Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Welcome to today’s roundtable. I’m Leslie Vinjamuri. I direct the US and America’s Programme here at Chatham House. It is wonderful to be chairing this particular discussion, with two of my colleagues, even though Mark Leonard is not at the European Council Foreign Relations, I feel like he is a colleague, certainly in the greater sphere of intellectual debate that takes place here in London and far beyond and of course, Hans Kundnani.
The title of today’s roundtable, The Cost of Global Integration is really a way of entering into some age-old debates. Those of you are who are UK and London based and certainly those of – anybody who studied international affairs and especially international relations in Great Britain undoubtedly began, not only with the E H Carr, but with Norman Angell’s thesis that the costs of war were so unbearably high that nobody would even conceive of taking the risk and that was, of course, before the First World War, and even before the onset of the creation of Chatham House, just over 100 years ago.
We are on the record today and we are here because Mark Leonard, who is Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, his work and his writing, and his speaking is very well-known to you, his – I believe third book, Mark was recently published a few months ago, The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict and clearly, Mark has sort of opened up a very important debate about connectivity and integration and globalisation, and whether it fosters peace, or conflict, or competition, or all of these things. And the notion of unpeace is very interesting and it’s a really rich and tremendously ambition book, I would say as well, and I’m really – will be fascinated to listen to this discussion.
Hans Kundnani is, of course, well-known to everybody here at Chatham House. Hans directs our Europe Programme. He is a well-known author. His most recent book was the Paradox of German Power, so we have two Europeanists talking about globalism, peace and interdependence. I did note, Mark, that you know, your first book I think was, Why Europe Will Run the 2021st Century. I have to say, I have to mention that ‘cause I have my own views on that, but it’s there as background for those of us who will be listening to you today.
We’re going to start with Mark and then come to Hans and I think we will take a considerable moment of time, all things being relative, for Mark to really engage with us on this larger question and then we’ll turn it over to Hans to do the same. And then we will have – we’ll have some time, of course, for questions, so please do be prepared to ask your questions. But with that said, Mark, let’s turn it over to you.
Mark Leonard
Thank you so much, Leslie. It’s a huge pleasure to be having this discussion with you and Hans and it’s wonderful to be hosted, even if it’s virtually, by Chatham House. And my sort of starting point here is that, even as we are starting getting used to COVID and to having these sorts of discussions online, we may be on the cusp of a new silent pandemic, which is going to change our world. Like COVID-19, it’s spreading across the planet exponentially, it’s exploiting cracks in our network world, it’s constantly mutating to evade our defences. But unlike the coronavirus, which is a biological force that affects all of mankind, what we are having to come to terms with now is a set of deliberate, but toxic behaviours that are multiplying like a virus, and that’s really what my book’s about.
I’m arguing that the connections between people and countries are becoming weapons, and if you just look at the news from the last few months, you can see dozens of examples of this happening. We might as well start with COVID because that is the number one story, which we’ve all been living through for the last 18 months. You’d have thought that something like this would have brought the world together to try and come up with ways of killing the disease, but instead, rather than working together to increase global supplies of vaccines, we’ve seen masked diplomacy in vaccine nationalism, 98 countries imposed export restrictions on PPE and medicines, and we’ve seen lots of people turning COVID into a currency of power rather than it being a cause for global co-operation.
When it comes to trade and finance, we’re seeing that sanctions are becoming a weapon of first resort. We’ve had lots of news recently about all the sanctions that we’re going to threaten the Russians with to stop them from invading Ukraine, but Russia has also been sanctioning countries, been blocking off gas supplies to Moldova and other countries. China has been targeting Lithuania and just last year, the US listed over 800 entities on its Sanction Lists.
Technology, it was also something that was going to bring the world together, but it’s increasingly something which is splitting the world up. We’re seeing lots of fights over things like 5G and Huawei. Lots of talk of decoupling indigenous innovation, every country introducing its Entities Lists, which is sort of banning components from other countries from its supply chains, and this quest for technological autonomy seems to be balkanising the world and balkanising the very idea of knowledge.
And even migration, the free movement of people has been turned into a weapon. We’ve most recently seen the Belarusian Dictator Alexander Lukashenko encouraging migrants to come from Syria and Iraq, to Minsk, not their normal destination and then trying to funnel them into Poland and Lithuania to put pressure on those countries. Not a particularly original tactic. If you look back at the last few decades, over 75 instances of people weaponizing migration in that way to achieve economic, political, and security goals.
If you take all of these things together, and I could have mentioned lots of other stories of, you know, electoral interference or, you know, information warfare, but if you look at these different things, whether it’s Chinese bullying, whether it’s European sanctions, whether it’s American tech regulation, Belarusian blackmail, what they have in common is that they’re not random accidents, like an asteroid falling from the sky, but new types of political violence. Each is a weapon, which has perfectly evolved to exploit a weakness in our connective world
Carl von Clausewitz famously called war, “The continuation of politics by other means,” but in a nuclear age, the price of war is unfathomable and that’s why these types of connectivity conflicts are becoming the other means of global politics. Countries waging conflicts with each other by manipulating the things that link them together and the kind of central metaphor I use in my book is that geopolitics has become like a loveless marriage where the couple can’t stand each other’s company, but are unable to get divorced.
I kind of – that’s the sort of core theme of the book. I’m not going to have time to go into all of it, but maybe in the sort of five minutes I’ve got left, I might look at five, sort of, core points that I make, which might set up the discussion. And essentially, my background is, that I was brought up as an internationalist who thought that somehow binding nations and people together would create peace and make war expensive, as you’ve kind of argued. But instead, I’ve come to the conclusion that everything that – that all the things that knit the world together are also driving it apart and this is quite a shocking idea for many Europeans. But I’ll just talk about a few elements to it.
The first is, that it is connectivity itself which seems to give people a motive for conflict. It puts its thumb on the scale between competition and conflict in favour of competition. Why? Partly because its digital connectivity seems to be leading to polarisation in our societies and splitting us more into likeminded groups, which put identity at the heart of politics. It’s creating an epidemic of envy as people no longer simply compare themselves to their neighbours or their parents, but to the most privileged people across the world. In fact, sometimes fictionalised images of the most privileged people across the world, so our own experience can only fall short. And you also see that, not just at the level of individuals, but at governments.
