Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe by Niall Ferguson review
(Evening Standard) – From plagues and volcanic eruptions to the current Covid pandemic, mankind has always been faced with catastrophes.
Thought Leader: Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson: Dark Forces of the Twentieth Century
Brian Pawlowski interviews Sir Niall Ferguson on his 2006 book The War of the World.
Since 2006, Ferguson has become one of the most influential historians of his generation—a prolific writer, teacher, and commentator whose scholarship and public voice earned him a knighthood in 2023. Much of his later work builds on ideas first presented in The War of the World: the fragility of order, the diffusion of Western power, and the moral and strategic limits of modernity. Seeds of Civilization: The West and the Rest, The Great Degeneration, and Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire can be found throughout the book. Perhaps most intriguing is Ferguson’s view in The War of the World of the role of Henry Kissinger, whose two-volume biography he is currently finishing. I sat down with Sir Niall in early December in London to discuss The War of the World. In the following interview, he provides an overview of the book’s main themes and offers his insights on events facing us today. His work remains all too tragically relevant.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Brian Pawlowski: In The War of the World, you identify three forces—ethnic conflict, economic volatility, and empires in decline—as the forces that drove twentieth-century violence. Could you briefly explain those, and do you see those trends continuing to shape the world we live in today?
Niall Ferguson: When I was dreaming the book up and the television series, I wanted to explain what seemed to me a huge puzzle. Namely, that the mid-twentieth century was an astonishingly violent time, but the violence was heavily concentrated in geography and in time. And so Ukraine, for example, is just an incredibly violent place from 1914 to even beyond 1945. Why? And so I thought, that’s the right question. Why was the violence at such an extraordinary fever pitch, but in some places, for some concentrated bursts of time.
And so the idea was that you’re looking for this combination of three things. You’ve got heterogeneous multi-ethnic societies, or at least societies where identity is contested, and there’s no homogeneity. Then you’ve got the shock of economic change being very uneven. That concept of volatility was a big one in finance when I was writing, but it didn’t really exist in the literature on conflicts. But volatility matters a lot. If you go from a high to low growth or high to low inflation, it’s that discontinuity that’s very socially disruptive.
And then it just seemed obvious that the places where the most violence happened were on imperial peripheries or places where empires met. And so the key hypothesis was that it’s when empires decline that things are most violent. I think that framework still works quite well if one is thinking about more recent conflicts that have occurred in the last 20 years.
You had the experience in the Middle East. It was already pretty obvious, to me at least, in 2006—I was writing it in 2005—that what was happening in Iraq and Afghanistan was, in a sense, fresh evidence of the point that the United States found itself caught up in an extraordinary ethnic conflict that very few people in Washington had understood or foreseen. And there was some kind of combination of the three factors because of the economic upheavals of the region, and then, in Iraq, the Ottoman periphery problem.
This process where people want to point out who is a Jew. It’s this nasty feeling of déjà vu that characterizes a lot of my current observations of politics in North America and in Europe.
I think it’s even more obvious when you look at the conflict in Ukraine because that’s an absolutely typical imperial periphery war. And it’s the decline of the Russian Empire that explains this conflict. Because in the previous era, Ukraine was only momentarily a contested territory after World War I. It was a fully integrated part of the Soviet Union. In fact, in some ways, it’s a core part of the Soviet Union, so the fact that it’s contested today tells you how much Russia has declined as an empire.
And I think this framework is also helpful for thinking about the coming conflict in the Far East because one of the ideas in War of the World is that there are these empire states that emerge in the twentieth century, and they’re as big as empires, but they pretend to be homogeneous. That’s China. And China has its own propaganda: “Oh, we’re not an empire. We never do that kind of thing.” Perish the thought! I mean, how did China come to have one-fifth of humanity under one political system? It wasn’t as if they all signed up voluntarily, from Xinjiang to Tibet.
