IN APRIL THIS year The Economist launched Open Future, an initiative that aimed to start a conversation on liberalism in the run-up to our 175th anniversary. Open Future consisted of online articles, debates, podcasts and films. It culminated in a manifesto for a liberal revival, published on September 15th, and in a one-day event that spanned three continents and consisted of discussions on migration, technology, free speech, trade and diversity. Below are some of the highlights. Click on the titles or the images to read the articles in full.

A manifesto for renewing liberalism

In September The Economist turned 175. The anniversary comes at a time when the world is turning against liberalism, our founding credo, which is defined by a commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress brought about by debate and reform. Even though liberal societies have prospered as fascism, communism and autarky have failed, Europe and America are in the throes of a popular rebellion against liberal elites, who are seen as self-serving and unable, or unwilling, to solve the problems of ordinary people. Liberalism’s detractors are not wholly wrong: what began as a restless, agitating world view, has become closed and self-sustaining. Now is the moment for a liberal reinvention.

Culture is not an excuse for oppressing women

Margot Wallström, Sweden’s foreign minister, became famous for initiating the world’s first “feminist foreign policy”, which makes the promotion of gender equality a top priority for Sweden’s Foreign Ministry and embassies. In this article, she writes about the ubiquity of sexual violence in conflict, and how some societies have come to see it as an inevitable part of the culture of war. Making a legal, ethical and practical argument, she dismisses the notion that culture can ever be used as an excuse to oppress women. “Let me be clear: sexual violence is not cultural, it is criminal.” To change this way of thinking, it is important to focus on women’s rights, representation in the places where decisions that affect them are made, and for development budgets to allocate enough resources to gender equality.

How to convince sceptics of the value of immigration

In this three-part essay, Philippe Legrain, the founder of Open Political Economy Network, a think-tank that defends liberal societies, suggests how to persuade critics of immigration: “The liberal case for immigration is simply put. Openness to newcomers is morally right, economically beneficial and culturally enriching.” It is also important to address people’s deep-seated fears and their misperceptions, such as the idea that immigrants take local jobs and burden a country’s welfare system. But immigrants also create jobs when they spend their wages, and at least in Britain, they tend to pay more in taxes than they take out in benefits and services and are disproportionately doctors and nurses themselves. Using personal stories over statistics, getting immigrants and non-immigrants to mingle more and emphasising what unites the two groups could warm people to immigration.

On tyranny, populism—and how best to respond today

In this Q&A with Madeleine Albright, America’s Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, we explore fascism, based on her book of that title, which was published earlier this year. Though Ms Albright, who escaped both the Nazis and the Communists in her youth, believes that North Korea is the only fascist country in the world today, she warns of “disturbing parallels between contemporary trends and the conditions that gave rise to Mussolini, then Hitler. These include economic disparities, a declining faith in mainstream political parties, the corrosion of public discourse, the defamation of minority groups and a concerted effort by repressive leaders to undermine free expression, pervert logic and distort truth.” To combat this, she says “We must push back harder against the cynicism of both right and left.” [...] “Today, we will be lost if we abandon faith in the institutions and values that separate democracies, however imperfect, from tyranny.”

The literature of liberalism

Towards the end of Open Future, we compiled a bibliography of liberalism in its it many forms, and built on it over two instalments after soliciting ideas from our readers. In the six weeks after publishing our first installment, we received nearly 900 responses suggesting over 300 different thinkers, from readers all around the world. Our aim was not necessarily to create a comprehensive list of familiar names, but to showcase the ways in which liberalism is, and has always been, a broad church. The resulting list is geographically and ideologically broad, including thinkers from the medieval Islamic empire to modern Mexico, and from Jane Addams, a radical social reformer, to Friedrich Hayek, a libertarian.

How free expression is suppressed in Saudi Arabia

Before his brutal murder in October, we interviewed Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent journalist and former newspaper editor, who was living in self-exile in Washington, DC. Mr Khashoggi’s troubles began after he gave a speech to an American think-tank following Donald Trump’s presidential victory. He argued that Saudi Arabia should be “rightfully nervous about a Trump presidency” at a time when the kingdom was cosying up to the president-elect. Shortly thereafter, he was informed by Saudi officials that he could no longer write or tweet. Mr Khashoggi was hardly a dissident. He told The Economist: “I believe in the system—I just want a reformed system.” All he wanted was to be a free writer. “I think I am serving my country and my people by providing an independent narrative.” He will be remembered for doing just that.

Can liberal democracies survive identity politics?

Almost two decades ago Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the victory of liberal democracy. Today he’s seeing the system shattered in large part by identity politics—the subject of his latest book. Identity politics describes a discourse in which people adopt political positions based on their ethnicity, race, sexuality or religion rather than on broader policies. Though it started on the left, it has been more potent on the right: it fueled Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. In this Q&A, we asked Mr Fukuyama how identity politics became such a force in politics, whether it is always bad and how to combat the threat of political balkanisation.

How work kills us









We sat down with Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, to discuss his latest book, “Dying for a Paycheck”. In it he argues that toxic work environments are as dangerous to health as second-hand smoke. “Evidence shows work hours are negatively related to productivity, that giving people more autonomy leads to higher motivation, and that layoffs often harm performance, including profits. So in making employees sick, employers have created a lose-lose situation”, he says. He suggests the best way to change toxic work environments is to start measuring the dimensions of the workplace that could have negative effects on people’s health, including looking at work hours and finding out how many employees take prescription drugs such as antidepressants and sleeping pills.

Transgender identities: a series of invited essays

In June and July we ran a two-week, ten-part series of essays on transgender identities, to coincide with a public consultation launched in Britain on whether to make it possible for people to change their legal gender through a statutory declaration. The debate over transgender issues has often been unhelpfully virulent and divisive. It pits activists who advocate for “gender self-identification”—the belief that the world should take at face value a person’s declaration of their own gender identity—against those who assert the primacy of biological sex, or fear the erosion of protections for women, or who see gender as a pernicious system that should be done away entirely. We hosted this series of essays from a range of people with varied viewpoints, in the interests of fostering constructive debate.

When respect for diversity is taken to crazy extremes

One of the most popular articles in Open Future looked at cultural appropriation—which we deemed “an elastic, ill-defined gripe”. Though it lacks a common definitoin, cultural appropriation is generally taken to mean the idea that a “dominant culture” wearing or using things from a “minority culture”—say, white American college kids in Brazilian bombachas—is inherently disrespectful because the objects are taken out of their native context. The idea is not entirely new. But we argue that today it has expanded to new extremes, obstructs free expression and fundamentally misunderstands the process by which all cultures form and progress: through creolisation and intermixing.