If you look at COVID, the daily charts where you see different countries pitted against each other creates this competitive ethos. But also, connectivity leads to a loss of control because our affairs are so entwined with others that decisions, in distant parts of the world, seem to affect our own affairs. And that’s why the light motif of our politics everywhere is about taking back control. So that’s the sort of, first basket. It gives people a motive for conflict and leads, you know, from the level of individual right up to the planetary level, with people pushing back against interdependence, trying to take back control, seeing increasing conflict between different identity groups.
Secondly, it gives people an opportunity for conflict. During the Cold War, there was almost no connections between the free world and the Soviet Union, and the main way that you could fight each other was to have a nuclear arms race or through proxy conflicts on the side, and there were no, kind of, obvious ways of competing with each other. But what connectivity conflicts does is, it massively lowers the cost of conflict and allows you to find ways of competing with each other and undermining each other which fall short of conventional war. And that’s where this title, The Age of Unpeace comes from, because you know, seen in conventional terms, we live in a golden age of great power peace ‘cause almost no-one gets killed in war every year. Many more people commit suicide than die in our conflict at the moment; less than 70,00, on average, have died in the last ten years. But at the same time, below that kind of radar of conventional war, you have huge amounts of violence going on in the world, which I’ll talk about in my third point. But I kind of argue that, the age of Tolstoy is now over. We don’t have periods of war and then periods of peace. What you have is continual low-level conflict between different players, played out through these connectivity conflicts, and I think the best way of describing that is a term which cyberpeople have rehabilitated from Anglo-Saxon, which is ‘unpeace’.
The third point is that connectivity, as well as giving us a motive for conflict and an opportunity for conflict, has created this new arsenal of weapons. I’ve mentioned some of these things earlier on and I talked about this idea of the loveless marriage and, just as in a marriage, the things which bring the couple together in the good times become the means that they use to hurt each other in the bad times. So, in the marriage, it’s about who gets custody of the pet dog, the family home, the kids. In geopolitics, it’s about how we manipulate our supply chains, the internet, migration, infrastructure, trade, all the different points of contact we have together.
My fourth point is that connectivity creates new rules of power. We learnt from Thomas Friedman that globalisation makes the world flat, turns out that’s total nonsense. What globalisation does is, it creates this very, kind of, mountainous network world where some people are more connected than others. And it’s the asymmetries in the system, which give people a chance to manipulate each other. People have been, you know, using sanctions at least since the Peloponnesian War, so there’s nothing new about connectivity conflict. But what is new, is the hidden wiring of this hyper, interconnected world, which creates lots of opportunities to take advantage of network effects and sanctions blockades, PR campaigns can take on a viral quality and deadliness that didn’t exist before our world was defined by networks. And in that world, we’re going to see the big clashes between great powers playing out around these different ideas that people have about connectivity.
In the book, I kind of argue that we’re not entering a new bipolar age between China and America, but instead, a full world order where you have three great networks of connectivity: China, the United States, the European Union all have quite different ideas about connectivity and about power, and we can go more into that into the discussion. And all around them, a fourth world of countries that are both exploiting cracks in the system in a tactical way like Russia and Turkey and Belarus and other players, but also, trying to avoid being bound into the three systems of the empires of connectivity.
Where I’d like to end, ‘cause I started this book in quite a bleak place after – in 2016, I was disappointed by the election of Trump, and the Brexit campaign, which led me to re-think a lot of my prior beliefs about connectivity. But I sort of tried to end in a more hopeful place. I’m not going to have time to go into the hopeful agenda that comes out of this, but maybe just end by kind of arguing, where I got to, in terms of thinking about what we could do about it.
When I first started writing the book, I thought I was going to write a passionate plea for a more open world and find an architecture for a more united planet. But the deeper I delved, the more I became aware that the good and bad features of connectivity are inextricably entwined and that it’s impossible to untangle them without destroying many of the biggest advances in our civilisation. So, rather than eradicating connectivity’s dark side with a grand design, what we need are strategies for shaping and surviving this new reality. Rather than ending connectivity we need to devise rules and norms that take the sting out of it, that disarm it and I kind of argue that, if the Cold War was eased by arms control, the equivalent of our age is about disarming connectivity, and that’s why I argue in my book that, what we need are not new Architects, but rather Therapists to help us live together. And I set out a five-step programme of therapy for our connected world, to allow us to survive the age of unpeace.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Mark, thank you. There’s so much in there. I just want to add one qualifier. I know that whenever anybody quotes the number of deaths in conflict it’s just incredibly complicated and so I’m guessing you’re thinking about battle related deaths in international conflict. ‘Cause we all know, once you start talking about things like Syria, you’re way over the scale of the 70 odd thousand that you quoted, so it’s sort of a – it’s a particular measure. But nonetheless, you know, on that one dimension, it is a very stark finding, certainly in the data, such as we know it. But very complex. But, you know, your broader kind of thesis is fascinating.
There’s so much to say. I will say a few things, but I’ll wait until Hans has had his opportunity and then I’ll say a few things and open it up to the audience. Hans.
Hans Kundnani
Thanks, Leslie. It’s so nice to have this chance to talk with you both about Mark’s book because I’ve been sort of thinking about a lot of the same issues, you know, over the last decade or so, and especially since 2016, which Mark mentioned there at the end. It was a, sort of, shock for me too. And a lot of the thinking I’ve done about these issues has been, sort of, you know, in part with Mark and influenced by Mark, but I have, I think, reached some different conclusions, especially in the last five years, and so what I’ll try and do is explain why. And I’ll do this in two parts, basically.
So, I’ll start by saying something about, something in general about interdependence and the relationship between interdependence or what Mark calls, connectivity and conflict. And then secondly, I’ll say something about the EU, which it does almost seem to me a kind of blind-spot in Mark’s analysis, so I’ll say something about that.
