Cover artwork © Lo Cole

It was the strongly anti-Communist US columnist and gossip writer Walter Winchell who first coined the term in print in 1953.

“Howz [sic] About Calling the Russians our Frienemies [sic]?,” he asked in the Nevada State Journal, on May 9, 1953—at a time when Americans and Russians had clearly been enemies for a couple of years already. Five weeks after Winchell published his article, the early Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union even threatened to turn hot when workers rose in Eastern Germany to protest the regime of Walter Ulbricht and the Soviet forces that propped it up.

It’s a reminder, though, that relationships in international affairs are rarely clear-cut; and often they only appear so in retrospect.

“Frenemies,” in its modernized spelling, didn’t really stick at the time of Winchell’s writing and only gained wider currency in the 1990s. Today, of course, it’s an apt way of describing how states relate to states in today’s world. Since Donald Trump has entered the White House, the US seems to have lost interest in having allies. And even a bilateral relationship as close as that between France and Germany has both cooperative and competitive elements, with the latter gaining ground.

The country least comfortable with this—helpless, indeed—is Germany, writes Jörg Lau, foreign editor of Germany’s weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, in this issue. Berlin has seen the foundations of its foreign policy eroded since at least 2014, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its war in Eastern Ukraine, with the double-blow of the Brexit referendum and the triumph of Donald Trump, and this year with French President Emmanuel Macron, having finally lost patience and going it alone–and against Germany’s grain.

Most worrying: Instead of coming up with new policy ideas, Berlin prefers to play dead.

In a world of frenemies, this is a strategy that no longer works if it ever has. Not forging your own foreign policy means that others will forge it for you. In particular, Germany needs to take the threats posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China more seriously, warns US Republican senator Tom Cotton, while the DGAP’s technology fellow Kaan Sahin makes it clear that there’s no way back to the alleged “certainties” of the Cold War, even in a “decoupling” technology sphere.

As a new decade starts, Germany’s foreign and European policies desperately need a new beginning. The status quo is no more. Therefore, carrying on as before cannot be an option.

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© REUTERS/Umit Bektas

1. At its core, systemic competition with China consists of rival visions of human nature. The European ideal of the autonomous individual, responsible for its own actions, has come under severe threat by digitally-driven behavioral conditioning. However, from a Chinese point of view, the Enlightenment view of human nature is a transient historical phenomenon, a luxury that only a few wealthy societies can afford.

In our epoch of interactive digital media, gamification and artificial intelligence, the autonomous individual—capable of thinking, deciding and acting for itself—has been increasingly called into question. That individualistic figure had underpinned the Enlightenment’s optimistic vision of human nature. But today, vast quantities of data amassed by digital platforms and the gaming and advertising industries have proven the extent to which human desires and preferences can in fact be exploited and manipulated, as well as analyzed for their supra-individual properties. It is also increasingly clear how easily most “netizens” can be influenced by the targeted manipulation of information and human emotions. Networks of influencers and followers—in other words, digital thought leaders and acolytes—are by now a powerful vehicle to steer collective mimetic behavior.

To use a rather pointed metaphor: the ecosystems of interactive apps are a playground for modern herd behavior among humans. This herd behavior can be observed in the imitation of prefabricated lifestyles, fashions and looks, but it also extends to individual positions taken on divisive, in-or-out questions, and to forms of collective online denunciation, aggression, and hatred. What confronts us in social media, the gaming industry, and digital advertising are not images of self-aware, mature individuals. We are witnesses to a pandemic of herd behavior.

In a vast number of experimental studies, neuroscience and behavioral economics have demonstrated that herd and mimetic behavior remains a determining element of human nature, notwithstanding the great efforts made by state and society toward individual education, freedom of decision, and self-responsibility. The reestablishment of authoritarian and totalitarian modes of social order has its basis in collective needs for security and order and in herd behavior that is prompted by sheer terror or mass fear. In this way, the digital proliferation of herd behavior benefits the social engineering of the Chinese Communist Party, which it is now deploying with ever greater confidence and championing elsewhere in the world.

2. The CCP’s design for social order is based on a vision of human nature compatible with both Leninist principles and the digital age. Human beings are understood as herd creatures requiring guidance and steering. Under the guidance of a wise, strong Great Herdsman, the herd can be formed into a placid, productive, and technologically innovative society, but only as long as it is protected by vigilant herding dogs and has its agility maintained by loyal junior herdsmen.

China’s communist revolutionaries and the founders of the People’s Republic always rejected Western individualism as a bourgeois smokescreen; they thought close control of the “masses” by a political avantgarde to be essential. However, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping never had access to the digital technologies of power that Xi Jinping relies on today. China’s model for digital civilization consists of an agile hierarchical order, deploying targeted, seamless digital control technologies in order to steer a conflict-prone mass society down well-defined political paths. As it currently stands, this Chinese model offers a worryingly productive combination of political and commercial conditioning with economic and technological agility. This sort of social order appears particularly compatible with the possibilities inherent to our emerging digital civilization. It can potentially serve as an example for other governments and societies also in search of political stability and economic prosperity.

