Living in an à la carte world
Our ECFR/Oxford global poll + Spanish-Catalan drama + Truthluvvies in Prague
History of the Present (fortnight ending 18 November 2023)
Oh brave new world, that has such powers in’t!
As the leaders of the world’s two superpowers, the US and China, held a summit meeting in San Francisco on 15 November 2023, many observers harked back to grand bipolar simplicities. A new cold war! The west versus the rest! Democracy versus autocracy! Let’s woo the global south! But the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt warned us always to beware of the terribles simplificateurs, the frightful simplifiers. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we now live in a world fragmented between multiple great and middle powers who do not divide simply into two camps.
The results of an ambitious round of global polling, released on the day of the summit, help us to understand this new world disorder. Conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations and an Oxford University research project on Europe in a Changing World that I co-direct, this is the second time we have surveyed what we call in shorthand the CITRUS countries: China, India, Turkey, Russia and the United States. This autumn we added to them five other major non-European countries – Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and South Korea – as well as covering 11 European countries.
Here are a few findings to keep you awake at night. More than half of those we asked in China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey said the United States was at war with Russia. Clear majorities in those countries – as well as in India and Indonesia – believe Russia will win the war in Ukraine within the next five years. More than half the respondents in China, Saudi Arabia and Russia said they thought it was likely that the EU would fall apart in the next 20 years. That was also the view of 45% in Turkey (a recognised candidate for membership of this putatively disintegrating union) and, rather shockingly, of no less than one-third of the Europeans we asked. Interestingly, there’s a correlation between a belief that the EU is likely to fall apart and a belief that Russia is likely to win the war in Ukraine. Put all this together and you see how much the credibility of Europe and the United States is at stake in Ukraine.
Our polling was completed before the outbreak of another war, that between Israel and Hamas, which further exacerbates the new world disorder, but we did ask how likely it was that, within the next five years, the United States and China would enter into direct military confrontation over Taiwan. Fifty-two per cent of those asked in China and 39% in the US said it was likely. Such prophecies can be self-fulfilling.
One other thing to disturb your sleep. Among countries that don’t already have nuclear weapons, 62% of those asked in Saudi Arabia, 56% in South Korea, 48% in Turkey and 41% in South Africa favour their countries getting access to them.
There’s some good news for the west too. Europe and the US win the soft power beauty contest hands down. Asked where you would like to live if not in your own country, clear majorities in Brazil, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey indicated Europe or the United States. Only in South Africa did the proportion of respondents choosing China exceed 10% – and almost nobody wants to live in Russia. But the west’s attractions extend beyond that. With the exception of Russia, people in most of these countries choose “the United States and its partners” over “China and its partners” on both human rights and internet regulation. They also say that Russia is not part of Europe “when it comes to its current political values”, clearly indicating that they associate Europe with a set of political values.
They are distinctly underwhelmed by European hard power, but impressed by that of the US. On trade, China is the favoured partner, but almost all of these countries prefer the United States over China when it comes to “security cooperation”. Then we asked a more challenging question: if your country was forced to choose between being part of an American or a Chinese bloc of countries, which would you prefer it to end up in? The US wins hands down. If push came to shove, people in Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey say they would choose a US-led bloc. In Indonesia, it’s a closer call, but on this, as on much else, the only clear exception is Russia.
So, the rest prefer the west? Well, maybe if forced to choose. But what really emerges from our two rounds of polling, taken together with other evidence, is that most of these countries think that they can choose not to choose. They can have closer economic relations with China, security cooperation with the US and simultaneously enjoy all the delights that soft power Europe has to offer. A world with many competing powers gives them the chance to mix and match.
A multipolar world, in this form, enables not multilateralism, nor even non-alignment as it was understood in the cold war, but rather what the Indian leader Narendra Modi has called multialignment. A great power among other great powers, you pursue your own national interests wherever they lead you, aligning with different partners on different issues. I and my co-authors, Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard, characterise this as an à la carte world, contrasting it with the old set menus of the cold war, to which the US president, Joe Biden, harks back with his binary framing of democracy versus autocracy.
Many people have enjoyed (and a few friendships been broken over) the board game Diplomacy, in which you play as early-20th-century European great powers forging sacred, perpetual alliances – and then treacherously switching sides, leaving your best friend in the lurch. But in the early 21st century, the real-life Diplomacy covers the entire world – and it’s now a four-dimensional game. You can be aligned with the US on security while cosying up to Russia on energy and China on trade. It’s not just major extra-European powers who are into this game. Aleksandar Vučić’s Serbia plays it too, and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the ultimate cynic at the board.
The lesson for the west is not that we should abandon our values. It’s that we should get a lot smarter, seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. Avoid all those simplistic binary framings and instead develop targeted strategies for particular great and middle powers, such as India, South Africa or Turkey. You’ll never win unless you understand the new rules of the game.
This commentary first appeared in the Guardian on 15 October 2023. Please use this link if disseminating: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/15/new-world-frames-reference-us-russia-china.