So, let me start with interdependence and conflict. So, I guess my first, sort of, question really, is that – Mark’s – you seem to use three terms: connectivity, interdependence, and globalisation almost interchangeably, and we could throw in, by the way, integration, as well, which you don’t use so much, but is a title for this discussion today. And it doesn’t seem to me that you, sort of, really define them, so the closest you come, I think is that you talk about – you say, “Globalisation is the connectivity of people, markets, technology and ideas,” you know, which still, for me, doesn’t quite underst – doesn’t really explain what connectivity is, and so, I don’t understand why you use that term, instead of the more usual term, ‘interdependence’. It may be because you’re, I think, slightly more interested in the tech part of this story than the economic part of the story, but I’d love to understand that a bit more clearly, what – whether these terms are just interchangeable or whether you understand them as being distinct from each other.
And related to that, I don’t quite understand what the weaponization of interdependence is. I know it’s not just you, Mark, that uses this term and lots of other people use this now, but I don’t really understand what that is. As opposed – you know, what is weaponization of interdependence as opposed to just, you know, pursuing your national interests or regional interests, in the case of the EU, under conditions of interdependence? What makes it weaponization? It feels to me quite an emotive term and I feel as if, in some of the debates, what this often amounts to is that other powers weaponize interdependence, but when we do it, depending on who that ‘we’ is, it’s something else. So, you know, I think for the EU, it’s often, you know, being a normative power or a regulatory superpower or it’s just conditionality or defending European sovereignty or something else, but not weaponizing interdependence.
The way that I think about this whole story of interdependence is, you know, essentially the – you know, based on the work of Dani Rodrik and in particular this sort of idea that, you know, we’ve gone from a, sort of, moderate form of globalisation during the Cold War, to something called hyper-globalisation, which is a much more extreme form of globalisation, basically in the post-Cold War period. And the reason that I find that a helpful way to think about it is because I think it allows us – it allows us to – it helps us to avoid binary thinking about globalisation. In other words, you either have it or you don’t, as if it’s a black and white thing. And it helps us to think about globalisation in a much more precise way and in particular, I think it, you know, allows you to see that there are different degrees of globalisation and those degrees matter, but there are also different elements of it. So, you know, if globalisation is the removal of barriers, to the free movement of capital and goods and people, then you can differentiate between those three elements of globalisation and that, in turn, you know, allows us, I think, to think a little bit more clearly about what the solutions might be as opposed to just the therapy, Mark, which you talk about. And specifically, I think it helps us to distinguish between, you know, roughly good and bad interdependence.
Now, I get the impression, you can tell me if this is wrong, Mark, that your argument is this, yeah, there is no distinction, you said there at the end that the good things and the bad things about interdependence are inextricably linked. So, it’s impossible to differentiate between good and bad interdependence. I think it is possible and – but yeah, maybe we can come back to that in discussion. And, in particular, I think for me, the crucial way of – or one of the crucial ways of trying to think about what’s good interdependence and good – and bad interdependence and again, this is really – this is not original, this is an argument that Dani Rodrik has made, but it’s to distinguish between, you know, democracy enhancing interdependence and interdependence that undermines democracy. And democracy, it feels to me, doesn’t really feature very much in the book and I think that’s an important element of this to bring in.
So, that brings me then to the EU, and, you know, Leslie, you mentioned that Mark’s first book was “Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century,” which focused very much on the EU at a time when, you know, to put it bluntly, I think, Mark, you thought interdependence was a good thing. And, you know, now you’ve reached the conclusion, based on the events of the last, you know, ten years or so, that interdependence causes conflict, but it seems, to me, that has huge implications for then, how you think about the EU. So, I sort of had the impression that the way you write about the weaponization of interdependence is that the EU is a, sort of, passive victim of this, you know, and yet, if you take something like sanctions, which you talk about a lot in the book and you mentioned again just now, you know, that’s been a key European foreign policy tool. You really only ever talk about the US sanctions, but, you know, for example, against Iran, but often, Europe was alongside the US, and these things like the Iran sanctions were, you know, I know this from my time, you know, working at ECFR, was seen as, you know, one of the EU’s big foreign policy successes, was sanctions.
So, you know, to come back to my earlier question about, you know, what does weaponization mean? You know, I guess, I would ask, does the EU also weaponize interdependence or is it just a victim of other powers that weaponize interdependence and should it weaponize interdependence? I don’t quite understand where you stand on that question of, whether weaponization of interdependence is a good thing or not? But, even more importantly than that, I think, the EU it seems to me, is a kind of extreme form or a kind of a vanguard of interdependence; it has been historically.
I think Mark, when you and I have talked about this before, you know, you’ve used the phrase ‘platonic form’, you know, the EU’s the platonic form of interdependence, but it – you know, in other words, it’s gone further, it’s been a pioneer in this and it’s gone further than the rest of the world, in the last 30/40 years, in terms of developing this kind of interdependence. And so, if you have now reached the conclusion, with which I do sympathise, that interdependence, you know, reduces the chance of war, but produces conflict, that has huge implications for the EU, it seems to me. And it becomes even clearer, I think, if you do frame it, in terms of integration, as we have done in the title for this panel, as opposed to interdependence or connectivity.
You know, in particular, you know, it sort of forces you to ask, I think, you know, the deeper independence that exists within the EU compared to the rest of the world. Does – you know, logically, you’d think that might create more intense conflict, even if it stopped short of war and precisely because war is even more impossible within the EU than it is in the rest of the world now. So, you know, I guess my question is really just, you know, if you’re right, in terms of what you say about connectivity and conflict, Mark, do we not need to rethink the EU in a big way?
And, you know, I think this is roughly, you know, where I’ve been in the last five years or so, this is why I think I’ve reached some slightly different conclusions about this. You know, I share the, you know – some of the conclusions about interdependence and how it produces conflict. I also agree with Dani Rodrik that hyper-globalisation has undermined democracy and that there’s a European version of that story within the EU of hyper-Europeanisation. But that’s, you know, then what’s led me to slightly the change the way I think about the EU and in particular, you know, it’s very easy to go back over the last ten years and identify all kinds of conflicts within the EU, especially within the Eurozone, that are the consequence of deep integration or what you call connectivity, Mark.
