The national interest: politics after globalisation

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The National Interest—Politics After Globalisation

Podcast: LSE: Public Lectures and Events
Episode Date: February 5, 2026
Host: Peter Ramsey (B)
Panelists: Dr. Philip Cunliffe (D), Prof. Anand Menon (E), Prof. Helen Thompson (C)

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Overview

This episode explores whether we are witnessing the end of globalization, the return of the national interest to the centre of politics, and the implications for democracy, sovereignty, and international cooperation. The discussion, prompted by recent political shifts and high-profile speeches such as that of Canadian PM Mark Carney, revolves around Dr. Philip Cunliffe’s book The National Politics After Globalisation. The panel critically examines the meaning and practicality of “the national interest” in a rapidly changing global order marked by renewed populism, geopolitical competition, and structural economic challenges.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining the National Interest (04:45–13:25)

• Philip Cunliffe:
  • The idea of “national interest” has resurfaced due to global shocks: US expansionism, trade wars, destabilization within Western alliances (04:45).
  • The previous era was marked by attempts to dilute national interest via international law, global markets, military alliances, and activism.
  • This left political elites ill-equipped to respond to current pressures because they lack frameworks for national self-determination.
  • Critiques the “trap” of seeing national interest as a static document or concept to be “rediscovered”—argues it’s a practice, not a thing.
  • National interest should be understood as dynamic, flexible, and a way of organizing public deliberation and representation:

    “The national interest is about effective representation. It’s about public deliberation, not arcane expertise.” (11:30)

  • Counter-populist potential: By channelling collective will through representative structures, national interest can offer a democratic alternative to populist shortcuts.

2. Critiques of Globalisation and Domestic Failures (13:26–20:03)

• Anand Menon:
  • Carney wasn’t declaring globalisation dead but urging a rethink, especially in relations with the US (13:26).
  • Globalisation brought benefits such as poverty reduction, but was poorly managed and imposed with insufficient democratic input.
  • The core issues lie within domestic political economies, not “out there”—UK’s system of political and economic inequality is key.
  • First-past-the-post and adversarial party dynamics result in “political inequality” and a chronic failure to deliver essential reforms (e.g., social care).
  • Short-termism and inability to pursue long-term policies are endemic.
  • Worry: Emphasis on nationhood and national interest risks hijack by the populist right, turning an inclusive idea into exclusionary or racist policies:

    “It is basically racism under another name. And my danger is that this sort of enterprise is too easily hijacked, which makes me personally quite nervous about it.” (18:48)

3. Nationhood, Geopolitics & the Limits of European Sovereignty (20:03–34:05)

• Helen Thompson:
  • The meaning and impact of “globalisation” are complex and multifaceted; financial globalisation endures, but the framing of the world has changed.
  • The nation state has reasserted legitimacy, as seen in Brexit, but the shift to explicit geopolitical competition (US–China, Russia’s reintegration/alienation) is central.
  • Democracy and nationhood are historically intertwined, but it’s difficult to (re)build cultural mechanisms for shared national belonging in today’s context.
  • European states’ sovereignty is constrained:
    • Denmark’s lack of control over Greenland due to US military presence illustrates “performative” sovereignty.
    • True sovereignty requires more than formal independence, especially in security and energy.
  • Concludes that the outlook for European autonomy is especially challenging under current conditions:

    “What is the specific ground in which your optimism is coming from?” (33:53)

4. Rebuttals & Optimism for Political Renewal (34:24–43:29)

• Cunliffe’s Response:
  • The “retrenchment” of US power (Trump era) creates a challenge and opportunity for other states to take responsibility for themselves.
  • Overcoming “political infantilization” of member statehood can lead to more effective, legitimate democracies.
  • National interest as a framework for bold politics and renewing legitimacy.
  • Culture wars are a reaction to politics without representation; renewed national interest deliberation can help heal these divides.
  • Avoiding both autarky and return to old-style protectionism—favors political self-sufficiency, not economic self-isolation:

    “There’s nothing appealing about the idea of economic self sufficiency, but there’s plenty that’s appealing about political self sufficiency.” (41:53)

5. The Future of Globalisation, Demographics, and Political Architecture (43:54–56:24)

• Audience Q&A:
  • Declining birth rates: Cunliffe is less alarmed, seeing loss of collective identification as a root of demographic malaise. Menon (“I’m quite panicked by it, to be honest…” 50:42) worries about fiscal sustainability and political honesty about immigration.
  • New architecture of globalisation: Shift from US- or China-centric models likely; future may entail several competing blocs.
  • European sovereignty & bloc logic: Thompson (52:45) doubts a return to past globalisation; resource-poor European states will need to cooperate but will face renewed competition.

6. Protectionism, Social Contracts, and the Populist Right (57:11–68:15)

• Renegotiating the social contract:
  • Audience: Calls for rebalancing power between labor, business, and finance—“What else do we need to rip up and start again with?” (58:35)
  • Cunliffe: National interest politics can enable (but doesn’t guarantee) more effective state intervention and regulation of markets, as well as a social contract that favors domestic rather than global capital.
• Populist right and the national interest:
  • Risk of “the national interest” being co-opted by exclusionary forces like Farage or Trump.
  • Cunliffe: The national interest provides grounds to meaningfully critique and defeat populists—but only if mainstream elites are willing to embrace it as a source of political representation and legitimacy, rather than just process or proceduralism.

7. Leadership, National Interest, and Political Transformation (71:52–86:00)

• Where will change and leadership come from?
  • Concerns expressed about lack of effective, durable leadership in Western democracies.
  • Thompson: Endemic short-termism and leadership churn are linked to the lack of solutions for deep-seated economic challenges.
  • The party system as known in Britain is fragmenting, potentially opening the way for new political coalitions or parties—but also for heightened instability and populist disruption.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Philip Cunliffe (on the national interest):

  “If we’re going to have democratic self government, then we absolutely need the national interest. If we don’t have the national interest, then we don’t have political representation. And if we don’t have political representation, then we don’t have democratic self government.” (12:50)

• Anand Menon (on domestic failure as core issue):

  “We have a political economy that tolerated and tolerates huge iniquitous levels of economic inequality. And it does so because it’s a system that was founded upon basically political inequality.” (15:28)

• Helen Thompson (on the difficulty of reviving nationhood):

  “What are the specific mechanisms either culturally, materially or politically… that are actually going to have large numbers of people believe that they belong to the same democratic nation again?” (26:34)

• Cunliffe, responding to populism and representation:

  “Until Democrats are willing to wield the national interest, it will be left to the populists to claim the mantle of representation.” (61:44)

• Anand Menon (on the current moment):

  “A better future is possible. I just really struggle to discern it in the fog of the horror we’re living through at the moment.” (67:48)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:14 – Introduction and context (Peter Ramsey)
• 04:45 – Opening argument: Philip Cunliffe introduces his book’s thesis
• 13:26 – Anand Menon’s critique: globalisation, political economy, and risks of populism
• 20:03 – Helen Thompson: history, culture, and hard limits of European sovereignty
• 34:24 – Panel rebuttals and perspective on optimism or pessimism
• 43:54 – Audience Q&A begins: new global models, demographics, bloc logic
• 57:11 – Protectionism, social contracts, and risk of the populist right
• 71:52 – Leadership and path forward; panel summary reflections

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Conclusions

• The national interest is not a simple policy fix or document to be dusted off—it’s a contested practice that calls for democratic renewal, institutional reform, and a reimagining of sovereignty.
• While “globalisation” as previously understood is under threat, total retreat into autarky or nationalist closure is neither feasible nor desirable.
• The future will likely involve new political bargains, revived national debates, and immense uncertainty—creating risks of further populist ascendancy if inclusive, representative politics do not take centre stage.
• Leadership, broad-based democratic engagement, new alliances, and conscious reckoning with long-term challenges—especially demographic and economic—are all necessary to move toward a stable, just politics after globalisation.

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This summary has focused on the substantive debate and omitted non-content sections, ads, and logistical remarks. It reflects the argumentation style and language of the speakers.

