Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When Rules Fail with Mark Leonard [PODCAST]

Does the idea of an open society still have a place in today’s world? Which four exponential forces currently run the world? And how to reconcile Europe’s values and vision with those of other key geopolitical players? Leszek Jazdzewski (Fundacja Liberte!) talks with Mark Leonard, Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), the first pan-European think–tank.

Leszek Jazdzewski (LJ): How do you reconcile your latest insights with your life’s mission and the foundational mission of the European Council on Foreign Relations, which are rooted in supporting an open society?

Mark Leonard (ML): This is not an easy time for many individuals, particularly those who believe in the Enlightenment Open Society project in Europe, because the contemporary world does not follow the rules we were taught it would live by. Many people are trying to deal with that in different ways. The world order, the rules-based order, or the liberal international order existed because there was a set of power relationships underpinning it, and the United States was ultimately its guardian. The United States did not always stick to the rules at the heart of the rules-based order, but it was basically a backstop for it. There were many countries around the world that would put up with it even if they did not love it.

Gradually, American power has shrunk in the world. It has gone from being one of the two dominant superpowers in the Cold War to being a unipolar, hegemonic power immediately after the Cold War, to now being the most powerful country in the world but one of many powers. It is not able to sustain that order anymore because it is being pushed back on by other powers, such as China and Russia, but also by many middle powers that want to have their voices heard, and by non-state groups. Actors like the Houthis can close the Red Sea. Iran, while not one of the great powers in the world, can close the Strait of Hormuz. That was already leading to a crisis of legitimacy and efficiency for this order.

When Donald Trump was elected, there was a full-scale American revolution against the American-led order, because a subsection of American society does not believe in it anymore and views themselves as the primary victims of that order. Therefore, the social consensus in the United States has disappeared. That is just the beginning. There are many other developments occurring in the world that are going to dismantle the foundations of this order. The question is not whether one likes it or views it as positive; it has simply been overtaken by events.

We are entering a period of unorder, which is different from disorder. Disorder occurs when an order exists and people break the rules. Unorder happens when the world moves on and the rules no longer have the same purchase over what is happening, leaving no common framework to discuss current events. That is where the world is at the moment. The fear is that the response of Europeans will be to try to preserve an order that is already dead, or to hope for the next order to emerge. Instead, rather than focusing on order, Europeans need to focus on their agency. There are many actions available to preserve values and interests in a world lacking order.

Pockets of order can be maintained. A rules-based order can exist within Europe, and Europeans can double down on that to make it stronger and safer. Actions can be taken to make individual countries more resilient, and one can fight for those values in different ways. That is the core theme of this book, addressing how to be honest about the contemporary world while advancing the values and interests one believes in. There are substantial opportunities for Europeans to advance open societies and rules, but only by adopting a very different way of thinking from the approach utilized over the last few decades when relying on the rules-based liberal international order.

LJ: Why did you select the ‘4 Cs’, namely capital, climate, chips, and civilizations, as the four exponential forces that are transforming the global balance of power?

ML: I use this pun to argue that rather than going through a phase of ordering, we are going through an explosive phase where things are going to get blown up. I argue that you have these four big structural forces which are changing the balance of power in different ways and also how the world works in quite fundamental ways. I basically look at them one at a time.

It is just capitalism as we have known since Karl Marx’s day is prone to crises, but even more so now than it was in Karl Marx’s time because of the extent to which the world is bound together through these intricate connections and also the way it is being weaponized. Therefore, lots of different countries are trying to turn the links that bind us together into ways of exercising power over one another, and that leads to a lot more volatility and fragmentation.

The second C is climate change, which both creates a lot of chaos with extreme weather events and changes to the climate which are driving many people from their homes and going to lead to a lot of migration, but also is leading to a rewiring of the global economy and it creates new winners and losers.

The third C is to do with chips, which for me is shorthand for all the new technologies which are turning on their heads how our economies work, how our societies work, even what it means to be human – technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing – and also creating a lot of winners and losers and new geopolitical fragmentation of the world.

Finally, civilizations, which stands for this big demographic shift. If you go back to 1950, most people who lived in the world were living in Europe and America; now they are going to be living in Africa and in Asia. As the balance of power between these different demographic blocks changes, they are increasingly wanting to have their own say on what rules and cultures get privileged, and that is going to lead to different ideas of modernity. Therefore, that is going to be a much more plural world than the one which we thought of within the kind of the enlightenment universalist frameworks that have been dominant in recent decades.

LJ: What is the distinction between your concepts of ‘architects’ and ‘artisans,’ and why is it more effective to adapt to a changing global landscape as artisans rather than relying on a grand architectural design?

ML: Yes, I say the big divide in the world is less going to be between democracies and autocracies or between East and West, but it is more different attitudes towards order. I have these two models, the architects model, where you start with a grand vision for how the world should look and you work out how to embody that in a set of rules and institutions which give it life and which create a shape to interactions between different states and individuals. In a way, the model for that are the Americans after World War II and the Europeans, where you had all of the Bretton Woods institutions set up, but then a whole series of different institutions that were set up after the end of the Cold War.