3. Platform corporations like Alibaba or Tencent and innovation champions like Huawei function as authorized “junior herdsmen.” Under close observation by central political authorities, they must pass on unlimited quantities of data to state bodies for evaluation and control.

The metaphor of herd behavior also applies to other specificities of the Chinese context. The system of herd control, which China quite deliberately brought into being, is led by wise herdsmen: the party leader and the central governing ranks of the CCP. For controlling the herd, the central authorities rely on a division of labor between “junior herdsmen” and “herding dogs.” This is necessary since herd society requires carefully-supported pioneers and role models, who for their part remain agile and innovative. Individual pioneering acts of innovation, in particular in the economy, technology, and science, are publicized in so far as they are socially and politically useful within officially-established parameters. In this context, popular online idols created by the system serve to popularize overarching regime goals, including unquestioned nationalism and unconstrained enthusiasm for technology.

From the perspective central authorities, China’s pioneers should on no account be independent, freewheeling thinkers. Instead, they should desire to emerge from the herd, ascending to high-ranking positions in the official order, while never calling political hierarchies into question. Status and rank within the herd are acceptable values; individual power or even political freedom are not. Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and a model member of the Communist Party, exemplifies this behavioral pattern: a loyal idol for the digital age.

All of this takes place under the watchful eyes of powerful herding dogs (cyber-administrations at every governmental level, digitally-upgraded state security bodies, state-run cloud operating companies, etc.). When in doubt, the authorities will bite quickly and hard to enforce subordination and discipline. The overall guardians are under instruction to allow considerable freedom of action to junior herdsmen who function as pioneers. The search for new grazing grounds (markets) and new nutritional sources (raw materials, products, business models) is of paramount importance to the highest-ranking herders to make the herd system prosper and expand.

4. The Chinese state, well-equipped with digital technologies, is becoming an agile conditioning apparatus impacting both society and the economy.

The Communist Party has powerful instruments at its disposal: AI-based facial, voice and gait recognition and analytic cameras in public spaces, as well as the ubiquitous smartphone, providing a constant supply of data on individual mobility, communications, and transactions. In part, this can be seen as a matter of surveillance and of early recognition of actual or presumed aberrant behavior. This entails an ongoing analysis of the unending data streams produced by all human interactions. On this basis, individual and collective behavior is regulated. Incentives and sanctions are used to shift overall behavior in the desired direction. All individuals and all legal entities, including official bodies, generate permanently updated data sets, which can in turn be used to evaluate and regulate their conduct. Political, social, and economic trustworthiness is no longer generated through human interaction or formal laws and contracts. Rather it emerges from the data streams and evaluations of trustworthiness apps—in other words through state-organized “social scoring.”

“Big Brother” or “Sauron’s Eye” are inadequate metaphors for this system of control. China’s rulers are aiming to have people internalize the system to such a degree that they no longer even perceive how much the Party controls them. Thereafter, inner resistance will no longer exist. External regulation and control at a distance are meant to become a self-evident and accepted part of life. So if the planners in Beijing have their way, a self-operating surveillance system may come into being, eventually meaning almost no need for police. Breaches of the rules will be socially proscribed, with no active participation on the part of state authorities. Each and every person in society must conform and practice self-discipline, otherwise they lose their trustworthiness ranking and are automatically forced out of society. Used in China’s unconstrained way, digital technology allows for constantly intensifying and granular behavioral control not imposed by a superior authority, but rather anchored and executed within the social fabric.

5. AI is a perfect instrument in the hands of a communist party.

Artificial Intelligence offers the possibility of centralized analysis of huge quantities of data, allowing the recognition of patterns and deviations, and systems of centralized regulation, all without active human participation. The particular strength of AI consists of producing optimized regulatory results for the largest possible population—in other words, it can overcome the chaotic, self-seeking individual pursuit of happiness. These ambitions have been among the central goals of communist revolutionaries since the early 20th century. This is why the IT investor Peter Thiel has accurately characterized AI as “communist.”

But after an initial phase of testing and optimization, AI will also be able to function without the deficient human organization of a communist party. For this reason, China can arrange to have its model of social order installed in other countries and societies without having first to develop a local party-state machine. In its enhanced, 21st-century form, AI will reconstitute the communist agenda of a collectivized, conflict-free society, a vision that was an utter failure during the 20th century. Moreover, it will do so much more effectively than any authoritarian party-state, past or present. Thanks to AI, the original vision of early 20th-century communist revolutionaries will at last come within reach: centralized planning, control, and programming of economy and society, aimed at overcoming all social defects and conflicts, both contemporary and historical.