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.

[B]

Welcome, everybody. Thanks for coming on this beautiful evening. And we're going to be talking about the national interest after globalization. My name is Peter Ramsey. I'm an academic in the law school here. And our subject for tonight, the national interest, politics after globalization. And we meet a couple of weeks after Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada and former governor of the bank of England, made a speech that you might have noticed in which he said, we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. Carney did not use the words national interest, but it was pretty clear where Canada was headed or where he thinks it's going to be headed. Under his leadership, sovereignty that was once grounded in rules will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure. We are no longer relying on just the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength. Someone who has talked about the national interests in recent months a lot is our own Prime Minister Keir Starmer, although he doesn't appear to be helping him very much. So the question for tonight, the big question, is Carney, right? Is globalization over? Is the national interest back? If it is, what does it mean? Does it mean anything at all? How do we find it? Those are the kind of questions I hope we're going to address tonight and to discuss it, we are blessed with a stellar panel. Dr. Philip Cunliffe, Professor Anand Menel, and Professor Helen Thompson. I'll briefly introduce them to you. Philip is Associate professor in International Relations at the Department of Disaster and Risk Reduction at the University College London. He's the author of the National Politics After Globalization, a book published last year, which has given us the title for our discussion tonight. He's also published numerous books on politics and international relations, as you might expect, including the End of the End of History, Politics in the 21st Century, the Twenty Years Crisis, A Critique of International Relations, 1919-2019, Cosmopolitan, International Intervention and the Failure of the west, and Full Disclosure. Philip is co author on a book with me on Brexit and British sovereignty from a few years ago. Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign affairs at King's College, London. He's also the Director of UK in a Changing Europe, the think tank that gives research based analysis of the UK's relationship with the EU. He's an associate Fellow of Chatham House and an Associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford. His books include Brexit and British Politics, the European Union, Integration and Enlargement and European Politics. And lastly, Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. Her books include Hard times in the 21st century, oil and the Western Economic Crisis and China and the Mortgaging of America. As you probably know, she's an influential commentator in in British Politics, writing regularly for the New Statesman and co presenter of podcasts including Talking Politics and these Times in the Past, which you will know of. Anyway. So that's our panel. I'll give the panelists will have a few minutes each to speak to what they think on this subject. After that I might give them a little brief response if they want to react to anything they've said. And then I'm going to open it up to the audience. And for those of you who are joining us online, do put questions into the question function that you can do that online. And they will be communicated to me as well. So feel free to ask those questions and I'll try and get them into the discussion for you. So that's how we're going to do it. The virus gates are at the back and there. So I've covered that off and we're all safe. So we'll begin with Philip Culliff.

[C]

Thanks.

[D]

Thank you. And thank you, Peter. And thanks to the LSE and the department for hosting the debate. So since the book was published last year, it seems that the national interest has been thrust to the forefront of public life and also international politics. We've had Trump's expansionism, the trade wars launched on the rest of the world at the start of last year, and also the destabilization of the Atlantic Alliance. And all of this together, the very crude and obvious assertion of American self interest has cascaded these questions of self interest onto all other states and forced all other states, including America's allies as well as America's opponents, to reconsider their place in the international order. So this has led to this reassessment where everyone has to consider where they stand in relation to each other and also to the U.S. so the reason, however, that this has been such a shock, I think, is because the politics of the preceding period, the politics of the last 30 to 40 years or so, has been characterized by the effort to evade the popular pressure that's embodied in the idea of the nation, and also to suppress or dilute the national interest. And there's different ways through which that has been carried out. Some of it has been carried out through international law. Some of it has been carried out through the pursuit of globalization and international integration. Some of it has been carried out through the pursuit of these rolling forever wars and military campaigns such as the global War on terror. Some of it has been pursued through the pursuit of human rights. Some of it has been taken up in the idea of climate action and the need to reorganize world order around the imperatives of environmental security. Some of it has been taken up with the idea of Western civilization and the need to defend a cultural idea of a transnational political community. Some of it has been taken up with the pursuit of defense policy through NATO and these very large and powerful transnational military structures and geopolitical alliances. Some of it has been pursued through international solidarity campaigns, the building of transnational networks of activism that seek to coordinate politics across borders rather than through them and within them. So all of these various kinds of political activities over the last 30 to 40 years have been the political and legal infrastructure that has accompanied the age of globalization. And as a result of that, our leaders, our political elites, both, whether in government or in opposition, have very few intellectual and political resources on which they can draw to meet the challenges that are posed to them at this time. So as a result of that, what I suggest in the book is the. That there's a temptation to imagine that somewhere there is a clear national interest from which our governments or our ruling elites have departed. In this situation that we stand in at the moment, it's tempting to imagine that the national interest has simply been overlooked, as if it's at the bottom of somebody's in tray somewhere in a government office, or there's a document called the National Interest which is lying around in a filing cabinet somewhere, or alternatively, perhaps it's on a USB stick. There's a temptation to imagine that there is something called the national interest. We've all departed from it, and if we could just rediscover it, it would all snap back into place. And what I argue in the book is that that's a trap. To think of the national interest in that way is a trap. And it is in itself, in fact, a legacy of the era of member statehood, the political form that has dominated the last 30 to 40 years, the era in which states defined themselves in terms of their international relationships, their policy alignment and their harmonization, as opposed to their responsiveness to the will of their constituents. The era in which their options were restricted by all of these densely institutionalized transnational relationships across borders. The era in which the national security had effectively eroded the national interest. So in that era, I think it was tempting to imagine that, or as a result of that era and its intellectual legacy, we might be tempted into thinking that the national interest is just this thing which is given to us by existing institutions and relations. And I want to suggest that that is mistake, mistake. A profound and important political mistake, in fact. And rather than a thing you should think of the national interest, I argue in the book that we should think of it as a way of doing politics. Which is to say the national interest offers us discretion and flexibility. It offers us the opportunity to seize benefits when they arise in international life and an international order. It offers the opportunity to recalibrate national policy in response to shifts in the balance of power. And also the national interest offers the possibility of expressing shifts in democratic opinion within states. So if we understand the national interest as something which is a way of doing politics, it allows for a much greater degree of flexibility and maneuver on the part of our governments, on the part of our states. So what I propose in the book is that the national interest is about effective representation. It's about public deliberation, not arcane expertise. And rather than taking popular will for granted, as I think politicians and governments have tended to do for the last 30 years, rather, the national interest is about contesting visions of how best to serve the nation. And that offers up much greater political opportunities, I think, than we have hitherto enjoyed for many years. And I also want to propose that as a result of that, the national interest is itself a counter populist political strategy, that it offers opportunities to withstand and contain populist insurrections of the ballot box. And that's for the simple reason that populists are hostile to representation. The core proposition of populist politics is that if you simply scrape off an incumbent elite, you can channel popular will directly through charismatic authority and through demagogic leadership. And that is, I think, directly opposed to the politics of national interest. Properly understood, national interest is quintessentially a collective and representative concept. It's built around the idea of political inclusion and integration. Potentially it's open to all citizens and members of a given nation. And if we are not arguing about the national interest, then we're not competing for political representation. And if we're not competing for political representation, then we have no democratic self government to speak Of So what I propose is that the national interest is served by letting democratic majorities form around competing visions of the national interest. It is the mode by which we can distill popular will through representative structures. We can filter bottom up democratic aspirations through the representative structures of state and society in a way that will allow us to express more effectively the will of collective democratic majorities, the will of the state and in that way be able to enjoy greater political options and greater political flexibility and as part of that project also undercut the appeal of populism as an alternative form of politics. So I want to. I'll close just on this thought which is that the national interest is a keystone of a democratic future for the 21st century. That's the proposition of the book. There's no evading. If we're going to have democratic self government, then we absolutely need the national interest. If we don't have the national interest, then we don't have political representation. And if we don't have political representation then we don't have democratic self government. We want those things that we need to be thinking in terms of the national interest. The national interest is the way in which we need to organize our collective aspirations and hopes for the future as societies, as citizens and as nations. Thank you very much.

