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- [00:00]
Patient
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- [00:53]
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- [01:01]
Mark Leonard
What happens with the military is very much part and parcel of a wider set of tools which involves weaponizing technology, financial market, energy. All sorts of different things are being kind of weaponized now. So I think we need to have a very different idea, both of security, but also of how you exercise power.
- [01:22]
Yasha Monk
And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. I've been spending some time in Europe for the last days and weeks and I've had really interesting conversations here about the state of the continent. Europe, I think is in a deep state of disorientation at the moment. It is starting to understand that the fundamental model that it has followed for a lot of the post war order doesn't work anymore. That it can't rely on the United States to the extent that it did, that its belief in international law and the liberal international order is belied by the realities of how power is exercised and wielded in the world and at the same time little action seems to follow a lot of that. I think Europe is starting to understand that it needs to rethink its model. It's really not clear to me that it has an idea of how to do that or how to actually act on those realizations in any concrete way. And so I invited onto the podcast the Natural Person to talk about this with. Mark Leonard is the founder as well as the Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and his latest book is called Surviving Chaos, Geopolitics when the Rules Fail. I think it was a really productive conversation about whether the kind of architectural mode which Europeans and some personal Americans had in terms of thinking about geopolitics is still helpful, or whether we have to learn something from the Chinese approach, but that is a little bit more case by case, but it's a little bit more what Mark calls artisanal. We also talked about what it means to give up on universalist ambitions around the world without giving up on commitment to universal liberal values in your own societies and in how you perceive the world. And then finally, for the last part of the conversation, we talked about whether Europe is actually living up to all of these ambitions, whether Europe is actually doing what it needs to protect itself against countries like Russia and to make sure that it can play a role in this deeply changed world. We also talk about what Europe's approach to its long term relationship with the United States should be, whether it might want to take a less sentimental approach to America, which might paradoxically allow to continue to cooperate with the United States much more. To listen to that part of the conversation to support this podcast, please become a paying subscriber, Please go to writingtashamon.com. Mark Leonard, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:00]
Mark Leonard
It's a huge joy to be with you.
- [04:02]
Yasha Monk
I really look forward to this conversation. I look forward to talking about your new book. We just spent a few days together in Vienna at the annual meeting of the European Council on Foreign Relations. How is Europe's situation in the world looking right now?
- [04:20]
Mark Leonard
It's looking pretty bleak. You both have a real sense of jeopardy you've had for a few years now. The full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has brought physical military conflict back to the continent. You had on top of that a big shift in relations with China. So people have gone from an age of optimism about their economic relations with China to a fear of de industrialization as Chinese excess capacity floods European markets and Germans are worried that Baden Wurtenberg is going to turn into Detroit. And then on top of that you have the United States, the protector of first resort for the last few decades that is becoming at best disengaged from European security and at worst predatory power. And we're seeing also a big divergence between the ways that Europeans look at the world, whether it's on Ukraine and Russia, whether it's on Iran and the strengths of Hormuz from American priorities. And Europeans are feeling both in a very uncertain state but also very alone. And that is leading to quite Profound changes in European politics, in European identity. And we've been going from a peace process, Europe as a peace project, to see Europe as more of a war project for the last few years. And that's only becoming more and more pronounced. And there's also, in many, many countries, this is leading to a big fear of the far right, which is looming over the domestic politics of many of the biggest countries. So whether it's the danger of Hasan blement in France, the alternative for Germany in Germany, or reform in London, that kind of adds to a sense of insecurity. It's both a symptom and a product and a kind of accelerator of insecurity.