Mark, Ivan and I had a lively discussion with Jeremy Shapiro about the results, and the prospects for Ukraine, on this ECFR podcast:
Spanish-Catalan drama
As luck would have it, I visited Madrid and Barcelona for the Spanish and Catalan editions of Homelands on the very days when Spanish-Catalan relations were the eye of a Force 9 political storm. Furious demonstrators in Madrid protested at the way socialist (PSOE) Pedro Sánchez became prime minister for another term by making deals with two Catalan separatist parties, including an amnesty for those involved in an illegal independence referendum six years ago and some extremely dubious wording about the history of Spanish-Catalan relations down the centuries, and ‘lawfare’ by the right-wing (PP) Spanish government in the 2010s.
It was both fascinating and depressing to find, at the same drinks before dinner in Madrid, extremely sophisticated, liberal-minded, pro-European Spaniards bending my ear with diametrically opposed, irreconcilable accounts of what had happened. For one person, what Sanchez did was a gross violation of the rule of law, comparable to what has happened in Hungary and Poland. ‘Europe’ - meaning the EU – must intervene. For another, it was an essential move to bring the fraught question of the degree of autonomy that Catalonia can enjoy inside Spain back to the political arena, where dialogue and compromise are possible. (Plus keeping the socialists in power, which they're not unhappy about either, arguing that the alternative would be the PP in coalition with the xenophobic populist Vox party. But the others say the only honourable, democratic way forward is new elections.)
In Barcelona, the general view was that the amnesty was essential to get this back to a political dialogue, although people did acknowledge how unfortunate it is that it involves a legally problematic deal with irresponsible Catalan separatists, the main function of which is to keep one of the two main Spanish parties in power. But nonetheless, long-term they think it will be helpful.
Thus, Spain appears to be hyper-polarised along not just one but two lines: left-right and centre-periphery. The wisest people I talk to agreed that what Spain really needs is a new deal of asymmetric federalism, which some argued can still be accommodated within the larger framework of the 1978 constitution. This, they added, requires a broad political cooperation between the main parties of centre-left and centre-right, and cool heads in both Madrid and Barcelona. Not much sign of either at the moment.
That said, at the book launch in Barcelona, people cheerfully bought both the Spanish and Catalan editions of Homelands, and sometimes both. A Catalan TV presenter show both editions in his late-night programme while we were discussing it, although the Spanish one distinctly more fleetingly.
You pays your money (euros in both cases)…
…and you makes your choice..
Truthluvvies in Prague
I take a direct budget airline flight from Barcelona to Prague, full of cheerful Czech holidaymakers, including families with young children, coming back from a nice few days in the sun. For the children, this is normal. For their grandparents, it would it have been an exotic dream.
This is one of the freedoms – not the least of them – that Czechs were celebrating joyfully on the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. In Prague for the launch of the Czech edition of Homelands, this was an occasion for me to meet with many old friends, as well as the current incumbent of Prague Castle, president Petr Pavel, as well as his Slovak counterpart.
Having seen off the ghastly last president (Miloš Zeman) and the populist oligarch Andrej Babiš (at least for now), and with a dignified pro-Western president and sensible (albeit unpopular) pro-European government, the Czech republic currently feels like an island of calm in the middle of a shaken Europe.
The conversation I enjoyed most of all was with a group of current students at the Charles University. (Remember that students started the Velvet Revolution.) Fresh from a memorial march and other anniversary events, they spoke movingly about how they had learned about the revolution from their parents, and how much Václav Havel means for them. Anna said she would never forget Havel’s funeral in 2011: ‘it was the first time I saw my Dad crying’. She was 10 at the time. (I had exactly the same experience watching Churchill’s funeral at the age of 10 in 1965, it being so memorable through my parents’ deep emotion.)
Many of these students had first became politically active in the anti-Babiš demonstrations organised by the student-led ‘Million Moments’ movement a few years before, full of the iconography, mythology and sentiments bequeathed them by Havel and the Velvet Revolution. (I describe those demonstrations in this new edition of The Magic Lantern.) Those protests, for these students, were the turning point, steering their country back away from corruption and oligarchic manipulation to democracy and decency.
I learned a new Czech word on this visit, the slang term pravdoláskař, roughly ‘truthluvvie’, a sharply ironical description of a follower of the velvet political philosophy that Havel spontaneously summed up at the end of a speech on 10 December 1989 as ‘Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred’.
The famous sentence is now inscribed around the table at ‘Havel’s Place’ in the Turn offUniversity Parks in Oxford. In a new memoir (published only in Czech), Havel’s biographer Michael Žantovský describes how Helmut Kohl privately made fun of it at a 10th anniversary event I chaired in Prague Castle in 1999. Of course one shouldn't be naive. But even – no particularly – in these dark times, I’ll sign up to it nonetheless. Note that Havel says 'must', not ‘will’. It's an injunction, not a prediction.
Truthluvvie! Love it!
Thank you.