6. The Chinese panopticon currently emerging arose as the realization of a Leninist dream: at any time, anyone can be observed by the central authorities. This will make possible the formation of a “New Human Being.”
Jeremy Bentham first described the idea of the “panopticon,” a method for enabling the perfect surveillance of large numbers of people by a single overseer. In the industrial age, as a result of cumbersome, large organizations, mass deviance from the norm, and many observational blind spots, this vision could never be consistently realized. However, the fusion of new digital technologies with the more traditional control instruments of Communist Party rule is preparing the way for a substantially more effective Digital Leninism that is currently taking shape in China. In the Chinese system of surveillance and conditioning, the individual cannot know with certainty whether he is actually under observation. But he knows that he is visible at all times, always observable: he thus will have to adapt his behavior in a kind of preemptive obedience.

Behind the ambitions of the Chinese social credit system, we can discern the idea of the “New Human Being”: the dream of a civilization in which human behavior is changed to such an extent that it becomes a lasting collective form, entirely compatible with the broader aims of those in charge. The new trustworthiness system—unlike traditional power instruments like mass mobilization and state terror —is being sold to the Chinese people as technological progress, purported to make the individual’s life easier, safer, and more transparent. In fact, the new developments have been hailed by many, who wish to use, for example, a scoring app to find out whether the person they are meeting or the delivery company they are contracting is worthy of trust. In this assessment, however, one’s own judgment plays no further role. The grounds for evaluation now consist of ostensibly objective data profiles.

7. If we do not oppose the penetration of digital manipulation of preferences and behaviors more effectively than hitherto, time will bring the essence of Chinese developments to our own society: a politically and commercially fabricated and regulated herd organization.

With the pandemic of herd behavior in the digital age, the Chinese government’s vision of human nature has concrete potential to gain ground in many other societies. Systemic competition between China and the West—which first played out mainly in economic and technological realms—is now escalating in politics and ideology. That particular conflict focuses on fundamentally differing conceptions of human nature.
If, in the medium term, China turns out to be the superior economic and technological system, with China’s economy possibly double the size of the United States by 2050, it will have undoubted global consequences for 21st-century governance. Chinese views of society and economy as a herd order in need of surveillance and regulation may prove victorious around the world. And China will reveal itself to be the political and economic system that can make use of the whole range of possibilities within digital civilization the most effectively.

For these reasons, systemic competition with China turns on questions that are even more fundamental than political institutions, technological competition, and security threats. It is a question of the roles and rights of human beings in a future society. China is offering an alternative form of social order, aiming at omnipresent digital conditioning and granular behavioral control. This stands in radical contradiction to the vision of human nature dominant in liberal democracies and market economies.
However, the Chinese conception of ordering human beings, society, markets, and government is gaining attractiveness in many developing countries and emerging markets. China can promise comprehensive technological solutions for politically unstable, economically less productive and conflict-ridden societies, in particular in order to reorganize the wildly proliferating metropolitan areas, now often housing more than 15 million people. The tried and tested systemic solutions that China offers for managing megacities can address infrastructure, living conditions, mobility, energy, environment, and security. Chinese surveillance techniques for public spaces and for online communication have already been deployed in at least 18 separate countries.

Europeans criminally underestimate the strength of demand in many countries for Chinese “smart city” models, including infrastructure and security technology. We cannot rule out in advance that the Chinese-designed systems of authority may allow for peace, wellbeing, and even environmental sustainability in an increasingly densely populated and conflict-prone planet. But if current Chinese conceptions and practices of social engineering come to proliferate globally, the ideas of human freedom and self-determination will head for their digital demise.

8. What can freedom-loving societies do to counter the global advance of Chinese-style digital social engineering?

If we Europeans want to defend what we have struggled to achieve over centuries—individual freedom and choice—the digital transformation will prove an obstacle in many areas of life. European data protection regulations are an expression of this conflict. China’s social scoring system and surveillance state offer a counter-model. Even in China, it is not at all certain that social and political conformity can be implemented without resistance, as suggested by Chinese planners. The large-scale technical systems on which Digital Leninism is based are highly vulnerable. And the social reactions to omnipresent surveillance systems and behavior control will likely become manifest only when systems extend over all areas of life and offer no escape, not even within the most mundane scenes of daily life.
But it would be irresponsible to rely on a stumble, even a collapse, of the Chinese system. In the past, the CCP has repeatedly startled us with its capacity for learning and adaptation. For this reason, we cannot pin our hopes on a Chinese collapse. Rather, what we need to work hard at is a purposive and consistent separation between European and Chinese models of digital control in spite of possible economic costs and political conflicts in relations with China. The discussion on the role of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment supplier, in the development of European 5G networks is only the beginning. Subsequently, we must address the worldwide communications, transactions, and data analysis that are enabled in particular by Tencent’s app “WeChat” and Alibaba’s e-commerce empire. Alibaba and Tencent are dominant ecosystems, not only within China itself, but also for the million-strong Chinese diaspora who all send enormous quantities of data to state-controlled server systems in China.

