Arts
A live recording from the inaugural Brewin Dolphin Lecture at the Baillie Gifford Borders Book Festival in Melrose. The liberal order we have lived with for seventy years is coming apart at a dizzying speed. Europe is fragmenting into rival blocks with competing, often mutually hostile, visions for the future. The US has elected a protectionist ‘America First’ president. Russia is back as a global force – nationalistic, authoritarian and anti-western. The rise of Asia means five hundred years of western hegemony in the world is coming to an end in our lifetimes. Can liberal democracy survive? Allan Little, who has reported for thirty years from more than eighty countries, takes us on a tour of a rapidly changing world and asks – what kind of world are we in transition to?