So, I guess, I’ll end with you know, one final question, which is, so, you know, is Europe internally also in a state of unpeace?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Mark, you’ve been given a lot there and I’m guessing that you’re going to want to respond. Why don’t I give you three minutes to respond and then I’ll come back with a comment and come to the audience.
Mark Leonard
Great, thank you very much. Thanks, Hans, a lot. So, I – you’re right that I use these terms of interdependence, connectivity, and globalisation more or less interchangeably. What I mean is, the kind of deep, hyperconnected world that we’re living in where ideas, people, data, flows increasingly freely and we’re moving from a kind of more, hierarchical world where you have countries that are maybe like, billiard balls to this lattice of links between different people. And I think that, whereas the original unifiers of the world in the 19th Century were empire and industry. What we’ve seen, since 1989, is a new era of globalisation – of, sorry, of connectivity, which was driven by hyper-globalisation and the digital revolution. And I use connectivity ‘cause I think the digital revolution has changed the nature of that connectivity.
There are obviously powerful threads, which run from the first era of globalisation, between 1850 and the First World War, and I think there are some lessons we can learn from that. But I think what’s happening now is more kind of powerful, both in terms of the amount of connectivity, but also, just the intensity of these different links.
With – you know, your point about good and bad inter – well, weaponization. I – basically, use weaponization also in a kind of loose way. What I really mean is the instrumentalization of it. So, it ranges from just using it as a political tool, you know, ‘as a tool of influence’, through to it literally becoming a weapon, as with sanctions or cyberattacks, or other kinds of things like that.
I don’t use it in a particularly normative way. I used, actually, the example of the European enlargement process, which is a kind of voluntary – well, voluntary – I don’t make much of a distinction between hard and soft power. I think the two things are very closely related to each other; usually hiding behind soft power is some kind of hard edge. So, I think that the European Union, in this kind of world, should be willing to weaponize it and has done in all sorts of different ways. But obviously, as soon as you start doing these things, this is where I started my talk on, there is a danger escalation, as one player escalates in different ways, and you can end up creating quite a lot of a backlash. And people talk a lot about the ‘Brussels effect’. I think the anti-Brussels effect is as powerful as the Brussels effect at the moment, as one of their, kind of, natural consequences of weaponizing connectivity.
As for Dani Rodrik, I mean, I actually do write – talk – write about Dani Rodrik in my therapy session where I have these, kind of, five steps, accepting there’s a problem, establishing healthy boundaries, so that’s very kind of ‘Rodrikian’. Being realistic about what we can control, the idea of self-care, sort of, starting with our sense of helping ourselves, and then seeking real consent, which I think is about democracy, normally that’s a kind of intrinsic part of thinking about democracy. So, the therapy is very much, kind of, related to that, but where I sort of differ with him is, I think it’s quite easy theoretically to have good and bad connectivity.
I’ve put, you know, the EU as good connectivity. It was democratic, people voted for it, in referenda, every single law that’s been passed has been passed by parliaments. It’s been incredibly good for every single country that’s been in the EU, created a huge amount of growth, etc. And yet, 52% of British people thought that all of the things I loved about the European Union were hurting them and making them feel vulnerable. And it shows to me, that the challenge is not about good or bad interdependence, but that you can have radically different perceptions of the same interdependence and it naturally creates winners and losers. And one of the big problems that we have, is that while we were living with the, kind of, idea that this was all win-win and positive and looking at the aggregate figures and had what I call ‘Esperanto economics”, where our unit of analysis is so distant from a lot of the people who live within the country, that you can miss out on the, kind of, dark side and that a lot of people feel that they’ve been left behind. And therefore, their reaction is to want to build walls, and that’s the kind of essence of Trumpism.
It’s a sense that large numbers of people have been left behind, have lost control, have been on the wrong side of interdependence and therefore, want to organise themselves against it, and that bifurcated politics and bifurcated economy is true, not just of the US and the UK, but of lots of different countries. Every European country is its own version of it ‘la France [inaudible – 32:17]’, the idea of Poland being, kind of, colonised, which, you know, every country has their different version of it. And it becomes rapidly entwined with identity politics as well, with the idea of ‘la grande [inaudible – 32:30]’ threatened majorities of different places.
Where – so, my kind of – where I go from that is to think that the difference is not between open or closed or good or bad interdependence, but rather, between managed and unmanaged togetherness. And the essence of thinking about it as a problem to be managed is, you can look at who the losers are, and you can work out ways of trying to mitigate them or to disarm connectivity, which is my, kind of – so, it’s a bloody difficult thing to do. It’s a Sisyphean struggle. You’re never going to manage to do it.
Anyway, it brings me to the EU. In – I think the EU, in a way, is both the greatest example of us trying to manage interdependence. We’ve both created a huge amount of it, but we’ve also done quite a good job of trying to make sure it was done with people’s consent, that we redistribute resources, we look at the losers, we look at the risks. But at the same time, I think that it was a failed project, in some ways. Certainly, Brexit showed that it was not able to maintain the consent of the British people. And my analysis of where that went wrong is that we actually did a poor job of doing my five-step therapy programme when it came to the European Union.
We told the losers that they were winners. We were not – so, just to take a microcosm of the problem, the migration debate in the UK. You know, it was a, sort – it’s almost a, kind of, masterclass in how not to manage connectivity. We thought that nobody was going to come over. We told people that 13,000 people were going to come. 1.5 million people came. We had no idea where they went. We didn’t redistribute any resources to the places they were going, so you had more hospital beds, more Doctors, more Nurses, that we had more school places, we didn’t look at the effect that it would have on house prices, if large numbers of people moved into different parts of the country, we didn’t think about whether it would drive wages down in particular sectors, we didn’t think about what it meant for the minimum wage. There was literally no idea of who was coming, who was going, where they were going.