- [06:26]
Yasha Monk
One way of thinking about this is that Europe, and perhaps particularly certain nations within Europe, like Germany, had built the entire post war model on a certain set of assumptions that have proven to be wrong. One formulation of this about Germany is by Constanze Stelzenmuller, who said something like, germany used to outsource its security to the United States, its energy needs to Russia and its markets, its demand for goods to China. And each part of that model has now collapsed. You could obviously talk in this context about, as you have the fracture in transatlantic relationships, about how far Europe is behind on some of the technologies of the future, including things like electric cars, but also things like artificial intelligence. My hunch is that around 2016, Europe was really in denial about the ways in which its model was running out. They thought they could somehow continue to deal with Putin without that much disruption. He was a nuisance, but he was a nuisance that they could contain. They thought that Trump would somehow be impeached or go away and America would go back more or less to how it was. And so it's just a matter of getting through these four years, or perhaps we get lucky only for two years until America kind of goes back to normal. This time around, with Trump's reelection and the second China shock which is playing out in Europe, and the invasion, the full scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I feel like Europeans have started to realize that that was a piece of wishful thinking. But I guess I'm a little bit skeptical about how deep that insight goes. Everybody says it, everybody sort of knows it, but it's not clear to me that there's a real recognition that there's going to have to be fundamental change in how Europeans govern their own societies and rule the world if they want to be safe, prosperous, and perhaps even competitive in this new kind of world. Am I being too skeptical here, Mark?
- [08:21]
Mark Leonard
No, I Think you're absolutely right. I mean, in a way that's what my book is trying to do. Because I think we're in a situation now where rhetorically people talk about a rupture, but then the next thing they do is to behave as if we could preserve the status quo ante, maybe without the United States. And in a sense that's what Mark Carney was doing when he made that speech in Davos, was to talk about this rupture and then to put forward this illusion that middle powers could come together and preserve the rules based order as if that was remotely an option. The idea that Europeans are going to be able to work with the Canadians and South Koreans and the Japanese to keep the World Trade Organization alive, to open the Straits of Hormuz, to stop the war in Ukraine, it's obviously a chimera. And I think what we're doing, having to very slowly come to terms with is that the entire edifice around which our economic policy, our security policy, our ideas of how relationships should work with different countries is now been overtaken by events. And we need to start from ground zero and work out how to survive in a world where there are, there's very little exogenous order. And you know, the only order we'll have is the order that we can create for ourselves. And that won't be a global order because we don't have the power to determine what happens on the global stage. But it doesn't mean that you necessarily have to give up on, on all of your values and your goals and the big advances which have been made within Europe and Europeans, still very prosperous countries with a lot of capacity. But it does mean behaving and acting in a total different way. And that is something that almost nobody has really managed to tackle in its entirety. So you see different things happening. Germany spending much more on defense. Finland and Sweden join NATO. But that sort of comprehensive rethinking of who we are and how we work together and what the world around us is going to look like, that is very, very painful. And I think for Germany it's the most painful country because the whole constitution of post war German identity was bound up in this global order, is bound up with an idea of returning to the West. So the fact that America has changed creates a massive crisis, not just for German security, but also for German identity.
- [11:02]
Yasha Monk
Yeah, in the German case, my sense is that Germany created, stumbled into, was forced to adopt some mixture of all three of those things. A model that worked quite astonishingly well in the post war Period. Germany was in many ways the most successful European country from 1950 until a decade or so ago. It had its moments of crisis and of challenge, including the very difficult process of reunification. But by and large, it was kind of the European mustekind, the example of how things go right in Europe. And a lot of institutions ended up being quite influential. European central bank is based on the German central bank and all of those kinds of things. And so I think what the German political elites learned and intellectual elites learned is that the only responsible thing to do is to support and mildly reform and sometimes renovate, but really not fundamentally challenge or rethink the model that we inherited in the kind of 1945-1955 moment. And by and large, that served the country very well for 65, 70 years. And the problem now is that we are at a moment in which we really have to radically rethink the model. And it's not just that it's genuinely hard to think about what that model might be. I mean, it's a really tough intellectual challenge with lots of constraints. But it's just that nothing in Germany's political intellectual culture has predisposed its leaders to actually dealing with that. Because everything we've learned for the last 70 years precisely not to rethink the model. And I think that's a particular challenge. There's versions of it in other European countries. The way you put that in the book about Europe as a whole, is there a distinction between architects and artisans? What do you mean by that distinction? How can that help us think through this moment?