I think the China problem is a really interesting one, given that Taiwan is the obviously contested territory, and was part of the Japanese Empire for much of its heyday. So I find that framework still feels right. And when I ask myself, “What would you change about it today?” nothing immediately springs to mind. I think the issue of identity, of ethnic heterogeneity, has only gotten more burning in Europe over the last 20 years to the point that it’s now the dominant issue in the politics of Britain, France, and Germany, and other countries too.
Many people use the term populism. What they are actually talking about is anti-immigration parties. And all the preoccupations of the last decade on both sides of the Atlantic have been essentially driven by the same kind of anxieties about ethnic mingling that there were at the end of the nineteenth century when the book begins. You know, the great surges of immigration in the late nineteenth century have been replicated, particularly in Europe, in our time, and they’ve produced a very similar political backlash, which then looks to articulate itself in ways that are very familiar.
Isn’t it amazing that the ideologies that we are encountering on the peripheral extremes of politics are socialism and anti-Semitism? I mean, those are the twentieth-century ideologies. Actually, they are nineteenth-century ideologies, but they were operationalized in the twentieth century, first in the Russian Revolution and then with the rise of fascist regimes. And it feels like we can’t seem to come up with new ideas. We’re kind of stuck in the twentieth century, in its framework.
BP: You mention something similar in the book, that bad ideas have been on offer throughout history, but only at certain times are they picked up. Anti-Semitism is a central theme of the War of the World. You show the moral, cultural, and political impact that anti-Semitism had and how it drove further violence. How does the history of anti-Semitism in the twentieth century explain the violence that happened then, and how does it help us understand the continuing issues that we’re seeing today? Also, you made an interesting distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, and I’m wondering if you see a third iteration of that now on the horizon.
NF: Well, having written War of the World, I’m hypersensitive to the return of anti-Semitism in Western politics. It’s a deeply disturbing symptom of our malaise that this should be possible. The novelty is that the old anti-Semitism that emanated from Christian communities, dating back to the Middle Ages, has been reinforced by Muslim anti-Semitism, which is in some ways the driving force now in Europe and in North America since October 7.
So you’ve got this additional form that was much less important in the twentieth century. It was there—it’s there in the time of World War II—but it’s much less important than it is now. So I think The War of the World is trying to explain anti-Semitism partly in sociological terms by saying this becomes neuralgic in Germany, partly because of high levels of intermarriage and the sense that the distinct identities are fading. They get a backlash against intermarriage in an extremely violent form.
The barriers, in some measure, had been reducing for some time. The story of the nineteenth century is a story of Jewish emancipation in most of Europe. By the late nineteenth century, it was seen as outrageous that Jews were treated as second-class citizens in the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. And so the trend is for the distinction between Jews and Gentiles just to diminish.
And I think the way that anti-Semitism operates from the time of Karl Lueger in Vienna in the late nineteenth century is: We’re going to reassert that difference and we’re going to insist on it even when it’s barely visible. And that produces the experience of someone like Victor Klemperer, who doesn’t even think of himself as a Jew, whose father had become a Christian, who’s married to a Christian, and he’s told he’s a Jew by the Nazis and gradually stripped of all his rights and narrowly avoids going to the death camps.
I think that’s a path that we could go down again. And that’s to me a deeply troubling thing, which I know a lot of my Jewish friends feel viscerally—that they’re somehow being once again ostracized. But to me, it’s uncomfortably familiar, this process where people want to point out who is a Jew. It’s this nasty feeling of déjà vu that characterizes a lot of my current observations of politics in North America and in Europe.
BP: You’ve said in multiple places that the diaries of Victor Klemperer are important. Many will be more familiar with Anne Frank, but the writings of Klemperer show a more insidious buildup of anti-Semitism. It is difficult to watch him slowly realize the true intentions of the Nazis.
NF: He was so alive to the language of fascism, of Nazism. But as he was thinking about it, he was experiencing the salami slicing of rights and the imperceptible or barely perceptible erosion of his equality before the law. That is a very chilling thing to read.