[E]

I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here because I'm just very lazy really. And also if I stand up it makes it look like I've got some prepared lecture and I really haven't. I want to react to. I mean, let me say several things. I mean firstly, it's a really, really thought provoking book and thought provoking to the point where I haven't quite decided and I have to read it again, which is usually the sign of a good book because it's got a lot of complex ideas in it. And I agree with a lot of what Philip says in the book. And I think the one thing overall we would agree with is we're coming out of decades of misrule, of political failure, of a failure to deliver for populations in this country and in others. I think I disagree slightly on some of the drivers and causes of that. It's worth saying in the Carney speech. Carney wasn't saying Canada alone. Carney wasn't saying globalization is dead. Carney was saying our relationship with the United States has changed fundamentally and bloody hell, we better find a way of dealing with that very, very quickly indeed. And actually much of what he said involved collaboration with other like minded countries and globalization isn't dead. Globalization is still there. Just look at financial markets. We haven't completely rolled globalization back and globalization did a lot of good. Globalization lifted billions out of poverty. Globalization allowed for more effective delivery of precisely the kinds of goods and services that people want. It was appallingly badly managed and it was treated as something that was done to us rather than something we did. There was a very famous Blair speech at a Labour Party conference where he said, if people who say we should limit globalization, it's a bit like saying that summer shouldn't come after spring. Actually, those weren't the months, he said, but I can't remember which months, he said, but you know what I mean. Basically, this is something that is inevitable. Globalization was based on a series of choices, a series of choices that individual nation states made. And it was up to individual nation states to decide how much to buy into that and how much not to buy into that. And I think we probably went too far. And judging from the financial crisis of 2008, there are clearly areas where we had let slip our ability to control what went on inside our borders far more than we should have done. That being said, I don't believe there aren't ways of managing globalization, that there aren't ways of doing it better, ensuring better control. And here, for me, the fundamental problem lies at home and not abroad. I think just thinking about Britain specifically, some of the problems that have led to these decades of failure are basically rooted in our political economy. We have a political economy that tolerated and tolerates huge iniquitous levels of economic inequality. And it does so because it's a system that was founded upon basically political inequality. I mean, just to give you an example, if you go back to the election of 2015, UKIP secured 4 million votes and one MP, the SNP, got about half as many votes and 50 odd MPs. There's a sort of political inequality baked into the way we do things. That was a clever way of saying that those people who are on the receiving end of policies didn't really have a say. I remember very clearly just before the referendum, being in Sunderland and talking to a woman about why she was about to vote Leave. And she said to me, well, it's just absolutely pointless trying to do anything else because you could stick a red rosette on a donkey here and it would win, all right? Because that's the nature of first past the post safe seats and all that sort of thing. So there are fundamental things about our domestic political economy that need reforming. And two things in particular that come out of our system that I think are responsible for a lot of bad policy making that has put us in the situation we're in now. The first is our sort of adversarial two party system. No longer two party system, but the logic of it still functions as sort of adversarial system. Let me give you one example of the way in which that impedes our ability to do basic stuff that we could and should have done years ago. We don't have. One of the reasons why our NHS is not working, one of the reasons why productivity in NHS basically flatlined for five years is because there's about 120,000 beds in our hospitals occupied by people who are perfectly well but who can't be discharged because we don't have a social care system. Now the thing about social care is both our political parties, both the former big political parties, Sorry, I'm a bit of a dinosaur. I keep saying Czechoslovakia, so it'll take me ages to grow out of. Labour and the Conservatives. They both agree on what the problem is and what the solution is. Andy Burnham's plan in 2010 was virtually exactly the same as Theresa May's plan in 2017. When Andy Burnham presented his plan, the Tories called it a death tax and it died. When Theresa May presented her plan, Labour called it a dementia tax and that died. There is an inbuilt motive for political parties to disagree even when they agree, and that sort of stymies our ability to make decent policies. The other thing about our politics that means we can't take the decisions we should have made, we should have taken is short termism, which again is baked into our system now, even more so, I think, than in the past. And what short termism means is government look for quick fixes. Think about the nhs. What did Boris Johnson do when he splashed money, and he really did, on the nhs? He paid for nurses and doctors because they show up before the next election. We still don't have the scanners, we still have hospital buildings that are falling down because those sorts of long term investments simply don't match the political incentives of our time. There's a wonderful clip, which I recommend to all of you, of Nick Clegg when he was Deputy prime minister in 2010, when he was asked, why aren't the government investing more in nuclear power? And he said, well, it'll only come on stream in about 2019 or 2020, so what's the point? And you think, you know, with the gift of 2020 hindsight, you know, so I think there are things we could and should be doing differently and better at home. I think there's a danger with the critique of globalization that we throw the baby out with the bathwater. And my final concern a little bit with Philip's book is it's a clever intellectual construct, this reclaiming of the idea of nationhood, of stressing the national interest. My fear in today's environment is, is if you try to put that into practice, it will be hijacked by the populist right. And that version of nationhood isn't Phillips version of a sort of cosmopolitan, not nationality or race based vision of nationalism. It is a far more insidious one of the kind we're hearing reform coming out with now. Both parents have to be born in the UK before you can get benefits. I mean, it is basically racism under another name. And my danger is that this sort of enterprise is too easily hijacked, which makes me personally quite nervous about it. But as I said, the bottom line is read the book because it's really, really rich and thought provoking.

[C]