- [13:03]
Mark Leonard
So, yeah, the backdrop, in my mind, is that we're going for a period of what I call unorder, which is different from disorder, because if you have disorder, there's a broad agreement on what order looks like. An order basically has two components. It's got a balance of power which can uphold certain relationships, and a series of rules which people are willing to be bound by. So you have a common framework for discussing things. And what I think we're. And you know, order is never perfect. So you have disorder with people breaking the rules. Where I think we're in a different state now is not that people are breaking the rules, but that the rules have become quite irrelevant to a lot of the big actors in the world. So if you were sitting in the Pentagon before the war against Iran, you know, the idea of legality or not was just not part of your calculus in the way that it was, say, during the Iraq war. And when it came to the Iranian response, it was similarly Absent, you know, they, they were as happy attacking countries that were attacking them, like Israel, as countries that had nothing to do with the war at all, like Oman and Qatar, just because they were within the range of their, of their missiles and drones. So there is a sense that we sort of basically overtaken those rules around which a lot of our international politics was centered. And when it comes to thinking about the future, you have these two tendencies which I think are the most. I think that's the biggest dividing line. So the architects are basically people who think, start to imagine how the world should be organized from first principles. They develop blueprints and grand plans which can then be anchored in institutions and laws and norms. And the model for that is the creation of the post war world, the Bretton woods system. Dean Acheson's memoir was called Present at the Creation, which is a very architectural way of formulating tickets. But then you have a kind of big enlarged.
- [15:13]
Yasha Monk
It's even more theological than architectural, isn't it? I mean, creation is nearly biblical.
- [15:17]
Mark Leonard
It is biblical. But I think the ways that they thought about it was quite architectural. And you know, you have a set of institutions and structures and they all make sense and they will create from scratch. You know, it was. Whereas. And I think part of that was
- [15:37]
Yasha Monk
a kind of assumption of permanence. Right. I mean, it's not build a building, I guess, you know, it might come down eventually. Right. But you're, you're ideally building for centuries. And especially if you're sort of doing the blueprint for a new city or something like that, you're really thinking, this is a city that I'm shaping for this really long period of time. And that certainly, I think was a lot of the idea of a post war, whatever was setting in place these institutions that should be able to endure for the indefinite future.
- [16:07]
Mark Leonard
Absolutely. And it was, it was underpinned by a balance of power in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the US that controlled a vast amount of the global economy and military power and other kinds of things. And then you have a moment of rebuilding at the end of the Cold War where Europeans get a bit more involved in it and you have a whole wave of new institutions being built. The World Trade Organization, the Kyoto climate measures, the International Criminal Court. There's a sort of new wave of institutions. But it's the same sort of basic idea that you, you try and imagine what the perfect world looks like and then you build a set of institutions from scratch which, which govern it. Another way of thinking about how you conduct Yourself in global affairs, you know, is what I call the artisan. So the artisan, it doesn't try and build things from scratch, but adapt to what is going on in the world anyway. You don't start with an ideal blueprint, but you try and work out how you can reuse old objects, repair things, reinvent things, try things out, and if they don't work, you get rid of them. So it's a much more improvisation, things more like, you know, DIY or bricolage rather than grand planning. And the model for that, I think is China, which comes back to the global primetime in a system that it didn't create and is very happy to use existing institutions to its own end. So it gets involved in the World Trade Organization and the imf, but doesn't necessarily use it in exactly the way that it was intended for by its original artisans, doesn't necessarily buy into the purpose for it, but is happy to repurpose it and to try and work out how it can work, but then at the same time tries out new stuff. It creates things like the Shanghai Corporation organization or the BRICs and tries that out for a little bit, changes the membership, messes around with that. It also builds its own arrangements like the Belt and Road Initiative and sets up things with different parts of the world. But what it's not trying to do is to create a new global architecture where it's delivering security and global public goods in the way that the United States did at the end of the Second World War and the way that Europeans are imagining re orgitering the world at the end of the Cold War. And it's much more flexible. It's trying to work out how China can benefit from where the world is going anyway, rather than trying to model a perfect world and then coerce people into, into that kind of world. And you can see if you look at America, Chinese policy for the last few couple of decades, it's basically been trying to position itself to deal with the disorder and chaos created by others, to benefit from that rather than creating order. So they tried to work out how they could