The fight, however, must not only be fought against manipulative uses of data coming from abroad. On the domestic front, we need to take on the predominantly US-based platform enterprises and targeted data services that have come to dominate the markets. Europe can only achieve its much invoked “digital sovereignty” if it prevents unacceptable practices of data collection and behavior manipulation by suppliers inside and outside Europe. Perhaps most importantly, as a precondition to even think about “digital sovereignty,” Europe needs to nourish the emergence of digital business models for its large domestic market that offers competitive services without destroying free societies.

The decisive question is whether European people, societies, and political institutions can find the strength to at least defend and preserve the core areas of freedom of decision in the manipulative world of digital platforms. Many concrete practical measures are on offer and are ready for implementation. Parts of European society and official regulators are pushing back hard against behavioral conditioning and herd behavior. Because why would any rational person want to be reduced to the human equivalent of sheep, lemmings, or even insects?

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© REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

California is the fifth largest economy in the world and in recent years it has been pioneering a new brand of diplomacy, first on climate change and now increasingly on tech policy. With its relative political cohesiveness, policy philosophy, tech-industrial base, and soft power, the Golden State is moving into a unique league in the international system: a sub-national great power.

The role of US states globally has traditionally been relegated to trade delegations with governors occasionally travelling to foreign financial centers in search of investment. California’s first significant entrée as a diplomatic actor was over the issue of climate change.

California’s role at the 2017 UN Climate Conference marked a watershed. Then governor Jerry Brown led a coalition of states and cities dedicated to meeting the Paris Accord’s emissions targets despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement. Speaking to a rapturous plenary session in the European Parliament afterward, Brown included California and Texas in a list of powers—along with the United States, Russia and India—that need to tackle climate change more earnestly. The scene had the trappings of an address by a head of state. The governor met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and California signed an agreement to cooperate on climate tech and withstand the headwinds of the US-China trade war.

Skipping Sacramento

When it comes to tech, California is a superpower. European policy-makers know this. Well, kind of. Streams of ministers and political delegations from Berlin and Brussels regularly shuttle to Silicon Valley hoping to learn from the world’s most dynamic innovation ecosystem, attract investment from its oceans of venture capital, and take selfies with tech founders. But rarely—if ever—do they bother to travel 140 kilometers inland from the Bay Area to the Californian state capital of Sacramento. In fact, not a single European Commissioner has visited California’s State Legislature in recent years.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier likes to frame the tech race in starkly geopolitical terms as a clash of values, in which Europe must become a co-equal pole. But when it came to his high-profile US trip in July, where he was on a fact-finding mission into American frontier tech, the German minister visited Silicon Valley and Washington but skipped Sacramento, where he could have found natural allies.

As California resets the regulatory philosophy for tech, Brussels—and others—could be working with the state. Take for instance, California’s sweeping new Data Protection Law. Signed into law in June 2018 with little notice, it has been called an American GDPR because its provisions mirror the EU’s data directive so closely. The law’s effect will be significant. It provides similar protections to all classes of personal data, with fines reaching $7,500 per user and possible amendments that would allow for class action lawsuits against companies that systematically violate California’s data law.

More revolutionary, Sacramento is considering forcing data brokers to disclose the value of personal data. This would bring a whole new reality to personal data, allowing for lawsuits for damages, forms of taxation, transparency and other modes of commercial compensation. California tech laws are often replicated across the United States. Its data breach law became the gold standard for US cybersecurity and was copied by 48 other states. California’s data privacy law goes into effect in 2020 but other states are already beginning to copy it.

The Power of the Techies

As the development cycle for general purpose technologies like AI, 3D printing, and quantum computing accelerates, California’s move to set rules could have global implications. Sacramento was ground zero for Uber and Lyft drivers working to secure rights such as minimum wage, overtime, and health and retirement benefits. They have been joined by traditional unions in the attempt to redefine gig worker rights in a way that could revamp the 21st century labor movement. California is considering a blanket ban on arming police body cams with facial recognition AI. The state is also drawing on moratoria on facial recognition technology in San Francisco and similar measures in Berkeley and Oakland.

The implications could go beyond California’s borders with implications for global law enforcement, democracy, and open society. For instance, China has been recently caught using massive pools of facial data hoovered up in public spaces in the US to train surveillance AI meant to track and monitor the country’s mostly Muslim Uighur minority. And as recently as October 2019, California’s governor Gavin Newsom signed a law banning candidate use of deep fakes 60 day before an election.