Helen so I think I'm somewhere between Philip and makes you Nick Clegg. I don't know. No, not Nick Clay. So like Aaron, the first thing I recommend is that you absolutely read the book. And I also, having read it sort of one and a half times, I think need to want to read it again because there's a very compelling intellectual story about the relationship between nationhood and internationalism and the changes in those forces, if you like, through the history, not just of the 20th century, but I think the history of the 20th century is particularly consequential in this respect. So I was never very comfortable with the word globalization when we were supposed to be pro globalization because I was never really clear what it was supposed to mean. And I think if you then say and put some specific meaning on it, like financial globalization, you would have to say that not much has changed. But clearly something really has changed. And the way in which globalization was used to frame the world, probably from some point in the mid-1990s to maybe 2016, if we want to use that as a watershed year, I think we can say that the two things have changed. The first has been the assertion of the legitimacy of the democratic nation state against sights of international authority, and some of those being the eu and obviously Brexit, stands as perhaps exhibit A of that. But it's also been the assertion of the legitimacy of the democratic nation state against international capital to some extent. And I think the Trump case, particularly perhaps in 2016, more than 2024 fits into that. Then if we think like in terms of the world itself, as opposed to the domestic politics of particular states, there's been a shift to explicit geopolitical competition. Now, I don't think that geopolitical competition ever went away. I don't think it's ever possible it could have gone away, but that's not really the point. Point. The point is it was believed by many people not to be there because the global economy was taken to be something that all the major powers, including Russia, not just China, could benefit from, as well as from the United States. So the global economy was not seen as a zero sum game between, let's call them the great powers. And that's clearly changed. It's changed in relation to the US China relationship. And one can argue like when that actually starts. I might say it starts in like 2010. Some people might say it starts with Made in China in 2015, but it's changed in relation to Russia because Russia was deeply integrated into the world economy. Even the invasion, sorry, the annexation of Crimea in 2000, 2014 doesn't really change that. It only really changes in 2022. So I want to say something about Philip's argument in relation both to the first issue about the democratic nation state and then in relation to where we are in terms of geopolitics and what that means for the sovereignty of particularly of European states. So the first is an issue about like nation building. Because I entirely agree with Philip that actually it's very difficult to separate the history of democracy from the nation state and to separate the possibility of democracy as we have historically known it from nationhood. Now, I think that what you want to say, Philip, and I'm misinterpreting you here, is that that doesn't have to be a historical relationship that's come to an end, but it can be a historical relationship that can be renewed and that actually that what is possible in this moment is more nation building. And this goes to Anon's point, it doesn't have to be nation building like it was historically, that it can be that it can be something different in that sense. It can be. It's not just can be. It is a creation project and it's not a restoration project. So I like the way that you pick out that line that's often used. We have made Italy, now we must make Italians and say we can be at that moment again. But that's where I think I depart company or more skeptical, is that I think if you look like historically. And I'm particularly going to concentrate on Europe, partly because it's what I know more about, but also it's because I think that there lie the origins at least of modern nationhood, indeed actually pre modern nationhood as well. You can say that it's got. It was created and it was created culturally, and it was created culturally by language and by telling a historical story about a country through its literary culture in particular, sometimes it's music culture, but in particular its literary culture. You, you can say that it was then expanded in terms of what nationhood was supposed to mean by the welfare state. And that actually begins in Bismarckian like Germany, but it reaches its epoch probably in the welfare state in post 1945 Western Europe. And it's pretty clearly, and you talk about this explicitly obviously, Philip, conscription that goes back to the French Revolution. I don't think it's a coincidence that if you take the United States, where the decline of nationhood has been very evident, to the point where you might say it's near non existent in terms of what work it used to do in democracies, that the 70s is a crucial decade and the 70s is when conscription ends after the Vietnam like war. During the Vietnam like war. So then the question I have for you, Philip, is like, what is the specific mechanisms either culturally, materially or politically? It doesn't just have to be militarily that are actually going to have large numbers of people believe that they belong to the same democratic nation again. And that's the bit that I struggle with because I can see how we can say that there's no reason why the act of creation has to be the same as it was last time. But particularly when you put the democratic bit in it, it seems to me that it actually was pretty important that the cultural bit of it in the language sense was there. I think that in the very interesting article that reading your book pushed me to go back and read again, which is, and I reckon it's a Perry Anderson article, he's talking about the history of internationalism. He sort of tries, I think, to confine the nationhood and culture language to the romantic nationalists, particularly in Germany in the mid 19th century. I don't think that's like very good history, particularly actually if you go back to pre modern nationhood like in England. So I think the issue of a shared language and some kind of like shared cultural reference points is harder to detach from the nationhood project than perhaps it is in the argument that you've put. So I'd be interested to know what you think about that. So then let's turn to the, the geopolitical and the sovereignty questions, because I read you saying, Philip, that actually you want the assertion of the sovereignty of European states against the United States. And at times there's some anger at the fact that this hasn't been forthcoming in the face of Trump's provocations. But I think that this is a really hard issue too, for European states. So you say at one point we need sovereign states, and I don't necessarily disagree with that. But what does it mean for Europe in this particular geopolitical moment? Now, let's take the Greenland issue, because this is one that obviously has angered us great number of people across Europe. And I think actually you mentioned it in terms of a context, or maybe you did on X, maybe I'm getting confused. But in the early days of Trump's presidency was obviously on the Greenland subject like that. Because Philip's argument, I think, is, look, Europe has to stand up. European states have to stand up for their sovereignty. But if you look at the Denmark and Greenland case, in what sense is Denmark the sovereign in Greenland or in regard to Greenland? Because since 1951, then the United States has effectively been able to do militarily what it wants in Greenland. Now we can say, oh, well, you don't have to have military authority over your territory in order to be a sovereign state. But that's a very historically specific judgment to make. The only reason why we could, anybody could think that that was true is because of NATO, because at that moment when NATO was like, formed is European states, particularly European states, you could say Canada, it applies to too, could say that they were sovereign while they were delegating their responsibility for security in the territory over which they claim sovereignty to another power. You can't find any other historical example that looks like this. So in that sense, I would say that Denmark's sovereignty over Greenland has either been weak since 1951 or even at worst, like, performative. Now that raises the question then of, like, what the European response now could be. Because again, I think your response for it would be, well, what Europe needs is Gaulism or some. Maybe I'm being a bit unfair, but I took it that that's part of like, part of what you're like saying. And so it's very clear that de Gaulle thought, in the way in which I've just spelled out, that actually you couldn't be a sovereign state unless you provided for your own security. Now then you can say, well, that's then what European states need to do to claim sovereignty. But if we look at de Gaulle's project, first of all, it's very bound in its first years to the French empire. He's trying to hold on to Algeria even when he has to concede Algerian independence. He damn well makes sure those French energy companies can stay on preferential terms in Algeria. Once actually the assets of those French energy companies are nationalized, I think it's in 1972 in Algeria. Then the whole basis, I'd say, of Gaulism becomes again quite performative from his success successes rather than actually being grounded in a strategic capacity of the French state to act geopolitically independent in the world. And in the end, the logic of like, oh, we can't actually really be outside the joint military command of NATO is acknowledged. When I think it's Sarkozy, Anon will correct me if I'm wrong. Sarkozy takes them back and joined military command. So I think the question is much harder in a way for European states. And then I guess it goes back to Peter's remarks on what Carney is saying, which I also think Carney's remarks kind of avoid the harder questions like what does it actually mean for a medium sized power, particularly one that's in NATO, to act as a sovereign state in a world in which the United States is trying its hardest to act on the Monroe Doctrine in a way that is harder for everybody else in the world than at any point, I would say, in the entire time that the United States has been the world's dominant geopolitical power because the United States has never really been commercially threatened in the world Western hemisphere to the extent it now is, like by China. These are much harder times, to use my own book title, sorry for that, than it was the point in which attempts have been made to assert the sovereignty of European states against the United States like before. So in a way, I guess what I want to say to you like Philip, is it's like what's the specific ground in which where your optimism is coming from?

[B]

Okay, thanks. Well, Philip, you've got do you want to respond? Some easy questions for you to have a question.

[D]

So thank you both very much for.

[C]

The.

[D]

Thoughtful and searching questions. I won't try and respond to everything that's been raised, but maybe just to a few points. I imagine we'll come back to them in further discussion with the audience, I suppose. What are the grounds for optimism? My most obvious ground for optimism, I think, is that beneath all the vulgarity and the crudity and the bluster and belligerence and even the military, even the military adventurism of the Trump administration, the retraction, the retrenchment of American power seems to me to be the Trump project essentially is acknowledging limits of American power and trying to reorder the world around a much more modest scope of what American power can achieve and exercise. And that's disguised by this pompous, bellicose rhetoric that enrages everybody. And I suspect that underneath that rage, there is also, and part of the reason that Trump angers beyond, like I say, the obvious, the gratuitous offensiveness and the crudity that he relishes. But beneath that, I think there's also resentment as well, on the part, particularly of Western allies and even, I'd say, on the part of opponents of American power, that the excuses are effectively being removed, either the excuses for opposition to America, by which America can be blamed for all the ills in the world, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the excuses that the Americans, the US Will always bail you out, either financially, politically or militarily. And so that gives me some ground for hope, at least in the sense that we are forced to take responsibility for ourselves. And the political infantilization that I think has accompanied the last 40 years, and perhaps even earlier, reaching back to the formation of NATO member states and leading to this historically unprecedented circumstance that Helen drew attention to, in which you could have long standing military bases of foreign power on your soil for decades and decades, free movement of a foreign military on your soil for decades and decades. And that could be seen as somehow compatible with national independence that was only possible in this condition of member statehood, this relatively reduced and infantilized condition of political independence, in which it's accepted that there is this paternalistic relationship with a protector and a patron. And that I think if we can get past our resentment of Trump, then I think perhaps we begin to see opportunities. But those opportunities, I think, can only be seized by being able to act on the national interest. And that means perhaps a politics of rupture as being willing to undertake a politics of rupture in breaking with established precedent and breaking with existing institutions. It requires risks and it requires boldness and ruthlessness. And for all those things, you need democratic legitimacy, you need a national. You need both the willingness and the oversight of the people behind you in order to be confident in exercising that kind of politics. And so what I hope is that the national interest is part of unlocking that kind of politics, not Just as a framework for the way in which we think about politics, but also for renewing political legitimacy. And I take Helen's point about that. The story of nationhood has been one of culture. I mean, there's no way of getting around that historically. At the same time, however, I think part of the problem is. Part of the problem is that we've had too much culture essentially, over the last 30 years. The culture wars that we're still mired in, I think, are the result of the lack of political representation. In effect, everyone is encouraged to associate with their particular identity or the particular culture in the absence of meaningful political representation, in the absence of meaningful political traction. And so my hope is that with the national interest, it's possible to use political institutions. And for us to collectively deliberate on what our national interests are is part of the process of eroding the inheritance of culture wars that accompany globalization and building up a new national politics. So I avoided. I didn't wish to be didactic about what new forms of culture, and I'm not in any way qualified really to speak on it. I have my views about it, but they're as good as anybody else's. My hope is that culture would follow politics with new political institutions and renewed political life. Culture will flow around these questions. And the reason I'm not a Gaullist is because it seems to me de Gaulle, in addition to the fact that it has these tremendous aspects of performativity to it, which is why there's so much theatricality associated with the Gaulis project, it also grows out of the deadlocks of political representation that France has endured since at least the mid 19th century. And so Gaulism is a way, the strong man, the military man, is a way of resolving the deadlocks between urban and rural life and between working class, middle class political clashes in France. And my hope is that that can be avoided in renewed European national project, but especially, I think, and hopefully in Britain, given the omnicompetent legislature, that in the traditional model of parliamentary sovereignty, it gives us tremendous scope to exercise, to make collective decisions, and for them to be exercised clearly, cleanly and dramatically, at least, if we have a political elite willing to exercise a democratic mandate through parliament and without the kind of Blairite overgrowth, constitutional overgrowth, that we've seen in the era of political globalization. And to this end, I agree with what Arnand said, that that project has to be part of the project of nation building, has to be a project of political reform, and principally political reform of the parties, whatever way is possible to break apart the cartel parties, as Peter Mayer called them, or the establishment incumbent parties inherited from the previous era. That seems to me the most important task of political change. In a book, the book that I co authored with Peter and two other authors that he mentioned, we propose PR as a possible model for breaking apart the cartel parties. But whatever model people might prefer, it seems to me political renewal is part of that. And that hopefully gets us away from the Gaullist trap, because the theatrical performance of sovereignty would be to fall short, I think, of a meaningful national interest politics for the 21st century.