If you compare the British way of dealing with migration to the Belgium way or the German way or other countries where people have to register with town halls, and you know where they are. It’s just a shocking disaster of laissez-faire, wishful thinking. And the fact that it was really good for the UK and driven by functional needs, was totally irrelevant to the people who felt that they were being left behind. And it made them angry, being told that this was really good for the country, even if it was true, in aggregate terms, that people who came paid more taxes than they receive benefits, that our health service would have collapsed, without all of these extra people coming in, etc., etc. But it was something, which was a total disaster.
So, I think that the next phase of EU, of the European project is going to have to be very different. It’s going to have to be much more self-reflective and to think much more about the losers. And I think at the heart of that, and this is the thing, which I’ve been working the most on for the last five years, is this idea of the European sovereignty, which is, I know, one of your favourite discussions, Hans, so I will look forward to talking more about that with you. But I think that the problem of sovereignty in Europe is fundamentally different in 2021 to what it was for the first few decades of European integration. And for the first few decades of European integration, there was a clear problem of sovereignty. It was, how to tame it.
Sovereignty had almost obliterated our continent, had killed – you know, there were cemeteries right across the continent. We were drenched with the blood of untamed sovereignty. And what we saw, through the European project, was an attempt to tame sovereignty, starting with the coal and steel, which had built the weapons, which were at the heart of the world wars that we had. And then that was, kind of, broadened out to a Customs Union, a Single Market, a single currency and we found different ways of kind of pooling and taming the sovereignty of people.
The problem with 2021 was not, how do you tame sovereignty, it’s how do you get it? How do you give people a sense that they are in control in a dangerous world where continental sized powers like China and the US and companies bigger than countries like Facebook, and Google, and Huawei, and Tencent are dictating the rules of the 21st Century where algorithms that are out of control determine, you know, important parts of our lives, and that is a different type of European project?
I think, again, the EU can be an enormously powerful platform on which we can stand, which can re-empower our states, but it’s a different kind of European project, which is not so much about trying to create, to rip down barriers between different countries and to tame sovereignty, it’s more about on the one hand, de-risking interdependence. I use migration as an example, but you could have had a similar discourse around the Euro, around free movement, around terrorism, there are lots of very concrete things that can be done to make – to help the losers to make it feel less risky. But at the same time, is more about looking outwards and how do you reclaim control from other powers? And the way that you can do it, is because the European Union is sufficiently large to actually have some say in a world of continental sized blocks. And I think that is one of the big challenges of the next century.
If I’m right about the age of unpeace and interdependence being sort of weaponized in the way it is, we can’t rely on the United Nations, on the World Trade Organization, on the idea of countries coming together to solve global problems like climate change and the pandemic in a co-operative way. So, increasingly, what we’re going to see is a fragmentation of global governance and the EU can actually be a space where you can develop some real solutions amongst likeminded countries and is going to be a big advantage for the countries that are still in it. You know, they can still work closely with the UK and other players, but that is an important platform that we have lost. But partly because of the fact that we hadn’t woken up to the sort of, unpeace, which I think was there in the European Union, is there in the European Union, but which is being more dealt with now than it was five or six years ago. And I think in 2016, particularly people who had been the Architects, were incapable of understanding those forces, which is why they did such a poor job, both of persuading the British people that the EU could actually protect them and help a lot of the people who feel left behind in the future. But also, of creating the, sort of, consent which I think is necessary for any political system with that level of ambition.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you, Mark. You know, it’s interesting, it’s fascinating, and it’s really good that the two of you are having this conversation, because what it highlights for me is that it really is a book that is very presentist. It really – it has, and I hope that you’re not upset by this and I’m sure you’ll come back at some point, but it has a pretence of being a book that’s global in its story that is, you know, spans a much longer time period of history. But, you know, as I listen to the two of you talking, and it’s partly ‘cause Hans has taken you down the path of thinking about Europe and many of the more current debates, but it’s also because, you know, quite frankly, you are trying to say in your book that there’s something about the current phase of globalisation that’s very different. And I guess my question to you is, you know, what is your baseline and what are your measures? Because if you’re looking at this from the vantage point of much of the rest of the world, it’s always been as story of unpeace, with a few inflection points. If you’re, you know, if you’re on the wrong side of power during the era of empire and colonisation, then unpeace was your daily reality and that, you know, the great multilateral framework that you referred to was never the source of your joy or your solutions. It was a place that you, you know, took your struggles occasionally, but not usually.
I mean, the other question I have for you is, you know, you talked about nuclear weapons as being something that gives a baseline of stability and then we get this, sort of, unpeace and certain kinds of conflict, but far below the radar screen, but that’s not a new story, right? That’s, you know, the instability – stability-instability paradox was, kind of, core to our thinking of how conflict took place during the Cold War, that it took place at the conventional level. It was about proxy wars, it was about all sorts of things. So, there is something clearly that is distinctive in the, you know, digital age, that part of the globalisation that you tap into. But I’m not persuaded that the unpeace, you know, the unpeace assumption gives due credit to all those people in all those countries that for so long have been, you know, struggling with unpeace for time in memoriam.
Hans Kundnani
I might add one sort of…
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Yeah, go ahead, and then we’re going to come to Jonathan Fowler.
Mark Leonard
Can I just answer briefly when some…?
Hans Kundnani
I just want to answer the question, if that’s alright?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Hans and then Mark, ‘cause when Hans speaks, I’m sure you’ll have even more to say, Mark.
Hans Kundnani
Just because, this was something I was thinking about as well, I couldn’t quite figure out, as I was reading the book, Mark, whether what you were trying to describe was a change in the world or something that we may be collectively or you particularly have now just realised, but was always the case?
Mark Leonard
So…
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Really quick, Mark, ‘cause I’m going to come to Jonathan Fowler.
