The glibness of globalist liberalism

Written for Kosovo Online by Srdjan Garcevic, founder of The Nutshell Times

Given the dramatic start of the year—with the US setting its sights on Greenland and fires ravaging some of the most beautiful parts of LA—one story of a local man who made it big warmed my heart. 

The man in question is Dorian Puka, a 28-year-old Albanian living in London and a social media influencer. Puka’s fame (or, rather, notoriety) rests on the fact that he frequently ends up in the British press as he taunts British politicians - and especially Nigel Farage - with videos of his extravagant lifestyle in the UK. In his TikTok, you can see him driving around London in expensive cars with his dog, enjoying the beautiful Cornish coast, or lounging in nice hotels with heated outdoor pools (a rarity in the chilly UK). These videos are especially interesting for me as his lifestyle is what I wanted - and failed - to attain when moving to the UK, first as a student at a decent university and then working for four years in London as a consultant for a major company, working sixty plus hours on my employer-tied work visa. 

While I did my fair share of enjoying the nicer parts of London and got to spend some time in Cornwall - in my friend’s aunt’s quaint house in Fowey - I realized I would rather go back to Serbia, just as Puka started making his name in the UK, in the Brexit referendum year of 2016. In pursuit of climbing up in British society, he chose a more daring path for which I had absolutely no talent or training - burglary and robbery - and despite being in prison for a while (where he launched his social media career), managed to stay on in the country as he claims asylum, though a very complicated British network of state and NGO bureaucracies. 

In his most recent popular video, which attracted the attention of the Daily Mail and GB News, he celebrated the new 2025 in style in a Central London club. On the other hand, whenever I have an intention to visit my friends in the UK and celebrate their weddings or new kids, I certainly spend less than Puka on a night out; it now requires me to go through an onerous, long, and costly visa procedure.
 
Back in the late 2000s, in the hey-day of globalist liberalism, during Obama’s presidency in the US, studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in a decrepit post-industrial town in the middle of England, I was taught and socialized in an environment where I was assured that the booming UK knowledge economy aims to retain the best and brightest “net contributors” to the system, but also that its asylum policies were too harsh on the applicants. 

Even as many Albanians decided to try their luck in the UK in the past few years - where they now hold the record for most arrests per capita (210 per 1000 people) - countless articles in prestige outlets like the FT, written by various tenured thought leaders, such as another prominent British Albanian Lea Ypi, a philosophy professor at the LSE, explained that there is no such thing as a “migrant crisis,” but just mostly biased attitudes towards the new arrivals. 

In many ways, the situation with Dorian Puka and the recent Albanian diaspora in the UK is just an example of how the world is seen through the lens of globalist realism: there is no problem with the UK’s approach to immigration, and if there is, it is there for noble causes, in this case, wanting to offer protection to the truly vulnerable, using an elaborate but ultimately just procedure.

The same worldview, applied to a much more horrific problem, was voiced by the British popular historian Tom Holland on the topic of the “grooming gangs,” decades-long criminal rings that attacked vulnerable working-class girls across the UK and to which the local and national politicians apparently looked the other way. In 2015, as the first stories managed to escape the long vow of silence by mostly Labour-inclined institutions and the media -  Holland opined that while the outcome of what the officials did was “monstrous” - many girls raped and molested while many of the perpetrators receiving very low sentences - that at least the motives - maintenance of peaceful multi-cultural coexistence - were “noble.” 

Due to Elon Musk’s interest in the topic, this statement to only caused ire and ridicule, but also got British commentators to explain that rather than “nobility,” it was self-interests that was at play, albeit somewhat obscured by the gestures toward lofty ideas (tolerance, diversity etc.) and laundered through elite institutions of the media and academia who displayed notable disinterest in probing the situation further, and maybe conclude that Labour politicians did not want to make trouble for themselves by going against a voting bloc and institutions inclined to them. 

Once noticed, this self-interested glibness of global liberalism when dealing with disasters it brings about is impossible to unsee. It is there when lack “technocrats” fail to take masters to prevent catastrophes and then blame them on “climate change” (employing their friends in vague organizations along the way). It is there when those same technocrats implode their economies and societies and blame their unpopularity on fake news and foreign interference. It, however, is most obvious abroad when the well-meaning humanitarians manage to unleash chaos and terror, as they did in countless places in the past forty years.

Up until recently, I believed that this infuriating hypocrisy of many Western politicians and pundits, such as the constant repression against Serbs in Kosovo or omission of crimes like the Christmas massacre in Kravica from the stories about the wars in Yugoslavia, was just a show of power and interest. However, seeing the same applied back in their home countries, I see that this glibness is actually an inability to see that there may be a difference between self-interest and social and even physical reality. In many ways, this glibness is impossible to escape: it has been in universities and media for decades, and the glib has been very hostile to anybody who dares point out that politics do not work like in Yuval Noah Harari’s books, where humans and societies are infinitely malleable only if you tell appropriate (and ideally good) stories and use technology enough.

It is no wonder that people like Puka, who were not inculcated by this delusional worldview, manage to make it work much better for themselves than those who thought it hook, line, and sinker. Thankfully, more people are seeing the disaster that this worldview has been.