[B]

Okay, can I just ask, what about Alan's point about the baby and the bathwater? Is there a danger of saying, well, globalisation's over and missing a retreat autarky?

[D]

Yeah, I don't. So, I mean, I accept, of course, that, you know, and I wouldn't wish the global economy to disintegrate. Autarky is different from the question of political self sufficiency. So there's nothing appealing about the idea of economic self sufficiency, I don't think. But there's plenty that's appealing about political self sufficiency, which is to say enjoying the collective authority provided by democratic nationhood. That there is no need to refer to any other external source of authority or check on the exercise of national will. That seems to me a worthwhile project and that necessarily rebalances. It rebalances the relationship between market and society, between market and state, more in favor of the state. I think that's true and necessary, but that doesn't seem to me to amount to a project of breaking apart the benefits of trade. And quite the opposite, I think. I mean, one of the critiques of globalization is, that is legitimate is the fact of how poorly conducted some of the basic bargains underneath globalization, how poorly negotiated those bargains were in the interests of particular cliques and elites within state, rather than the greatest, for the benefits of the majority. So if it's possible to use the national interest to recalibrate those bargains, that seems to me welcome. And perhaps there'll be more benefits. We'll see more benefits of economic interdependence, more benefits of economic trade as a result of being willing to wield the national interest more than we have thus far.

[B]

Okay, thanks. So over to you. There's microphones will come your way when I think you. Obviously you're welcome to preface your question and explain it, but please make it a question because there's quite a lot of people in the room and there's Some people online, I'd like to get through you. So the gentleman right there who's in the tracksuit.

[D]

Hi. I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that. That we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question, like, why do people believe in conspiracy theories? Or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.

[F]

Hi, I just wanted to ask, how.

[C]

Do you think declining birth rates and the associated challenges that will come with.

[D]

That will affect these projects of building.

[F]

The national interest and maintaining that?

[B]

Okay, I'll take a couple of questions and then. And behind you there with the glasses. Hi.

[G]

I'm wondering where the architecture for a.

[B]

New model of globalization will come from.

[G]

So will it come from sort of like a grassroots cohort of. Of activists or engineers, or will it.

[B]

Come from the top down, where existing institutions seek to bolster the existing architectures of globalization and we don't get fundamental change? Where does the change come from? Okay, and third one in the far corner here.

[H]

So this one's made for Peter. So it seems like a lot of source for nationalism, a source of opposition, especially in this country, against the European project, is from inherent contradictions within it. So it's the fact that we created this international system after World War II that actually seems to be weaponized against us by powers like Russia and China. We've seen this in Euroclair, where we have about 200 billion euros of Russian assets that are frozen in a Belgian bank, and yet no one wants to unfreeze it because we don't want to undermine the international system that we developed. Part of Bretton woods, and we don't want our credit rating to decline in international markets. So it's a case of where we almost have our hands tied and we don't have any. We almost seem to delegate any control that we have over globalization. I think that's where a lot of resentment comes from. So my question is that do you think going alone as individual countries is actually the best way to do that? Because as we've seen in the Euroclair situation, Belgium does not to want. Want to take responsibility because they don't want all these lawsuits in the international courts to go towards them. It seems like the only way to me that we can resolve these issues and contradictions in globalization is to globalize as a bloc with Western countries, with the eu, United States, Japan, Australia. So do you believe that so, yeah. Do you believe that the best way to globalize is to globalize within a fixed block?

[B]

Okay, thanks. So, three questions, mainly anger from. So Phil says something and then if you.

[G]

If.

[D]

Sure, yeah. So on this question of. I mean, I think the seizure of the, if I go in reverse order, perhaps the seizure of the assets in the Belgian bank, the Russian assets, I think that speaks perhaps more than anything to the end of financial and economic globalization, at least as we've understood it thus far. And that's evident in the gold price and these halting efforts to make independent payment systems in Russia and China that are independent of the American dominated Swift system. And also the slow erosion, the slow development of multipolarity in global finance, the slow, very slow erosion of the dollar as the reserve currency. And that I don't think is going to be a dramatic transformation. And I don't think the dollar will ever lose its stock status as a premier financial instrument. But we are moving into a world in which financial globalization will look quite different. And so there is, I think there are basic backstops to the story of international integration over the last 30 to 40 years. And as a result of those transformations, it requires greater political self reliance. So that it isn't. I don't think I would call what comes out of that globalization precisely because it's got to be built on a model that is less dependent on external authority. It's going to be built around new forms of international cooperation that are more rooted in the national interest. So Peter raised the Mark Carney speech at the start. It seems to me the problem with Mark Carney's vision is that globalization doesn't work without a Hegeman. So the idea that a middle power league can compensate or make up a globalization without Russia, China or the US doesn't seem to me to hold water. So that's the problem with the Mark Carney model. But if we understand, you know, if we think about the possibilities for middle power cooperation on the basis of internationalism rather than globalization, then I think there's much greater scope and potential for understanding possibility in that world. And so my hope is the architecture should be internationalist rather than globalist, which is to say, hopefully rooted in democratic legitimacy rather than rooted around external authority or observance of international law, or on the basis of morality, or on the basis of obedience and compliance with international partnerships, or simply simply compliant to the state status quo. We've done it like this for 50 years. This is why we should keep it. A new architecture that is based on the national interest, I think, will be more resilient if it has the input of democratic legitimacy, if voters are more willing to give leeway and discretion to their diplomats and representatives to undertake these kinds of negotiations with greater purpose and then hopefully with less sabotage at the ballot box from populist suspicion and resentment as to what deals are being cooked up in remote conference suites.

[E]

So.