Perhaps equally important, a large share of the world’s top programmers are based in California. They are increasingly mobilizing, when they feel their companies are betraying their values-based missions. Google programmers successfully rose up against the company’s cooperation with the Pentagon on Maven Project—an AI-face recognition project for military drones. More and more, California’s techies, too, will be looking to state politics as a check on companies, which could have significant implications for the US military’s tech edge. The Pentagon has taken note.

Championing Human Rights

Sacramento is creating new institutional infrastructures to engage with the world. Newsom’s number two, Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis—formerly President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Hungary–has been appointed the state’s chief representative on International Affairs and Trade, a kind of Californian foreign minister. After the appointment, she called Trump’s trade policy “erratic” but went further, stating California’s ambition to help “set the standards for democratic values” around the world. The state already has an office in China and plans to open another in Mexico. Other states are doing so as well. For instance New Jersey has opened an office in Germany.

California is becoming a more confident global actor in other areas, too. Even as China and California have already started to build an asymmetric alliance on climate change, the state is increasingly taking strong positions on China’s human rights record, democracy and tensions with Taiwan and Hong Kong. California State Speaker Anthony Rendon stated, “all of us, here in California and elsewhere, have a duty to stand in solidarity with those who stand for freedom…I want the people of Hong Kong to know that California stands with them.”

The state’s massive procurement budget and even greater public pension system, CaLPERS, are increasingly being leveraged to advance human rights, democracy, and rule of law and to combat corruption. As a border state reflecting America’s changing face, it is leading the resistance on Trump’s immigration and relations with Latin America.

No Army, No Currency

There are, however, limits to California’s neo-Hanseatic bid to redefine statecraft. For one, the international system is still nation-state centric. California lacks some of the capabilities traditionally associated with Great Power status. First and foremost, it has no military. California is thus not a player in the exercise of war. It also lacks some of the geo-economic attributes that allow the European Union to project power internationally—namely control over tariffs and its own currency.

And there are the practical challenges. First, the primacy of Washington. California attempted to undercut the Trump administration by negotiating a deal directly with Volkswagen, BMW, Ford, and Honda to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The deal effectively would have set emissions rates for the entire US, and in doing so, would have helped establish California as a regulatory hegemon within the US by setting American policy—in direct opposition to Trump’s Washington. But the Trump administration has been ruthless in its attempt to block California’s right to regulate emissions and has punished car companies for having worked with the state.

So Goes the World

Then, there’s Big Tech. As the state enters a great tech political awakening, it remains to be seen if California can resist capture by the state’s uniquely powerful tech juggernauts that are seeking to pacify the state’s policy ambition.

Like the world’s diplomats, Big Tech’s political Svengalis had long ignored Sacramento and concentrated their rule-shaping efforts on Washington, Brussels and London. For instance, they lobbied Congress for federal privacy regulations that would either supersede the Sacramento law or at least water down its privacy provisions. This has hit problems given the political polarization, dysfunction, and lack of bandwidth in Congress. Now, Big Tech is concentrating their efforts on Sacramento itself. After all, California is one of only two states—the other is Alabama—that are pushing ahead with a massive antitrust case against Google.

But even with these limiting factors, the rise of California heralds a criteria shift as to what makes a foreign policy actor—and a power—as geo-economic issues like climate change, and connectivity take on greater importance in global politics. As a direct result, the clean lines of the Westphalian system continue to break down. A neo-Hanseatic system of subnational actors is emerging with California at the forefront—joining a tapestry of other powers that include Big Tech companies, multi-stakeholder organizations, and political movements like FridaysForFuture.
New European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has argued that her top two priorities for the EU’s next five years are tech policy and climate change, both areas where California is an undisputed global leader.

One measure of her seriousness could be whether or not she seeks an asymmetric alliance with like-minded leaders in Sacramento. After all, Sacramento politicians are fond of saying: “As California goes, so goes the nation.” If trends continue, perhaps it should be: as California goes, so goes the world.

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Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

It should have been a done deal, or so most people thought in the recently renamed country of North Macedonia. After all, the country had finally settled a long-running dispute with Greece over its name, meeting Brussel’s key condition for EU accession.

But then Emmanuel Macron said “No.”

Disbelief, frustration, anger, even rage screamed off the pages of media outlets for weeks following what was widely viewed as the French president’s historic mistake. EU Council President Donald Tusk even told his “Albanian and Macedonian friends” that “you did your share and we haven’t.”

Beyond the initial response, what lingers is a sense of betrayal. “I am breaking inside,” Prime Minister Zoran Zaev told the New York Times on November 19, 2019. “This destroyed me personally, psychologically,” Zaev added, underlining his concern about the future stability of the Balkans. “Nationalism and radicalism can rise again,” he said. “There is a risk to open conflicts inside of the countries again. Also to open conflicts between countries again.”