benefit from America's wars in the Middle East. They tried to make sure that they're in the right place. If, you know, after the full scale invasion of Ukraine, they don't really try and deal with that, but they work out they can have a better relationship with Russia and get cheaper oil and gas out of it and get Russia more dependent on China, whilst simultaneously talking to the global south and talking about Western hypocrisy on this and how, et cetera. It's a very different sort of approach. And you can then see it also in different areas of policy. If you look at at Chinese economic policy, the Americans talked about decoupling and de risking, but actually was Xi Jinping with his ideas of dual circulation that really thought about how do you develop an autonomous economic system where you are not subject to pressure from elsewhere and you build up other people's dependence on you. And he has this idea of dual circulation where you separate the internal economy, which is called internal circulation, and that's meant to be more self sufficient, and then external circulation, which is about your relationships with the rest of the world, where you think about how do you get access to raw materials or the things that you want, but also how do you make people more dependent on you. And you see that when it comes to technology policy. With made in China 2025, we'll go
- [20:43]
Yasha Monk
into some more of the details. I want to get to the broader themes and I want to understand the extent to which this is challenging a kind of universalism and so on. But before we get there, there is a kind of bearish case in China as well, right? I mean, you could look at China and say it doesn't have a lot of friends in the world, right? I mean, one major power on its borders that it is more or less friendly with is Russia. But the Russian Chinese relationship has always been complex historically. There's always been moments of cooperation, but also deep moments of tension. And it's not clear to me that Putin fully trusts Xi Jinping and we will see how long that relationship can endure. The other uneasy alliance that China has with a country on its borders is with North Korea. But again, I don't know whether if you wake Xi Jinping up at 3am he really thinks that Kim Jong Un is a wonderful, reliable ally who he's infused to be blood brothers with. I think that even, you know, the government, Beijing has certain concerns about the nature of the regime in Pyongyang. And other than that, you know, it has deep conflicts and skirmishes with just about every country on its borders or in its periphery, from Japan to India and beyond, you know, in the world. The relative standing of China has recently improved in public opinions, in part because the United States under Donald Trump is so toxically unpopular globally. But there's also quite a lot of quite deep skepticism about China. And that is only going to grow as China rises in prominence and becomes more of a global player. A number of countries in Africa and elsewhere are now quite economically dependent on China, but that's also leading to a lot of anti Chinese sentiment in those countries, in part because some of the belt and road initiatives which were really meant to portray China as a very friendly investor nation and so on, ended up with terms that often were quite difficult for those countries. And as the infrastructure products and always reaping the rewards, the benefits that were promised and the repayment terms are coming due, there's a lot of anger about China in those countries, even internally. Of course, China, along with genuine and big strengths and it is a very impressive place in its development over the last decades, also has quite some quite deep challenges, from the fact that housing is very difficult to afford for even the elite university graduates in Shanghai and Beijing, to the fact that there's a vast army of underemployed gig workers who continue to have very bad standards of living and who often are excluded from local welfare states and so on and so forth. So just to say there's a way of making this kind of Chinese bricollage appear very, very attractive. But there is also a bear case about it. Is there a danger that some of the advantages that Europe has historically had that they've been perceived as very principled, rule bound partners who perhaps are a little bit stodgy, who perhaps can't act very fast, but on whom you can actually rely, whom you can have long term partnerships? Which helped explain why despite the colonial history, or in the case of Germany, despite its Nazi history, a lot of European countries actually are quite popular around the world. Is there a risk that sort of emulating the Chinese bricolage approach might undermine what have historically been Europe's strengths in the world?
- [24:15]
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- [24:45]
Mark Leonard
So firstly, on the part of China, that's absolutely well taken. And my purpose here is not to romanticize China. I've been going back and forth to China dozens of times for the last 25 years. And you know you could fill an entire year's worth of episodes of your podcast with Chinese problems, whether it's economic problems, the social problems, mistakes in Chinese foreign policy as well. But my feeling though is that people often, when they look at Chinese success, think that it has a lot to do with the Chinese regime type and the fact that you have this authoritarian power that can do whatever it wants. And people often talk about how the Chinese are like engineers and the Americans and lawyers and make those sorts of distinctions. I think that maybe had an episode
- [25:41]
Yasha Monk
of this podcast with the author of a book that argues this a few months ago.