[D]

And then just briefly on the question of demography. I mean it's. I'm not my viewers, I suppose that it's. It's not something I'm not panicked about. I'm not panicked about demographic decline, though very. It is clearly a problem not only for nations but also for the human species. But it seems to me part of that issue is perhaps the lack of collective identification that gives meaning to reproduction and procreation and the nationhood and collective identification at the national level perhaps is one way in which reproduction and procreation can be made politically meaningful in a way that perhaps is unavailable to individuals at the moment.

[B]

Anand on any base.

[E]

I'm quite panicked by it, to be honest, partly because I want someone to pay for my pension and I'm a bit worried at the moment that there won't be anyone to do it. I think it is a real ticking time bomb, particularly for Western societies. So. So it's a combination of declining birth rates and increased longevity just mean increasing Social Security bills, decreasing tax revenue and it's a problem. You'd have to have a very cosmopolitan notion of the nation to allow for the sort of immigration that we will need to make the sums add up. At the moment I don't see how we square that circle. I really don't. In fact, it's one of those debates where we have a sort of. Of baked in dishonesty that governments allow people in because they need them, whilst talking tough about not allowing people in, which makes people feel very unwelcome. It creates a hideous hostile environment, one might say. And how you square that, I just don't know. I mean, I'm fed up of saying we could do with a bit more honesty from our politicians. I'm sure if I was a politician I wouldn't be honest. I mean the incentives all work in the other direction. But at the moment the, the sort of. The baked in contradictions and our stance on economic migration are just undermining good public policy. The new model of globalization I think might be several models of globalization competing. The Chinese will have their views on how this should be structured going forward. The US obviously has its own views as well. And that sort of speaks to the question about whether we should do things in Blob. I think there is an obvious incentive, if only because we share geostrategic interests with our nearest neighbors, to work closely with them. Also happens that we share a lot of economic interests with them. We're in a similar situation. So I think it does make sense to work with your partners as much as possible. I was a bit intrigued and confused by Zach Polanski, who seems to have got an obsession with Brazil and Mexico at the moment for reasons I couldn't quite figure out. But how that works as a sort of geopolitical grouping, I have no idea.

[C]

Just on that point, I think that it's quite, I find it quite difficult to think that there's a version of globalization as we knew it. Leaving the problems with the term aside for a moment, that is coming back because it was bound to a period of time in which the United States could, could exercise power in a particular way and had bound in different ways, China and Russia, into a relatively global economy. And it's very difficult to see how that world comes back again. And even if one thinks, and I think this is right, that the Trump administration is going to be some way further down the road in terms of prioritizing the Western Hemisphere, I don't think the next administration, assuming it is Democratic for the moment and not Republican, is really going to retreat from that because it's too difficult, I think, for the United States to be like a global power that structures a global economy any longer. I think, though, even if we say that European middle powers have got economic incentives to cooperate with each other, it still doesn't change the fundamental predicament in which European states face, which is that they are not great powers and that they are in a resource poor position in relation to the existing energy regime around fossil fuels and the emerging one around electrification. Now, the incentives for them to try to cooperate, deal with that problem are quite strong. But at a certain point they also, I'm afraid, going to be competing like with each other. And if you look at European history, those competitive dynamics have been quite diabolical at times in their consequences. I just want to pick up just a bit on the question of, like, where change might come from because I do think in a way that, you know, we live in. I can't remember when those emails will release now, but I think that we live in a world in this respect that's different than it was, say two weeks ago. I think there's lots of ways, obviously in which People can react to these revelations, but one way you can look at it is to see that there are some kind of elites that are internationally connected with each other other and that they are kind of, if you like, bound up with global capital. I mean, in a way that's at the core of the Mandelson part of this story. And when you connect his sort of Epstein connections, but also his China connections, his Russia like connections, they're all in a way about how he could personally enrich himself from this global capital system. And I think the more that this is understood and the more fury is unleashed into any number of countries, democratic politics over this, then there is the potential for very considerable instability. Now generally, I would say that more often than not change comes from above and it's elites and elites, certain parts of elites, except exploit the dissatisfaction of those who are the losers from economic and political configurations. But I do think that potentially at least, we're into unknown territory here in terms of what the reaction to these revelations are going to be, particularly because the revelations aren't going to stop.

[B]

That's interesting because one of the questions we got from the online world, from Roman Gardner, is that the politics of, of national interest seems to position itself against the interests of global big business who would most likely seek to curtail such a vision. That's his view. Given we live in a time where the representative mediating institutions that can hold capital or this global network to account and control are weak and brittle, who do you believe could drive a politics of national interest forward? So that's a kind of follow up to that observation. I'll leave that there and take a couple more questions. Person right in the middle classes two rows back.

[F]

Thank you for the discussion.

[D]

My question is when you mentioned the return of the state, so does national interest mean more protectionism?

[F]

If that is the case, then could.

[D]

It deliver more equitable growth?

[C]

Thank you.

[B]

Could it enable a more.

[D]

More equitable growth?

[B]

Okay, and then right in the front here.

[C]

A light bulb went on in.

[A]

My head, Philip, when he said that the national interest debate has to be.

[C]

About rebalancing some of the contracts in society. And it seems to me that's a.

[A]

Massive thing because if you look at where those things need to be renegotiated.

[C]

You could say in the workplace, where.

[A]

The power of trade unions, not necessarily the old trade unions, but worker organisations, is still ridiculously constrained by the satya legislation, which we still have, that needs renegotiating. The difference between big business and small.

[C]

Business needs renegotiating in the Financial arena. You know, people say we're just subject to global markets but you know, you can have currency controls, you can have a non independent independent bank of England in the law.

[A]

You could have a great repeal act.

[C]

That sweeps away all that awful code.

[A]

Based legislation that we've had imposed upon us from the eu. Now that all potentially fills people with.

[C]

Panic, you know, but to me it.

[A]

Fills me with excitement.

[C]

What else do we need to rip up and start again with?

[B]

Okay, and then just next, just there too and then we'll go back to you.

[C]

Thanks.

[F]

I'd like to pick up on something Anand said and pick up a question that he or point that he made which I think Philip has not really addressed. So my criticism to you Anand is that I don't. I think you're being too institutionalist in suggesting that a two party system and short termism means we can't solve our problems. How was the Labour Party able to create a welfare state after 1945 in a two party system with every five years we had general elections because they successfully claimed to lead the nation as David Egerton points out in his book, because of their strong representative ties to the British people. And where I'd like to pick up your challenge is we know that those ties have eroded to the point of non existent which is why you posit the idea of a politics of the national interest. Given that the idea is appealing. We use the national interest as a way of doing politics. We ask what is the national interest. We contest it, we use it to rebuild ties of democratic representation. But given where we are, where democratic representation is all but dead at last general election, 60% of people said they were not represented by any political party. Isn't Anand right that it will be the populist right that will steal the mantle of the national interest? As for example, Trump and the America first crowd are doing in the United States.

[B]

Okay, three more. I'll come back to you in a second. Anyone? That last one was the equitable question from protectionism and then renegotiating social contract. Just you know, how exciting a prospect or alarming a prospect is that. And won't the populist right just profit from the collapse?