Stuck in the Waiting Room

Macedonia had been waiting for a “Yes” from the EU for a long time. It’s actually been waiting longer than anyone in the Balkans, given it was the first country in the region to start the bid for EU membership, in 2001, before Croatia. Yet the country has been stuck in the EU waiting room.
In 2009, when the European Commission first gave its recommendation that accession talks should start with the then Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM, the proposal was shut down by Greece.

Over the following years, Athens repeatedly ensured that the European Commission’s proposal remained just a piece of paper, blocking any attempt by Skopje to launch talks. Every time, Athens raised the same objection: “FYROM” had to settle the name issue first. Greece played the same blocking role at NATO: the alliance told Skopje in 2008 that it was welcome to join once it settled the name issue.

The fact that Athens was allowed to keep Skopje in limbo was seen as unfair and unjust by many Macedonians. Why should the country change its name only because Greece demanded it? And why are other countries allowing such behavior? This sense of betrayal played into the hands of the former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, now a convicted fugitive residing in Budapest.

The Troubled Gruevski Era

Gruevski stoked tensions at home and abroad, fueled narratives about domestic and international enemies, started a massive revamp of the capital in neoclassical style that ended up costing over €600 million of taxpayers’ money, erected a huge monument of Alexander the Great in the main square, clamped down on critical media and civil society, and packed state institutions with party members. As the EU put it in 2016, he carried out “state capture.”

Following dramatic opposition press conferences that revealed the illegal wiretapping of 20,000 people over many years—and sizable, sustained protests—the country got a change of power in 2017. The new government was eager to resolve the name issue and unblock EU integration. A year later, in mid-2018, a deal was signed with Greece to rename the country to North Macedonia. The agreement was praised all over the world as a success story for conflict resolution.

Yet for North Macedonia’s government, the political cost was high. Already in 2017, they had barely escaped alive when an angry nationalist mob stormed parliament and attacked them. One year later, they had to make political concessions and—to the public’s dismay—grant amnesty to the same MPs (the VMRO DPMNE nationalist opposition) who had opened the doors for the violent mob. This was the price to pay for getting a two-thirds majority to approve the name-change deal with Greece.

Once the law was passed, NATO immediately started procedures to invite Skopje to take its seat as the 30th member of the Alliance. The EU was set to deliver a decision to start talks in October 2018, but that decision was first moved to March 2019 and then delayed again to October, when Macron said no, arguing that the Union had to sort out internal issues before expanding any further.

What Comes After Predavstvo?

So where are we now? The political establishment led by the Social Democrats has been betrayed by its foreign partners, who had repeatedly assured them that Macedonia would start negotiation talks. The government had no other option but to call early elections for April 2020.
These are the same leaders that pledged to uphold EU values and restore rule of law, freedom of the press and liberate state institutions from party influence. They have now been forced by the EU to face new elections and bear responsibility for the broken promises. Their approval ratings have fallen since Macron’s “No,” which reinforced perceptions that the government wasted its two-and-a-half years in power by banking heavily on the EU integration process instead of focusing on reforms at home.

The EU is saying that it will have another discussion on enlargement in March, following French proposals for changes in accession methodology. If the EU decides again not to open accession talks, it would further fuel narratives of nationalism and reignite attempts by North Macedonian politicians to replicate the “successes” of leaders like Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or Vladimir Putin.

Whether this government can stay in power or not, the end of the EU accession process would increase the temptation for any political leader to seek authoritarian rule—and arguably make this easier to achieve. Without incentives and pressure from Brussels, the weak internal system of checks and balances would not have the power to stop state capture.

If the EU carrots disappear, all that remains are the local sticks, and that cannot lead to anything other than a malfunctioning system, one thriving on corruption and nationalism and resistant to any kind of reform. Predavstvo could be followed by something worse.

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Pictures © REUTERS

The global climate debate is entering a new phase. Whereas it was previously between “environmentalists” and climate deniers, with a large section of society watching on indifferently, in the new phase the issue is how to handle climate change, rather than whether it is worth discussing or doing something about. There are two main drivers of this shift.

The Death of Denial

First, climate denial is on its last legs. This might seem premature given that US President Donald Trump, who has called climate change “a hoax,” withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement in 2017. The underlying trends, however, are not on the deniers’ side.

In a July 2019 global YouGov poll, just 15 percent of Americans agreed either that the climate was changing but “human activity is not responsible at all” (9 percent) or that the climate was not in fact changing (6 percent). Yet that was the highest number of all polled countries, and even Trump’s Republican party appears to be moving away from the president on this issue. In a September 2019 US Public Views on Climate and Energy poll, 52 percent of millennial Republicans agreed that the US “federal government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change.” These young conservatives might well describe the current US president as a boomer.

Indeed, in recent years the more intellectually honest climate deniers have simply run out of ammunition. Natural variability kept temperatures quite stable in the 2000s, but the last five years have been the warmest on record as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases continue to reach new highs.

