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In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Vladimir Putin, Russia's leader, argued, indeed insisted, that liberalism is dead. That the western ideas of multiculturalism which he associates with liberalism have proved absolutely unsuccessful. Migration has been a catastrophe. And we have to reject liberalism.
Is he right? No. Liberalism is not over. The fundamental idea of liberalism is individual agency - that people have rights, above all rights, to manage their own lives, to pursue their own goals. And at the same time to share in public life through the rights of democracy, to have a free media, to have freedom of opinion, and to vote and organise political parties. These are fundamental liberal ideas.
These ideas are of course to some degree in tension. Individual economic freedom and the collective voice in politics can be, and often are, in opposition. But societies that have been built around those ideas have been and are today the most successful in world history.
Nearly all, and certainly all the large countries that are prosperous are also liberal. Economically, they have relatively free markets. And they are politically democratic. So when Mr Putin says these ideas are dead, that's completely absurd. They're obviously incredibly powerful because they have succeeded so well.
And that's been true in other parts of the world. China has succeeded, certainly not a liberal society politically, but it's liberalised economically.
Mr Putin's regime, on the other hand, has clearly been a failure. Politically it succeeded, but economically, Russia hasn't caught up. It's more or less stagnant now. Its politics are those of corruption and fraud. And it really hasn't done very well. And he's pointed to the west because of the failures at home.
Nonetheless, democratic and liberal regimes are showing serious weaknesses. We can see that in the politics of protest, the nationalism, Brexit, the protectionism of Mr Trump. So we have to recreate the social compact that underpins liberal societies.
We have to balance individuals against the collective. We have to balance the economic against the political to create a new form of liberal, democratic society. It's through recreating itself that liberalism has always succeeded. And it is the way, in my view, that it will succeed again. Mr Putin is wrong. He must be wrong. But we have to prove he's wrong by changing ourselves.