Mark Leonard
Really quick, I think what is new is this hyperconnected world that we’re living in. In fact, I use ‘empire’ as a very powerful way of trying to understand the feeling. But I think what is different now is that the feelings of humiliation, of the world being out of control, which were true for, you know, most of the world that was colonised, and now kind of strangely being felt in the former imperial core, it’s the UK, this country that controlled, you know – and has invaded all but 19 of the 194 countries in the UN today. And Trump’s America, you know, the kind of ultimate imperial power, for the last few decades, that voted for Brexit and for Trump and where people – where Boris Johnson talked in the referendum campaign about taking back control and about how people would see the 23rd of June as Independence Day. And he’s using the, sort of, language of Frantz Fanon and post-colonial movements around the world to describe how the kind of White, former imperial class, who now feel colonised in their own lands, can reclaim control from these, kind of, shadowy forces outside. So, that’s true that we are basically now have that same sense of humiliation of being…
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Thank you, Mark, but I’m going to stop you here ‘cause we have so many people, but I will say, there are plenty of people in the United States – in the territory of North America who have felt this for much longer than Donald Trump, right, indigenous peoples around the world. So, just pause that, and I know that you’re aware of that, but just to kind of set the frame, which I think we just need to be very careful about. Jonathan Fowler and then Andrzej Kalisz, let’s take two. And actually, let’s take three. Jonathan, Andrzej, and then Anita Punwani. Jonathan.
Jonathan Fowler
Am I unmuted?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Yes, we can hear you.
Jonathan Fowler
Oh, okay, thank you. Thank you, yes, sorry. Yeah, so, I work for the United Nations, but this is the question, in a personal capacity. So, the role of non-state actors has become increasingly significant in armed conflict. I just wonder if you see such actors, more or less non-state actors, carving out similar or even a greater level of significance in connectivity conflicts? Thank you.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And Andrzej Kalisz, and I’m sorry if I’ve mispronounced your name, Andrzej.
Andrzej Kalisz
Am I off of mute?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Yes, we can hear you.
Andrzej Kalisz
Thank you for a fascinating session. My question to both, Mark and Hans, is that you both seemed, at least as you spoke, with the frame of operating in a tripolar world that where this discussion, whether it is the globalisation debate or the connectivity debate, that is dominated by the USA, Europe and China, but excluding Russia and India, all the large multilateral blocs or the nuclear bloc, is that correct or is that just an impression that I had from the way you both spoke?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Great question, and Anita Punwani.
Anita Punwani
Hi, I’m a risk management Professional. We’ve made several references to control, but isn’t it more relevant to speak about international co-operation as the key mode of governance?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Three great questions, and just so you know that there are more, but we’ll turn to you, Mark.
Mark Leonard
Great, yeah. So, on the first one, absolutely, connectivity conflicts, but on the one hand, incredibly empowering for non-state actors who can cause havoc in ways that they weren’t able. So, it means many more people are on the – are playing on the playground of international – on the, sorry, on the football pitch, or whatever metaphor you want to use anyway, there are many more people on the pitch than there were before. But at the same time, and this relates partly to the tripolar world. It has also been – led to a concentration of power. So as well as, like, empowering lots more people, what you can see is that though there are all sorts of options available to countries like Turkey, like Russia and Morocco, all sorts of players that maybe couldn’t compete in a, kind of, classical balance of nuclear power, they can find ways of exercising power in this world. They’re only able to do it in a tactical way rather than operating at a systemic level and I think at a systemic level China, America, and the EU are the kind of biggest players.
As to control versus co-operation, I mean, I think that there are a whole series of wicked problems, which could end up killing us, which we need to work together on. Pandemics, climate change are the two most obvious ones, but there are thousands of other ones. And my – the big hope was that what we would see is a move from national interest to, kind of, international interest, to move from thinking about solutions based around power, to one’s based around rules, that science would take the place of emotion, and that was basically the promise that we had at the beginning of this century, when we started having real moves forward in debates around climate and other issues.
The reality is, that if you look at COP26, if you look at the response to the pandemic, it’s been very obvious that we’re not all in the same boat. Some countries are more effective than others and that many countries are looking for relative advantage in this game. And I think that connectivity, in a strange way, has actually made it more difficult to co-operate because of some of the reasons that I was talking about before.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Let me come to Ilse, Elena and Stephanie. Ilse Rens. Ilsa, if you unmute. Okay, while we’re waiting for Ilse, let’s come to Elena Lazarou.
Elena Lazarou
Hi, can you hear me?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Yes, we can.
Elena Lazarou
Sorry, ‘cause there wasn’t an option to mute until a second ago. So, good evening, fascinating. I’ve been following Hans’ writing on Europe and well, in the past month, and I – Mark, I haven’t read the book, but I’ve listened to the podcast, so, really great to hear you both talk. I mean, my question was – I had two questions. One was, what does this all mean about how we should be thinking about multilateral institutions, because obviously, you know, different – thinking about interdependence or connectivity or integration differently, means we should imagine a different world of global governance ,if it’s to be for the mutual benefit of those participating? So, how should it look like, is my first question? And apologies if that’s in the book, obviously, I guess it is, but there’s my question.
And the second question I put in the chat was, as some of you know, I work on Europe, but I also work in Latin America and that’s a region where, for decades, we’ve been discussing the lack of connectivity, the lack of integration, as a very big problem, and the lack of interdependence, you know, regional initiatives fail, there’s very little cross-border co-operation and actually, that leads to inequality, it leads to lack of growth, which, in turn, leads to conflict in fact. Different types of conflict, and that’s resulting from that, so, is there a sort of golden standard of how much interdependence there should be in a region, how should we look at that? Because obviously, the problems are not the same across the board. So, thank you for that, and great to listen to all of you, Leslie included.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Actually, let’s have you answer that before we come back to Stephanie and Ilsa ‘cause there was a lot there.
Mark Leonard
So, basically, if I’m right that everything is being weaponized, that all of the things that we thought would bring the world together are in fact creating conflict and driving people apart, then we can’t carry on acting as if you can somehow have a system of global governance, which stands outside of that competition. We have to see global governance and multilateralism as part of the ba – as one of the battlegrounds on which people are going to be trying to pursue relative advantage, and to muck around with each other’s internal affairs, and to kind of compete with each other. And that means that I think we have to become much more modest in our demands of global institutions.