Second, the climate crisis is becoming a more salient political issue, and the public at large is becoming more passionate about it. The forests of California are aflame; Venice is underwater; the Victoria Falls have run dry. Youth activist groups such as Fridays for Future are real political forces, especially in Europe and the US. Just as importantly, typical voters truly care about their elected officials’ climate policy.

That was not the case previously. Although, compared to the US, deniers never played an especially large role in the European debate. Still, centrist leaders were able to treat climate issues as just another policy field. Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and Jacques Chirac all urged the US to back the Kyoto Protocol, but when election time came, not many voters were talking about emission reduction targets, whereas the 2019 European Parliamentary elections demonstrated that climate was a key issue for all parties. In the 2020s, leaders of major political parties will no longer be able to brush the issue under the rug.

No Dodging of the Issue

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison makes a good case study. Morrison, a Liberal who won a close election having promised to protect coal and cut taxes, is the type of man who might have denied or ignored climate change in previous times. These days, he can’t, not when there are major climate conferences the public actually cares about—Morrison claimed at the September UN climate conference in New York that Australia is “doing its bit” on climate change—and not when there are frequent major climatic events, like the bush fires that devastated the country in November 2019.

After those fires, Morrison could not dodge the issue, nor argue that heat and drought are unrelated to fire. Instead he had to resort to a tangled defense that “Australia, accountable for 1.3 percent of the world’s emissions” could not be “impacting directly on specific fire events.” Even in the statement by US Secretary Mike Pompeo on the occasion of the US leaving the Paris Agreement there is no climate denial—Pompeo proudly cites America’s emissions-reduction record, lackluster as it is.

So climate denial as we knew it is passé, and the climate crisis is becoming impossible to ignore. Where does the debate go next? Like most conceptual categories, these are somewhat fluid—the same individual may move back and forth between camps, but here are the four main groups.

The Carbonists

First, there are the “Carbonists.” Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic invented the term to describe the successors to the climate deniers—the “carbon” is akin to the “nation” in nationalism. They are small in number, though they hold significant political and economic power. Carbonists do sometimes try to argue that climate science is incorrect, but they can quite easily make their point without doing so. Meyer writes: “Carbonism is a belief that fossil fuels … have inherent virtue. That they are better, in fact, than other energy sources.”

Carbonism is behind Donald Trump’s efforts not just to slow climate action but to roll it back, e.g. to reduce cars’ fuel efficiency against the will of large automakers and US states. At its core is a desire to pull up the drawbridge and protect the property of currently powerful groups, like those who control fossil fuel production or benefit most from the absence of taxes and regulation on carbon emissions, a group that in the West comprises mainly older white men. It frequently devolves into trolling—witness Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s accusation that actor and climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio was responsible for fires in the Amazon.

This philosophy is not specific to the Americas. When Clemens Tönnies, meat magnate and chairman of the German football team Schalke 04, said that the real problem was not how wealthy Europeans live but the “Africans … producing children when it’s dark”, he was making a Carbonist argument.

A Far-Right Phenomenon

Some far-right parties in Europe still take the traditional route and deny the science, like Spain’s Vox, the Brexit party, and the Swedish Democrats. But others raise different objections to electric cars and vegan burgers. Former AfD party leader Alexander Gauland despises everything the Green party stands for. “Green ideology,” he has said, is “taking in strangers, saving the climate, helping others,” as opposed to standing up for “the people.” (Incidentally, the AfD also denies the science.)

The list goes on. The Danish People’s Party says wind power spoils landscapes, while Greece’s Golden Dawn argues that Greeks have a right to exploit their national fossil fuel resources. The leader of the True Finns says “climate change is a reality,” but warns that wind turbines are bad for human health.

Indeed, many Carbonists are obsessed with potential negative impacts of going green. For them, the cure is worse than the disease. How many of those writing op-eds about the water consumed in avocado production or the humans rights abuses often involved in cobalt mining (for lithium batteries) ever made a fuss about the water a cow drinks or the child labor that goes into Nestle chocolate?

The Lukewarmists

Next there are what British writer Matt Ridley has dubbed the “Lukewarmists.” These people accept the overwhelming evidence that the earth is warming and human activity is the primary cause. However, as self-described Lukewarmist and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explains, they “doubt … that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised.”

Lukewarmists, who include German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are a diverse bunch. Some believe the effects of climate change are more manageable than the doomsayers claim, as least manageable for the well-off in wealthy nations. After the bush fires, Prime Minister Morrison underlined how his government had given more resources to the fire chiefs to put out the fires once they started.

Douthat, meanwhile, is skeptical of the Green New Deal in general but has praised the elements of it that seek to adapt the United States’ defenses. Adaptation is rightfully on the agenda nearly everywhere, be it nature-based measures like mangrove restoration or high-tech air purification towers, such as those the Indian Supreme Court recently urged the Delhi government to build to reduce smog.