[D]

So on the question of the populist right it seems to me they are. They obviously take advantage of the dearth of the problems of our inherited misrule and the fact that people don't feel represented. But that's not the same thing as them being able to claim long term legitimate stake to the grounds of national interest. That seems to me, a different kind of proposition because there is so much scope for criticizing the populist right on the grounds of national interest, it seems to me, and in fact, it's the only, it seems to me the only meaningful way in which Trump's opponents will be able to tie him down, to actually pin him down politically at least, is on the grounds of national interest. So much of, if you think about the shilly shallying kind of policy, the back and forth, the instability in his conduct of foreign policy, the wild claim that the only check on his, on his choices is his own conscience that he made in an interview in the aftermath of the strike, strike and Caracas, all of that seems to me to give plenty of ground for opponents to claim the national interest. The problem, it seems to me, is that so far at least, his opponents are not doing that. They're not taking plenty of opportunities to criticize Donald Trump as being as acting on his personal interest rather than on the national interest. It seems to me the opponents of the populist right still say seem too attached to process, to inherited models of doing politics, to defending the legacy of the status co anti and that hamstrings how far you can critique them. And until Democrats are willing to wield the national interest, the populists, it will be left to the populace to claim the mantle of representation. So that seems to me, it's a challenge put to me, but I suppose it's a challenge I'd throw back out to the crowd. It's for all of us to grapple with, but it seems the only way through is by talking and thinking in terms of national interest. On the question, I mean, so on the question of protectionism, I think perhaps it's misguided to think in terms of the, to think I'm sure more protectionism is merited in certain sectors and with certain international relationships, but it doesn't seem to me to frame it in terms of the old global economy. I think the globalized economy that's passing away, I think would be to prejudge what's possible and that we should perhaps think more open mindedly because I think the claim that globalization would lead to a more sophisticated international division of labor in which all would benefit, that seems to me to be a very a model that can be a claim that can be easily criticized. And so the scope for more for productivity growth through greater state intervention, through allowing state moulding of the market and the moulding of society in ways that we've been hitherto unwilling to countenance if it's framed in terms of the national interest. And I think it offers possibilities for more effective trading relationships as well. So that I think thinking in terms of protectionism or mercantilism as the opposite of globalization, I think we'd allow ourselves to get trapped in a cleft stick inherited from the past and not be thinking in terms of opportunities for economic growth and for economic connections that may exist at the moment. And then on this question of finally, just briefly, on the question of the social contract and everything that needs restructuring, I'm excited. I'm excited about those possibilities too. And I would say, I suppose that the, perhaps one of the biggest challenges is in terms of rewriting that social contract is getting British capitalists, British business to see that in the aftermath of globalization and in the aftermath of American hegemony, their interests lie with the nation rather than with thinking in terms of globalization and a global business elite. And perhaps that is also the upshot of the Mandelson story, that this is being this transactional globalist elite. As a result of all these changes, its authority is being challenged, being exposed and it's being broken up right before our eyes. And I hope so. It's not simply a matter of empowering trade unions, but also encouraging British business businesses, finance, banks, industries, all of them, to see that their interests lie perhaps with a new relationship with the British state and the British people, which they have to be willing to enter into on terms of the national interest.

[B]

Okay, Alan, do you want to take on the populism? Any of it, but particularly is the national interest the way to see off the populists?

[E]

I've never been called an institutionalist before. It's quite exciting. I mean, look, I find an intrinsic sort of intellectual appeal in an idea of a sort of open, inclusive national interest, grounded vision of politics of the future. Like you, I just find it hard to envisage in the current political situation how that happens. I mean, just listening to Helen talk about change coming from below, it'd be lovely to think that was true. But I seem to. But I just suspect that the ultimate people who will profit out of this are the Jordan Baldelas and the Nigel Farage is not people. With this, with this open view, Labour was able to do what it did in the post war period because those are the days when you're getting close to 50% of the vote. I mean you're taking a chunk of the public with you in those days. The fragment, I mean, you know, Starmer's got 33, well, less now. Obviously, significantly less now is the fragmentation of our politics makes up very, very hard to envisage. But I think, you know, in a sort of abstract world, this kind of open, inclusive vision of the national interest makes a load of sense. And no, it wouldn't be protectionist, and yes, it would be able better to regulate some of the most sort of pernicious practices of international big business. If you think about the tax take from some of these American tech firms and things like that, I think actually enlightened societies working together for the best interests of their own populations could and should be able to do that. That just doesn't seem like the world we're living in at the moment, sadly. And it will take an enormous sort of act of political leadership to shift the debate back in that direction. I mean, you know, a better future is possible. I just really struggle to discern it in the fog of the horror we're living through at the moment. I mean, just the thing about the Epstein thing for me was it's like with every sort of headline that comes out, it's like a populist conspiracy theory made flesh. You know, if I were a populist, this is what I would have invented, and this is what proves all my attack lines have been right. I mean, one of the fundamental problems of populism at the moment is whilst many of the solutions they're proposing to our problems are frankly, just batshit crazy, the diagnosis looks more. More and more compelling. And that, I think, is the real danger of the moment.

[C]

Yeah, I mean, I agree in the sense. I agree in the sense that what's happened is, in the first instance, anyway, you're going to help various populist positions. I think, though, that some of them, including Farage himself in the UK case, are sort of less removed from this than might look alike on the surface. So I think where this goes is, as I say, open to. There's a lot still to come, I think. But I just want to answer a little bit on the question of the return of the state, because I think in a way, the protectionist part of this is a bit of a red herring. Not because it's not important, but I think. I think if you look at the Trump administration's tariffs, a lot of it is actually using tariffs as a coercive instrument for other purposes. It's not necessarily about the trade barriers themselves or indeed, like, trying to import less from abroad. Obviously, that's true in certain sectors. It's a means of trying to get other states to do the things that Trump wants them to do, like get Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States. But I think that there is something that is going on that is kind of like national interest politics, which is at the heart of the return of the state, which is the state in Western countries. And I think that this is true in North America and in Europe, whereas usually one might have to distinguish between the two, is having to get more involved in energy and resources. And by resources, I also mean like metals. And it is doing it quite often in the name of the national interest. And if you want a really clear example of it, it would be the fact that in the name of the national interest that the Pentagon is now the single biggest shareholder in the company that does rare earth mining in California and refining operations, one of which I think is in Texas. And it's all just. It's been done by the Trump administration. It's all justified as necessary to the national interest. If you look, I think, at the historical story where the origins of globalization, or neoliberalism, if it's going to be called like that, are they're in the 70s, and the story then is the retreat of the state. But that again, I think, is driven fundamentally by the retreat of the state from the energy sector. In terms of the way in which European states and the different way that the United States dealt with energy questions. When that world that they created, which was in many ways imperial, came crashing down around them in the 70s, then the response to that was we'll let markets deliver the energy that we need for us, but in the world, and the advantage of Western countries was being able to pay more. But in the world in which not only China is a large energy consumer, but India is a rapidly growing energy consumer and they're much larger countries, then the idea then that Western states can stay out of energy markets, it's for the birds to now, because it's just not possible for them. It's not possible for them to do that and to sustain the economies that they've hitherto had. So I think whatever else happens, we are going to see more and more of the state.

[E]

I think also just on the tariffs. It's now a revenue stream. And whatever you think about Trump's successes, the one thing they're not going to do is come back and say, I'll do without that revenue stream. So some of the stuff. Stuff is going to stick.

[B]

All right, so. Right, yeah, right at the back, because you've been waving at us for a while. Right at the back, further back. Follow that and Then down here and then over there and then I've got bigger front, see if I can. We've got, we've got a bit more time to go, so we're making good progress. Yeah. So what I'm here hearing is that the as is condition is pretty broken and words like rupture are used, which I agree with, which normally means there's a period of extreme uncertainty and the world is changing very quickly. And what I'm hearing less about is we have a version here of national interest that sort of, let's call that to be condition, but in a way world where it strikes me that in a world where, you know, increasingly toothless international institutions abound and sort of somewhat broken national democratic systems, I just wonder where the panel believe the leadership will come from that's going to get us from this, to use your words, horrific situation to where we need to be and how long it will take. Great, thank you. Down here. Yes, go.

[D]

Good evening. So, based on discussion today, we mainly talk about the national interest from the international political landscape perspective. But my question is from the bottom perspective. So we know that no matter in the democratic or Austrian regimes nowadays, they are more and more like right wing social movement protest emerging. So like anti immigration or anti these climate change, social justice. I wonder how this grassroots change of the social movement, right wing social movement, shape our understanding for national interests and how can this new understanding affect the relationship between national interests and globalization?

[F]

Thank you.

[B]

Okay, thanks, Annabir.