There might be a few very, very small examples of areas where we can come up with a minimum agreement about things that we don’t want to do to each other, in order to preserve humanity, but I think that it’s going to be very limited. And most of the action’s going to be done at a national level or within other kinds of groupings, either permanent groupings, or maybe not whether – permanent’s a big word, but anyway, more kind of ordered groupings like the European Union, or in coalitions that are winning, or kind of likeminded groups around data, or things like – or different areas. So, it’s a much, kind of, messier framework.
We talked a lot about the EU. That’s all Hans’ fault. My book is mainly about China and America actually, which, who I think are – and I think their relationship in a way, illustrates a lot of the core things that I’ve been talking about, because the big wager that we made over the last period of time was that by integrating China into the world and creating this dense partnership between China and America, we would somehow minimise the differences between the two and have more harmony. And my kind of argument is that China and America, the more similar they become, the more they hate each other and the more conflict there is between them. And, in a paradoxical way, the problems we’re having is not problems of a lack of globalisation or the wrong kind of interdependence or anything like that, it just shows – it’s about globalisation doing exactly what it was meant to do. Bringing about a huge amount of convergence, bringing out a huge amount of links, and then spawning this, kind of, increasingly vicious spiral of conflict, which is very, very dangerous. And that is what I think should give us pause and make us much more sceptical about the promise of multilateralism and of global governance and its ability to somehow override those conflictual elements in the system, which I think can be managed, but can’t be eliminated as a result of interdependence.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Mark, I’m going to come to Hans here in just a minute. I just have to say one thing though. You know, your book is – it’s wonderful in what it opens up, and I think the session is a reflection of that. It opens up so many questions and hypotheses and you have many, many big arguments. It’s tremendously frustrating also, and maybe that’s a good thing because what it really does, is it asks us all to, you know, define and narrow universe of cases, to actually use data to, you know, measure some of the claims that you’re making because, you know, it’s all – you know, it’s so big that one can imagine that the story, you know, might be a little bit different than the way that you tell it, when you actually start to look at some of the empirics. But you know, I applaud you for, sort of, putting the big case out there. I’m not persuaded necessarily by all of it because – and, you know, one question that I keep asking myself is, how much of this is about a perception, you know, how much of this is perceptions of, you know, we’re aware of each other and therefore we feel frustrated that you have more than I have? And how much of this is about, you know, real inequality? I mean, it’s age-old questions, but it’s very difficult, and maybe that’s a good thing, right? It’s an opening, as opposed to a closing kind of book, which certainly plays an important role, so long as we then take the next step. Hans.
Hans Kundnani
Yeah, I was going to try to say something about Elena’s question about multilateralism. Also, though, Anita’s about, you know, control and co-operation. You know, shouldn’t we be thinking less about control and more about co-operation? And I’m not sure if I’m agreeing or disagreeing with Mark at this point. I may just be saying the same thing in different words and, in fact, that’s my overall conclusion, from this discussion is, I thought that I disagreed – well, it turns out that I agree actually a lot more than I thought I did with Mark about what the solutions are to this. I think you’re just putting things in some slightly different ways.
But on this question of control, co-operation, multilateralism, so, I think this is, you know, this – I think the demand for control is something real. I see it in terms of democracy, and, you know, so, I think of, you know, control and co-operation in a way as being in tension with each other. You know, and more broadly, you know, and this relates to, you know, some of what Mark was saying earlier on about European sovereignty, it seems to be that Europeans face two countervailing pressures. One is a top-down pressure that Mark talked about, which pushes you towards bigger units to compete with these continent-sized powers, as Mark was saying. So, there is a kind of a top-down pressure that pulls you in that direction. And – but there’s also, I think, a bottom-up pressure, which is pulling you towards smaller units, which is about decision-making being closer to the citizen, and I think that’s part of what was driving Brexit actually.
And I think that there’s a similar kind of tension, if we think about this question of, you know, multilateralism because, you know, I personally am, you know, with Robert Dahl on the idea that actually, you know, multilateral organisations can’t really be democratic in a meaningful sense. And so, you know, then I think what you have is, on the one hand, a pressure, which is again, top-down, to do with international politics, four powers to co-operate with each other. But I think there are – there’s also a bottom-up pressure that’s putting you in a different direction, which is, I think, essentially to do with, you know, instead of having, you know, transnational co-operation between elites, trying to bring those elites under control, which, in most parts of the world, happens naturally. So, I think this is a very real tension.
Mark Leonard
Can I just say…?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Very quickly, Mark, ‘cause I’m going to come to Stephanie.
Mark Leonard
It’s just something that you said, Leslie, ‘cause I thought it was very interesting and I think maybe this’ll be helpful, but because – you were saying, “Ah, is this about people’s perceptions or the reality?” And what I think is that people’s perceptions are a reality for them and that what has changed, and this is the thing, which I think has changed quite profoundly in a way that is a real gamechanger is, who we compare ourselves with. So, you know, you’re saying that what’s going on now is people have experienced that for decades. That’s not quite true, actually. For most of human history, we didn’t really know very much about anybody except those who lived very near us, you know, even, you know, when I was a child, our levels of knowledge about what was going on didn’t extend very far. Even in the most advanced, democratic countries, we were pretty clueless about everything that was happening everywhere else. So, our sphere of reference was local. It was – or national at best.
What’s happened now is that people are comparing themselves to other people right across the world and, in that sense, there is this floating sense of grievance, which is structural. And to say that it’s not real, you know, is exactly the problem. It’s obviously true that nobody’s really lost out as a result of globalisation, even the, kind of, so-called ‘left behind’. We’re not actually poorer in absolute terms than they were 20/30 years ago in rustbelt places, etc. What they’ve got, more televisions, they go on more holidays, they’ve got many more material goods than they’ve ever had before. People are not dying of starvation. However, the gulf between where they thought they were and what they thought their identity was, and what it is now, has grown. And then also, they’re comparing themselves to other people who seem to be relatively advancing much more quickly and that is where a lot of these grievances come from. And I don’t think that that makes it any less real.