- [25:45]
Mark Leonard
Exactly. It's a very good book. But I've got a slightly different take on China from Dun Wang in that I think actually maybe the essence of Chinese success is less to do with regime type and is more to do with this experimental mindset. And in many ways Xi Jinping has gone against it. He's definitely a much more repressive internal society than it was beforehand. When I first started going to China, you had very, very lively public debates between intellectuals which are, you know, much less part of the Chinese public sphere now than it was beforehand. But there is still, and some of it's to do with the Chinese size, but some of it's just to do with the way that they think about things. A much more improvisational way of, of governing where there's a lot of internal competition between different parts of the Chinese system. You have this sort of complicated relationship with different lay government and the party playing a kind of weird role. And there is actually something which is very, very interestingly adaptive about the way that they're working. And we sometimes miss that, particularly as Westerners because their language is often very architectural. There's big fuss about their five year plans every now and again. And we think these five year plans are like Soviet five year plans with tractor production targets and very, very detailed blueprints for what's going on where fact, actually they're much more poetic, is often a kind of metaphor for, you know, the party will set a broad direction and then lots of weird stuff gets tried out. There's a lot of waste and it doesn't make any sense. You know, it's not a detailed plan as would be developed by the Pentagon or by a Western civil civil service or by Soviet planners.
- [27:45]
Yasha Monk
And, and I don't know if you have that article in mind, but there was a very interesting article recently, sort of trying to undermine the Western perception of how electric cars became such a dominant industry in China. And the simplistic vision of this is that this is top down industrial policy decided in Beijing tremendous Public subsidies. It's unclear just how many public subsidies. And that's what created this incredible capacity to build electric cars more effectively, more efficiently, more cheaply, often at higher quality at this point than American cars and certainly most European cars. The actual story that the authors of this article I forgot about seem to be arguing is that there's a lot more local competition, improvisation, that there's sort of a broad marching route set by Beijing, but that it's actually then in particular a competition of different cities that really try to attract industry and get forward and so on, that experiment in different ways with local ecosystem and local subsidies that has created this kind of explosion in that manufacturing capacity of electric cars. And that's sort of, I think, one concrete instant of this. Let me get back to a broader theme.
- [29:00]
Mark Leonard
Can I just say, on the Europe. No, but your point on Europe. So basically you were saying there's a danger of us losing the things which people value us for. But my kind of feeling actually is that in a way we've slightly lost our way as Europeans because we basically, you know, obviously since the French Revolution and the Enlightenment have got these sort of universalist ideas. But if you, you. At the same time, our universalism wasn't something that was developed as a result of universal consent and discussions with people around the world. We basically came up with a bunch of ideas which were hard won within our own countries and our social systems. And then we universalized them, often because of, because of empire, because of the reach of Western capital. We were able to spread them to different places. And it was often quite unilateral that this universalism. And then we helped people up to standards that we had developed ourselves and saw their level of civilization in terms of how far they were able to meet the standards that we were asserting. And some of these standards are things which were very recent. So like a very interesting model for me is what happened during the World cup when it was in Qatar, where Qatar was behaving towards gay and lesbian people and other people in exactly the same way that most European countries did until 10 or 15 years ago. And then all of a sudden we sort of decided that it was an evil country and we were lecturing them about and saying that people should boycott the World cup and doing all sorts of things like that, rather than having the humility to both see how rapidly a lot of these rights and norms have been developed in our own societies and to, to think that there might be, you know, political processes in other countries. And I think that's part of the challenge with our universalism is that it's something that we assert. It sometimes maps onto indigenous desires that people have. The fact that China's emerging, even if it's not as attractive as the US or as Europe, the fact that it exists gives them a choice and an alternative. And it's that alternative which allows them to have kind of sovereignty. And that's what. What was very interesting about the Chinese approach as well. Instead, they kind of realized they would never have as many allies as the United States of America. So they therefore tried to turn that weakness into a strength and said, oh, alliances is very old school. That's kind of Cold War thinking. We want to be in a world where people aren't forced to choose between different blocks, but where they can determine their own future. So they tried to make themselves the friends of sovereignty. Which is more convincing if you're not a direct neighbor of China, where China is trying to grab some of your territory, like the Philippines or, or Vietnam. But it is an interesting part, another sign of this kind of adaptability which they have.