[G]

So to follow on from the points about energy, I mean, it strikes me that the, you know, the productive capacity of society is clearly squandered all the time, you know, and so when Boris Johnson had his Red War moments and he said, look, things are going to be different, you could feel, you know, a kind of pull of the idea that, look, we could organize industry, we could make society better in all kinds of ways. And then the moment slipped away quite quickly. And it strikes me therefore that the idea that you would have a political will, like a popular sitting of the people that would direct both the market and the state is very common, compelling. Of course, the question is, you know, where does the polis, where does that kind of polis emerge from that would do that kind of steering? So it seems to me the gap is there. I mean, for my money, you know, it seems to me the two big kind of sections in society are, on the one hand, the disaffected people who are kind of missing in the political equation. And then the other section is the professional middle class, you know, who Kind of, you know, have kind of been on the global kind of project for some time but that that is being called into question. And it strikes me that, you know, in a world in which we do have to rethink how energy is done and how building is done and so on, there is a space there to speak to the professional middle class and to form a different kind of political alliance with a wide section of society.

[B]

Thanks. I'm going to take one more question because this. We'll come back for another round. But these conversations are very lacking in participants of the female persuasion about nation nationality. So since we've got some. I'm going to take.

[A]

Yeah. The national interest as Phil set out at the beginning was really, I think you were talking about a way of doing politics. And I think that that's really important thought, a very important idea because it introduces reason into the equation. And I think we've moved out of an era where the bottom line really was that there was no point in us making decisions because the market.

[C]

Had.

[A]

The final decision on everything from whether on social care, what resources to put into the schools and national health service. Everything was finally decided on by the market. And I think one of the interesting things that has occurred and that you touched on upon it was that this horrible scandal that's occurred, this vile sort of never ending release of files and so on, what it's revealed actually is that those who. That the market is not a sort of force of nature. It is a system that is controlled by people. People make decisions, decisions and they act in their interests. And they. We have been told that the market is just a thing and that we have no control over it. But of course people do have control over it and we've seen them now. Now I think in the hands of the populists that would just go straight off into the world of conspiracy theories. It's because they still see the market as a, as an immovable force to them. And I think what I would like to see is through the application of reason that we would as a population say well, what's in our interests? What do we want? What is it for and how do we get it? And that we would put our interests first. I think the only way we can do that is collectively and through representative democracy. There's no other way we could. We can't take the market on individually and we really don't want to go down the road that says it is an impersonal and force that's run by shadowy operatives is not going to take us Anywhere. So the national interest is the only answer. I would say at least it asks the right questions.

[B]

Okay, so leadership and can we. Would the professional middle classes buy into this agenda, given that the assumption of the question is, so far they haven't. And then is it.

[C]

Is the market.

[B]

Is the globalized market exposed for a political institution really? For where those are the questions?

[D]

Yeah, I mean, I wanted. So on the point about Epstein and Mandelson, I think it's a great example, actually, about. Because what's striking about it was what Mandelson did. The claim that Starmer. The idea or the best offense you could offer of Starmer's decision is that he sends this sleazy political fixer to Washington, to the court of the Mad King, in order to be able to carry out the kind of deals and backroom deals that other people wouldn't be able to. And so that would be a kind of national interest defense of the appointment of Mandelson. Potentially. But what's interesting about what's been exposed as a result of all this, and which Gibbs makes Gibbs credence to all the populist conspiracy theories, is that Mandelson wasn't actually acting in the national interest. Like, what was exposed was the fact that he was lobbying on Epstein's behalf for trying to alter British banking regulations in the aftermath of the financial crash back in 2008, and that he promised to do these things for Epstein in return for payments, it seems. So that seems to me a very clear case of where there is. You can, like you say, Pauline, that instead of seeing these great anonymous forces that lend themselves to populist conspiracy theories, you see leaders and elites brokering certain kinds of decisions for themselves with no political accountability or no effort to justify it in terms that are public, in terms that can be rendered in a form that is amenable to democratic oversight. So I think it's a great example on the middle classes. It's very striking because the middle classes are in the history of nationalism, particularly the cultural history of nationalism. It's the middle classes that famously school teachers in the back and beyond of Eastern Europe, kind of communicating in vernacular languages and gathering folklore that became the basis of nationhood in Central and Eastern Europe. And so it's very striking that their departure from the nation to globalization, that they've hooked themselves around globalization is a very important part of that story of gouging out political nationhood. So bringing the middle classes back into the nation and on the basis of a new social contract with working classes. Because nationhood, I Think it's worth remembering nationhood is the vestigial political rights that the disenfranchised enjoy. The working classes have few political claims in modern states. They're one of the few places that they do still retain some political power and political agency is through the ballot box and through their rights as citizens. And so if the middle classes can be grouped back in, back into the nation, and they've done it before, then it seems to me that will strengthen that project. And. And so there is scope for new alliances as part of building out the national interest and for new social contracts to be written.

[C]

So on the leadership question and the productive capacity question, I think that these are linked in the. I think one of the reasons why we have a leadership issue and in this country, assuming that Starmer will be gone at some point in the next months, if not weeks, days, is that we're going to go through not having had a Prime Minister who have done a full term since David Cameron managed between 2010 and 2015. And part of the explanation, I think, for that is that none of them know what to do about the limitations of the productive capacity of the UK economy and the really deep structural problems that we face economically and socially, I would say. And then the acceleration of our politics in the face of that makes it very difficult for anybody to learn anything because they're not doing anything for very long. And it's not just like the Prime Ministers, if you just look through the number of politicians in midlife who, his careers had been burnt through and blown up in relatively short periods of time. And one of the oddities about Mandelson in that respect was that he was a continuity player. I mean, even you might argue through the coalition government, given his relationship with, like, George or apparent friendship with. More than apparent friendship with, like George, like Osborne. But most of the time, our senior politicians don't stay around, like, very long. Their careers blow up, they lose their seats. And given that it's not easy to govern well in the set of predicaments that we have, with the productive capacity of the economy that we have, we're just kind of stuck at the moment. So in some sense, you might say, well, it's hard to get out of this because to get better leaders, we needed a better economy. Economy. To get a better economy, we need, like, better leaders. But at a certain point, I think that how this happens is a whole other question. But things, I think, cannot continue as they are. And I think if you think of British politics as accelerating, and that's why we keep going through these short term Prime Ministers. The obvious thing on the surface would be that reform forms the next government and Farage is the next Prime Minister. Once you get to that and say that, it's very difficult actually to imagine that that will be the case, that Farage won't himself blow up. He's exposed, I think, by some of these recent developments, like around Epstein. And then we get into, well, the party system has broken down. The party system, as all of us through our lifetimes in this country has known it will not deliver what we have known it to deliver at the next election. I don't think that even if you ended up, which I think unlikely, but still say possible of like some kind of like coalition in terms of campaigning between Labour and the Liberal Democrats and Reform and the Conservatives, that would still be a radically different election than any of us that any of us have known. So I think that we're reaching the end, so to speak, of what the system can keep replicating whilst being stuck in crisis mode. And in a way that's a good thing because in that sense we have to start again.

[D]

Thank you.

[B]

We're kind of out of time. I just want to. We won't attempt to answer this question, but someone online put it. And I think in this environment it's worth us at least going away with it in our head. Edwin van der Haar, an alumni of the International Relations department here, has asked us from the Netherlands if the national interest is an expression of democratic will or outcome of democratic processes. It will inevitably be very volatile. But does the national interest not entail a set of long term ideas, politically and economically, that will keep a country safe and wealthy? And that's another component. We talked about leadership, but that's another component that people in a place like this, perhaps we should be thinking about investing in a nuclear power Station is a 10 year investment investing in the ideas that we are going to need. If Helen is right, that things are not going to stay as they are, is, I hope, what we're all in the business of in a place like this. Just before we thank our speakers and I'm sorry to those of you I couldn't take, just want to say this is part of a series of events around the national interest that we're organising here. I think you've all got a leaflet with a QR code if you'd like to go onto the mailing list for it. The next one is on the 17th of March, where I will be interviewing Angus Hanton, the author of The Vassal How America Runs Britain. But anyway, thanks very much for coming. And if you thank our panel.

[A]

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[C]

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[A]

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