I think the way that you’re talking about it is slightly patronising and quite old-fashioned in a way, that there is some sort of material reality, which is somehow divorced from people’s perceptions. What we know about inequality is that it’s relative inequality, which has all the negative effects, rather than absolute inequality. When you get beyond a certain level, obviously, if you’re dying of starvation, that’s a – there’s some kind of material facts. But when you get beyond that sort of material thing, most of the negative consequences come from these relative questions.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Super. No, supergood. Let me say one thing, and we’re going to take just – we’re going to five after, so I’ll come to Stephanie after this. You know, first of all, I raise it as a question, right, not as a conviction, is it your argument material or is it about perception? So helpful to have you clarify that. But I think, again, you’re throwing out all sorts of claims that are quite – I mean, I think empirically unsubstantiated, but importantly what you do in the book, and I applaud you for it, is that you open up the space for many of us to then look very carefully.
Like, let me give you one example. Do people who live in small towns in Nebraska worry more about the fact that the Chinese in Beijing are doing well, or do they worry more about the fact that the people that they can drive into town and see living in big houses with two cars and not struggling from the current wave of globalisation, are doing better? And that is something that we don’t have – you know, there probably is data for it, and my hypothesis would be that they care more about the people that they can drive and see, but we don’t know. But it’s a super-interesting question with very significant implications for public policy.
I mean, I would encourage all of us to, kind of, take the big claims and double-down to see, you know, what we find. But the – a final point, is not – again, I think, you know, the title of your book, The Age of Unpeace, right, my starting point was just, there are plenty of people who have been experiencing structural conflict, absent, you know, overt signs of war for a very long time and long before the age of, you know, the digital phase of globalisation. That’s all, right? There’s plenty more to say about that and I think you’re getting – and there’s clearly something that’s categorically and very importantly different and you get a lot of that in the book, so it’s super-interesting. I just think it’s important not to say, you know, it’s new and I know you’re not saying that. Let’s come to Stephanie. Stephanie, are you with us?
Hans Kundnani
I think she’s asking her – asking you to ask her question for her, ‘cause…
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Anar, I’m going to have you ask Stephanie’s question.
Anar Bata
Hi, can you hear me?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
We can hear you, Anar.
Anar Bata
Great. So, Stephanie Blair asks, “Did the EU take the notion of its power of attraction in its neighbourhood, too far and in turn, alienate those it has strung along for too long, i.e., Serbia and Turkey?
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Would you also like to read Ilsa’s question and then we’ll let Mark finish with those two?
Anar Bata
Great. So, Ilsa asks, “Regarding the creation of European flash strategic sovereignty, you mentioned the external constraints. Do you also” – sorry, I just lost her question. “Do you also see internal constraints? In your opinion, what are they? Is it possible to manage the potentially different conceptions of it, different interests?”
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
And, Mark, before you answer, Hans, is there anything that you would like to say before we finish ‘cause I’ll give Mark the last words?
Hans Kundnani
No, I mean, I’d love to have a longer conversation about both enlargement and European sovereignty.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
We will. We will, so hold those thoughts.
Hans Kundnani
I’m not sure there’s anything I can say in 30 seconds.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Okay. Okay, Mark, it’s over – it’s your – you get to close.
Mark Leonard
Okay. So, oh, you’ve moved the que – so, on the first thing about did the EU take the notion of its power of attraction in its neighbourhood too far and in turn, alienate those it strung along for too long? Yes, and for the second question, are there – what was the question? Are there internal constraints for European sovereignty? I didn’t really understand. What’s an internal constraint? Internal to what?
Hans Kundnani
To the EU, I guess.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Within the EU, within…
Mark Leonard
Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve been talking a lot about these internal, political constraints and, you know, it is quite difficult, within any political system, to come to any decisions at all, given the levels of polarisation that we have at the moment. So, there are internal constraints within lots of different countries. I think that – I mean, one of the reasons my therapy thing has so much about self-care is, actually, I think most of the problems that we face are, kind of, internal to our societies. Every EU country is one election away from being a, kind of, illiberal majoritarian country, as is the US, as we saw in 2016, as we might find again when people get to go to the ballots again. So, I think that those constraints are at least as important as any of the, kind of, international relations questions that we’ve seen.
But I do think that the fact that we’re going through some quite profound structural changes in the distribution of power and resources, and doing it at a time when people are much more aware of what’s happening, as a result of the information and technology and communications revolutions, does actually change the way that people are thinking about things.
So, you know, it might be that people are, you know, on a daily basis more upset about the wealth of people a couple of streets away, but at the same time, for many people in the West, they realise that we’re going through a – and this is one of Hans’ favourite topics as well, that we’re going from a period where, you know, Europeans and Americans have been setting the rules of global history for, you know, for centuries, towards one where other people are being empowered and are increasingly deciding what’s right, and what’s wrong, and what’s important, and not necessarily in line with the contingent lessons, which have come out of our history. And maybe they’re prioritising values in a different way. They’re maybe prioritising ideas differently from the way that we have done traditionally and I think that is something which is fundamentally disempowering and creates a backdrop, against which the daily humiliations are playing out. This sense that we’re no longer in the cockpit of history and that stuff is being done to us, rather than us being able to do it to them. And I think that that is definitely part of the, sort of, feeling of malaise that you get in a lot of advanced, industrial democracies today.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
Tremendous. This was really terrific, Mark, and you always bring extraordinary intellectual force and authority to not only your writing and your engagement, your leadership…
Mark Leonard
You’re going to put, evidence-free.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
…your formulations. But also, I know I can say from experience, I’ve been party to many discussions between you and Hans, in multiple settings, and I’ve always enjoyed them. I’m always happy when they o – when they end and everybody seems to remain still in conversation with each other, so let’s make that our bar for a good conversation. Robust, but we know that we’ll carry it forward. So, thanks to everybody for joining us, terrific to have you here, and I’m sure that this is not over. Thanks.
Mark Leonard
Thank you so much, Leslie.
Hans Kundnani
Thank you.
Dr Leslie Vinjamuri
You, too.