- [32:12]
Yasha Monk
So I'm torn here because there's some things that you're saying that I agree with and then others that I think I disagree with. So I certainly think that there is a European tendency to want to lecture the world. And part of the tendency to want to lecture the world comes from the fact that we can't really do much else in the world. There's a particular form of this in a certain kind of anti Americanism that has been quite traditional in Europe for a long time, where it's sort of you Americans who are so militaristic and with your guns and cowboy hats and so on. We have a wonderful pacifistic Europeans. And of course, the condition of possibility of that pacifist Europe was that we very happily subsisted under the American security guarantee and nuclear umbrella and relied on the US army to create that peace. And now that we suddenly realize that we may not be able to rely on a peacemaker or security guarantor in Washington, D.C. we're rightly investing a lot more into the military in Europe and perhaps are trying to become a little bit less pacifist. And certainly I think that there's all kinds of hypocrisies and injustices in European societies that should make us a little bit more skeptical about sitting in easy judgment of everywhere else in the world. There's an interesting particular German part of this, where Germans are the least patriotic Europeans and among the least patriotic people in the world. At least those two until recently, if you say, are you proud to be German? Germans are much less likely to say yes than most citizens of other nations. But if you say, do you think the world would be better if everybody lived like you do in Germany? Germans say yes, overwhelmingly. So it's sort of the patriotism and the chauvinism takes a slightly different form now. At the same time, I think it's important not to go too far, right? I mean, Carter has a penal code that in principle criminalizes sex outside of marriage with penalties up to the death penalty, and that includes all homosexual sex. Since obviously gay marriage is not recognized in Qatar. That's rarely applied. But there are genuine prison sentences. It has relatively recent law passed a few decades ago in 2004, criminalizing leading, instigating or seducing a man to commit sodomy with up to three years in prison. I mean, that's not where Europe was 10 years ago. That's a more extreme version of where some English laws, when you go back to Oscar Wilde, were 100 something years ago. But I do think that there is a kind of gap between those two things. But the thing that I actually want to ask you about is about how to formulate this critique of universalism in a way that captures the moral problems with Europe trying to lecture others and just the absurdity of Europe lecturing others when it doesn't have any power to impose those laws, when going around telling India or China how they should do things just is going to be ineffective, whether or not we would want to do it if it could be effective. And I think that we really should relearn on that front. But that doesn't to me mean that we need to abandon universalism or liberalism as a way of thinking about what societies are just and treat the citizens in the right ways, what model for our own societies should be. So I guess how far should we take this critique of universal liberalism? Is this just sort of we shouldn't be going around thinking we're the architects of the world and our goal is to make sure that people in Afghanistan separate the trash in the good universalist ways that Germans in Heidelberg have done for the last 30 years, which signed me up to that recognition? Or is it sort of a deeper questioning of political liberalism or a certain kind of universalist outlook in terms of helping us understand who we are, how we want to govern our societies, and how to think morally about the world.