The other way of thinking about the world is as the artisans do. Instead of thinking that you can shape the world according to your grand designs, you try and understand how the world works, where it is going, and you adapt to them. You do not build new structures from scratch, but you adapt old structures. You turn them into new purposes. You improvise. You test things out. If they work, then you carry on with them. If they do not work, then you try something else out.

In many ways, the model for the artisans in the last couple of decades is China, because it has come to global prime time in an order that it did not create, and it has therefore tried to adapt that order. It has been very active in some pre-existing institutions. It has created new things like the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. Rather than thinking that it could control the whole global trading order, it has come up with different ways of diversifying its relationship to build a Belt and Road initiative to link it to lots of other countries. It did not invent the carbon transition, but it understood that this was going to happen and that it was worth putting resources into becoming a leader in solar panels and electric vehicles so that you could benefit from that change in the order.

It is a very different way of working. Rather than thinking that you can control things and design structures, you work out how you can adapt and put yourself in a place where you can benefit from what is going on. You can tell that this is the Chinese approach from the fact that the Chinese president’s favorite phrase is to talk about great changes unseen in a century. Whereas Europeans and Americans often talk about preserving order, the Chinese are thinking about a world that is going to be in chaos and how do they benefit from the chaos and get themselves in a place where they can at the very least survive it, but maybe even profit from it.

LJ: Based on your extensive travels and research on China, what critical perspectives regarding the Chinese view of the global order are western analysts currently overlooking?

ML: There are lots of brilliant analysts of China, but when we look at the world, we start with a lot of our own baggage, and we often try and look at it through the frameworks that we are familiar with. Therefore, when we look at China becoming a very, very important power in the world, pushing back on Western institutions, creating new bodies like the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, we assume they are trying to create a Sinocentric world order that looks like the American century that we have just been living through, but just a rival order.

It is definitely true that China is not happy with the role of the West and the Western dominance of global institutions. They are definitely pushing back in lots of different ways, and they are building a very close relationship with Russia and with other players that are equally unhappy with a Western-led world. The goal of it is not about creating an order which looks like the American order. They are not thinking about how they provide global public goods in the way that the United States provided global public goods. They are not thinking about how they deal with big challenges of keeping sea lanes open in different continents or acting as a backstop for security in different regions.

They are thinking much more about how we, as China, put ourselves in a position where we can be strong and powerful and in charge of our own future and more resilient to what is going on in different places. That is the purpose behind a lot of these institutions that the Chinese are building. It is a much more selfish perspective than the United States perspective. It is also more adaptable, less architectural, much more opportunistic and improvisatory.

There are advantages and disadvantages from it, but at this period where yet so much is changing and where you have a set of power relationships that are really in flux, that kind of approach is likely to serve you better than trying to create a big set of global institutions and trying to get countries that are in a very competitive mindset without stable power relationships between each other to follow a common rulebook.

LJ: In a global landscape increasingly dominated by strong civilizational projects like MAGA, China, Russia, and India, how does the European Union fit into this framework while balancing universal values at home with a pluralistic approach abroad?

ML: I am a huge fan of – more than a fan, that is a trivial way of putting it – but I am a big beneficiary of the way that Europeans have transcended ethno-nationalist conceptions of what their identity is. My family were German Jews. We were the biggest victims of a Europe that descended into that kind of ethno-nationalist agenda. I really value the fact that in many European countries, people have been advancing a civic rather than an ethnic identity and put democracy right at the heart of their sense of who they are. We now have a big fight to defend those values, the open society values, this much more civic idea of what our identity is, and we should do everything we can to fight those battles within Europe.

I also think that it is a good thing to believe in human rights on a global stage. I do not think that your rights should depend on the color of your skin or where you were born. There are lots of different disagreements about this, but rights are political constructs that come out of a series of power relationships, and they are won within particular political contexts. Different countries, different parts of the world will have their debates at different rates, and a lot of the rights that we value and the particular balance between them are quite contingent and have a lot to do with our history.

These rights are very fragile, and they are being threatened in all sorts of European countries; we saw that in Hungary, and we have seen that in Poland as well. Therefore, the first thing we need to do is to try and fight these battles within our societies where we have legitimacy and try and preserve them. I wrote a book in 2005 called Why Europe Will Run the 21^st Century, which was a very universalist book. I realize actually that that was probably a mistake. What we need to understand is not that these are bad rights and that other people will not necessarily want them, but that in a world where power is much more widely distributed, we should maybe have a more exceptionalist mindset where we realize that there are a set of rights and norms which have come out of struggles in our own societies, and we should try and preserve them and save them.

We can help people in other parts of the world and we can advocate things, but we do not have the same legitimacy telling other people how to lead their lives as we have calling for rights for ourselves. Therefore, we should start by trying to make these rights real within a European context and be a bit more humble about how we engage with other parts of the world. It does not mean that we should not speak out about different things, but I do not think that we should put ourselves in a place where we give people the impression that we think we are the moral arbiters that can decide what is right and what is wrong and what is important for them.

This podcast is produced by the European Liberal Forum in collaboration with the Movimento Liberal Social and the Fundacja Liberté!, with the financial support of the European Parliament. Neither the European Parliament nor the European Liberal Forum are responsible for the content or for any use that be made of.