World War II doesn’t end happily. It ends with a pact with the devil. It ends with joining forces with Stalin.
I believe in diaries as almost the best form of historical source because you live it as the writer experienced it; the writer doesn’t know that it ends in the firebombing of Dresden on the eve of his deportation to a death camp. You know it, but you’re reading it knowing that each week there’s a new and baleful intimation that things are getting worse, and yet it’s not sufficiently awful that he can bring himself to leave until it’s too late.
We all talk about the experience of the frog in the saucepan, not quite noticing the temperature of the water rising until it’s too late. That’s Klemperer.
BP: I think that one of the underappreciated arguments of that book is about the descent of the West. I think a lot of people at the time did not want to confront that part of the book, given the place the US was in 2006. What did you mean by the descent of the West, and how has that trend continued since the Cold War to today?
NF: Well, I was thinking a lot at that point about the implications of China’s rapid growth. It had only joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, but it was already obvious that this had unleashed an extraordinary bout of growth. And so thinking, as I tend to, in economic as well as social and political terms, I was thinking, wow—this is undoing centuries of Western ascendancy.
I came back to that subject in Civilization. But in War of the World, I was starting to think through the implications. It crops up again in The Ascent of Money in the chapter on Chimerica, because the Chinese rise at that point was being facilitated by the West. It was the opening of our markets to Chinese exports that was crucial for the acceleration in Chinese growth.
And I think at the end of the book, I was trying to challenge the perception of an American Century, which is very much how the US thinks of the aftermath of World War II: the United States comes out of the Depression, beats all comers, bestrides the globe, and sets the agenda for the century.
I noticed, living in the United States—I only moved to teach there in 2002—the widespread assumption within American society, including at the elite level, that this was just a permanent state of affairs. And I wanted to suggest that that might not be so.
So part of what I was working at was, let’s think through what happens as China’s share of manufacturing catches up with the US and then overtakes it. What does that imply? And I thought there were two things going on here. One is that the Chinese have kind of figured out a way of competing. But we’re also getting worse at what we used to be good at. And that also produced the book The Great Degeneration later.
So there’s a continuum in my thinking that goes right back to The Cash Nexus, in which I’m trying to make everyone see that Western predominance is coming to an end. That’s probably the dominant theme of the twenty-first century so far, and we’re not mentally prepared for that. Hence, all the cope in the political class about win-win cooperation with China, which persisted right up until Trump’s election in 2016.
I came to see in 2018 that we were in Cold War II. That was a distant possibility in 2006. But I still think that the descent of the West concept was the right way to end the book. The war doesn’t end—World War II doesn’t end happily. It ends with a pact with the devil. It ends with joining forces with Stalin. I think that “Tainted Victory” chapter is an important one because we don’t want to face how compromised the Allied victory was. It feels almost disrespectful to our grandfathers, but that’s the reality.
And I think in that sense, the book was never going to be a popular book. Its messages are not cheerful or uplifting.
BP: No, but I think it remains as necessary now as it was when you published it.
NF: Yeah. I am the bucket of cold water in human form.
WWSG exclusive thought leader Sir Niall Ferguson is one of the world’s foremost historians of economics, international relations, and global power. His incisive analysis illuminates the geopolitical forces and economic undercurrents shaping the 21st century. From great power competition to emerging security challenges, Ferguson offers unparalleled historical context and strategic insight — helping global leaders, policymakers, and business executives anticipate what lies ahead. To invite Sir Niall Ferguson to your next event, contact WWSG
Relevant posts
Time to end secret data laboratories—starting with the CDC
The American people are waking up to the fact that too many public health leaders have not always been straight with them. Despite housing treasure…
Thought Leader: Marty Makary
David Frum: How Harris Roped a Dope
This piece is by WWSG exclusive thought leader, David Frum. Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger…
Thought Leader: David Frum