- [36:14]
Mark Leonard
So I think we're in a very. Sounds like we're in a very similar place, actually. So I'm not questioning the validity of a lot of the freedoms and the ideas and the moral codes that have been developed in European societies. You know, we're both Jews. My family were German Jews, and, you know, I have nothing. But I think that what's happened within Europe and the creation of the freedoms that we have is. Is a kind of miracle and give us an option, you know, a set of perspectives which, in our lives, which are unthinkable for our ancestors. And. And I think they're very fragile, and I think that we have to fight for these rights and we have to make sure that we don't go backwards in a lot of these different dimensions. But at the same time, I think we need to move from seeing the world as a kind of unitary system which was going to be melded around European ideals, to. Towards seeing what we've managed to do in Europe as quite exceptional and fragile and put a lot of our energy into preserving that. I think there's a kind of huge debate and discussion going on about the future of our politics in different places. We're much more conscious both of the positive aspects of liberalism, but also the negative aspects, and that is leading to the rise of the new right in lots of different places. And they're very powerful critiques of some of the side effects of liberalism, not least the sort of economic side effects which you've done lots of amazing podcasts on. And like you, I think we need to take those. Those discussions very, very seriously. But I think increasingly, you know, we're moving towards a world where power is. Is much more widely spread, where this desire to control one's destiny is very, very strong everywhere, and where Europeans might have views about how people should lead their lives everywhere in the world, and we shouldn't run away from them and pretend that we're wrong to be against the death penalty or against stoning people for marital infidelity or whatever other things which offend us as human beings are. But we don't necessarily have the standing in those countries to tell them what to do. And it doesn't mean we shouldn't say these things, but I think we need to conduct ourselves in a way where we have to be clear that we're gonna have to coexist with other ways of organizing societies, that the main people who are going to be fighting for particular rights in different places will be those citizens themselves, rather than outsiders telling them how to do things, and where actually a lot of the freedoms that we've enjoyed over the last few decades in our own societies are under threat, and we should put a lot of our energy into winning the battles around them. But also where, increasingly I think we do have to be left blind to the problems of liberalism within our own societies. And I think what we're seeing now is a much greater awareness of the dark side of liberalism and of globalization. And part of the challenge for our kind of politics, if you want to have of politics, which isn't just about building walls and about going back to ethno nationalism, you need to find ways of bringing everyone in our societies along with the idea of cooperation and find ways of speaking to the losers and other people like that. And that does mean a different kind of politics.
- [40:11]
Yasha Monk
Just a few points of this. I mean, one is that domestically a lot of the time the problem is not actually with liberalism, it's with people who claim to be liberal in some kind of way, but actually impose their values on the rest of society. I think there's a kind of set of people who are very influential because they're hugely over represented in the most educated classes and so on, who actually are quite illiberal, who have real disdain for people who are religious in their societies, who have more traditional communities in certain ways, who don't go to university and move to a big city, but who stay rooted, more local communities, I think there is a lot of looking down on them. And that is not actually a liberal attitude for it sometimes sort of masquerades as that. I think in terms of our general outlook on the world, we agree. I mean, to put it more starkly, you might disagree with that. You know, if I could flip a button and make sure that Afghanistan is, you know, ruled more or less the way that France or Germany is, and that women there have a right to go to school and to university and to make their own decisions in life. Of course I would. I mean, I wouldn't hesitate one moment, but I think the last 20, 30 years have demonstrated amply that trying to impose that from outside is incredibly difficult and often counterproductive and can involve a lot of suffering along the way. And that button just doesn't exist. Right. So I think we need to sort of, I mean, people sort of have trouble distinguishing between either you think we should do it in principle and therefore we should do it in practice, or if you think that it's a bad idea to do it in practice, we should claim that, you know, Afghan culture is just as fair to people living there as cultures elsewhere. And, you know, Afghan women have somehow chosen to live in the way they did, even if all indications are that they haven't. Right. And I think we need to be able to live with the discomfort of some amount of impotence. Right. But of course, if we could easily do something without enormous wars and suffering, et cetera, for people in Afghanistan to be able to live self determined life and actually recognize the freedoms of individuals there and give equal rights to women and so on, we absolutely should just that is not the world we live in and we have to be clear eyed about that. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of A Good Fight. Well, this is a great tour de force so far in which we really think through some of the high level concepts about geopolitics in the 21st century and what position that puts Europe in. In the last part of the conversation we make this much more concrete. Is Europe actually succeeding in remodeling itself? What kind of camps does Europe fall into in its thinking about the future of relationship with the United States? And what should the nature of relationship between Europe and the United States be? Is there a way to make it less sentimental, but perhaps, perhaps more enduring than it is at the moment to listen to that part of the conversation? To support the podcast, to make it possible for us to do what we do here, Please go to writing.yashamonk.com writing.yashamon.com and become a paying subscriber.
- [43:25]
Mark Leonard
Sam.