how to think and act on a particular issue. Political correctness was meant to save you from thinking. If it cannot do that – if it actually gets you involved in difficult discussions – it has lost all usefulness. It can no longer be called political correctness at all.

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Europe no longer exists – our future is Eurasian

By Bruno Macaes

Leaving the European Union is often presented as an opportunity for the United Kingdom to go out into the world. Global Britain, they call it, a concept not devoid of logic.

By the very nature of their integration project, EU member states have to spend more time than they would like coming to terms with each other. Right now, for example, they are busy trying to reach an agreement on the next multi-year budget, when it might be more advisable for their attention to be fully focused on the clouds gathering over the global economy and global politics.

The UK has its hands full with the Brexit negotiations, but these – one hopes – will eventually come to an end. At which point, it might be advisable to have a strategy for the life outside the EU in place – one which takes into account all the dangers and opportunities presented by that painful separation.

So what kind of Britain will emerge after Brexit? Will it prosper? To know that, we need to know who it will be doing business with. What we can say with certainty is that in this new world Europe will count for far less than it does right now; in this world, four out of the five largest economies in the world will likely be located in Asia – none in Europe.

And so the success of global Britain depends far more on the relationships it can build with those Asian giants, than on strictly domestic political variables. A great British future will rely less on London and Brussels than on a third, hidden pole of magnetic attraction: Beijing.

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China is introducing such dramatic changes in the global balance of power that even a seemingly regional question like Brexit cannot be properly solved without bringing its economic might to bear. Relations between China and the EU are going to dominate European politics in coming decades. But the real question is: will Britain be in a better or worse position to deal with China once it has left the EU?

I see a number of scenarios in which Brexit could move Britain’s foreign policy in highly desirable directions. Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is no indication that only large economic blocs can thrive in the new world order. Countries such as Switzerland, Singapore or New Zealand have ridden the wave of global change better than anyone else because they feel the urgency of doing so earlier than others and can adapt more quickly. Britain will be under enormous pressure to adapt to life outside the single market, and swiftly. The best way it can do that is by forging a new economic relationship with China.

In a recent presentation on the future of British foreign policy at the Treasury, I argued that the UK needs to first ask itself what it wants. And to know this, it needs to understand how China is changing and how those changes can affect it. Only once that position is known can Britain confidently exert influence and leverage over Beijing. As I see it, there are two key areas where Britain can make an impact.

The most important issue is technology. As China sets its sights on exercising significant control over the industries of the future, large parts of the European economy will be negatively affected. Germany is already facing increased competition in high-value sectors such as sophisticated industrial machinery, and is worrying about diminished returns once China develops its own technological standards. At present, German companies earn billions every year from licensing fees and royalties. Some of those revenue streams will be diverted to China.

Once released from the European Union and its one-size-fits-all trade negotiations, Britain can play a substantive part in the discussion on these new industries. It’s a discussion about specific standards rather than – as tends to happen now – endless ruminations concerning the role of the state in the economy and other abstract notions. Britain could take the lead in defining relative spheres of influence, in helping consolidate control over standards, and determining areas of cooperation where it could work with China to develop new technologies.

The second key area is infrastructure. Control over critical infrastructure is where competition between countries increasingly takes place. The growth of global value chains means that we must increasingly think of different countries as parts of the same factory floor, across which are distributed the various stages of production. These value chains are held together by physical and digital infrastructure. Whoever controls that infrastructure can organize the most efficient and competitive value chains.

More on China

One Belt, One Road: How China's ambitions span the globe

By Michael Burleigh

China is leading a bold economic and political project – the Belt and Road – by which it will strive to reorganise global value chains, with its own companies and its state at the steering wheel. This is surely a project in which every country has or should have a stake. It presents a clear opportunity for the United Kingdom to leverage its financial services industry to participate in the Belt and Road, provided it can also acquires managing rights in the initiative, something China has so far reserved for itself.

These moves call for fresh and original thinking. There is no reason for Britain to spend valuable time discussing the outlines of a free-trade agreement with China. Leave the traditional elements of a free-trade agreement – industrial tariffs, regulatory norms, agriculture – for a more convenient time. The priority right now should be technology and infrastructure, the two pillars of the future global economy, upon which Britain and China can build a new economic partnership.

Bruno Maçães’s latest book, The Dawn of Eurasia: on the trail of the new world order, is published by Penguin.