Back to the Stone Age?

Climate change is a collective action problem, and Lukewarmists are quick to point that any country acting first or alone will incur major economic costs for relatively little reward if other parties don’t also act to cut emissions. Lukewarmists are also eager to minimize their own in-group’s responsibility, perhaps because their country or sector is responsible for only X percent of emissions (for instance, Germany: 2 percent; aviation: 2 percent). Or perhaps because fossil fuels are simply indispensable: Saudi Arabia has ratified the Paris Agreement but does not appear committed to meaningfully reducing emissions; BP is being sued in the UK for its “greenwashing” advertisements. Or perhaps because Greta Thunberg’s journey across the Atlantic was not technically entirely carbon free.

Other Lukewarmists complain that it would be too expensive to solve the problem. They warn that change cannot come too fast without either destroying the economy or alienating the population, pushing people to vote for Carbonists. Russian President Vladimir Putin said in November 2019 that a complete switch to solar and wind power risked “humanity once again ending up in caves.” According to Russia’s Public Opinion Foundation, 40 percent of Russians believe nothing can be done to prevent climate change. Though the cost argument tends to come from the right, some leftist parties or hybrid left-right movements make it too: the French Gilets Jaunes took to the streets in part to oppose a fuel tax increase.

The Techno-Mitigators

The next group are the “Techno-Mitigators.” They have a lot in common with Lukewarmists, particularly in their reluctance to disincentivize, restrict, or ban planet-heating activities. Yet they tend to take climate change more seriously than Lukewarmists and want to mitigate it with technology and human ingenuity.

Think of how the Republican US Senator Marco Rubio and Czech PM Andrej Babis advocate nuclear power. Or how Christian Lindner, leader of Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats, pleads for “innovative approaches” such as synthetic fuels or carbon capture and storage. Or of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company backed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates that is working with the oil giant Occidental to build a plant in Texas that will suck carbon out of the air… and use it to drill for more oil.

Also in the Techno-Mitigators camp are those in favor of geo-engineering, e.g. solar radiation management. This is the practice of injecting reflective particles, such as sulfate aerosols, into the atmosphere, in order to reflect sunlight and thus reduce the amount of heat that reaches the earth, mimicking the effects of volcanic eruptions that have reduced global temperatures in the past.

China led by President Xi Jinping is something of a Techno-Mitigator by inference. It talks the talk on climate and is the largest developer of renewable energy, but it is also building enough new coal power plants to match the entire current coal capacity of the EU. This coal expansion is incompatible with the Paris Agreement. How will Beijing square the circle? The superpower that is already planning to launch the world’s largest cloud-seeding operation in order to increase rainfall in the Tibetan plateau might well continue to bet on technology in the long term.

The Alarmists

Alarmists are those who respond to reports of species going extinct and ice sheets melting by saying it is time to, well, sound the alarm. Greta Thunberg has been doing this very effectively in 2019. Alarmists are horrified by the fact that many G20 nations are on track to miss their climate targets for 2030, and that even if current climate pledges were implemented, temperatures would still rise by about 3 degrees Celsius. Alarmists believe that climate change is a unique, existential threat and governments must drive rapid transformation.

This group includes radical organizations like Extinction Rebellion and authors like Naomi Klein, who see capitalism as it exists today and climate change as part of the same crisis. In January 2019, 626 environmental groups sent a letter to US lawmakers that opposed “corporate schemes … including market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets.” But the Alarmist camp also includes most of the comparatively staid scientific community and many moderate Green or center-left politicians.

Sometimes people make Alarmist arguments for political advantage. The Guardian asked all major British parties the same set of questions about climate change ahead of the 2019 election. All agreed that “climate crisis” was the “biggest issue the UK faces as a nation.” Yet only the Conservatives opposed the youth climate strikes and said they would not stop the expansion of Heathrow airport.

Only those political parties that do not have a massive gap between their rhetoric and their proposals (if not results) can credibly argue the Alarmist point of view. Labour didn’t agree with the British Greens on everything in the survey, but its climate policies did get good marks on a Greenpeace test.

It will take a few years to tell how committed would-be Alarmists, including new European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, are to their principles. The municipalities that recently declared climate emergency or pledged to go net-zero will have to demonstrate their seriousness in the 2020s. And many alarmist parties will face heavy friendly fire over their cooperation with other camps, on the grounds that, as Klein put it in This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, “the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.”

Mix and Match

Unsurprisingly, the author of a column called Carbon Critical has a lot of sympathy for mitigators. One suspects that if more people read the UN reports of impending disaster, there would be more people on the Alarmist bandwagon. Nevertheless, every group but the Carbonists has something to offer.

Techno-Mitigators have a clear-eyed view of how bleak the situation is. Flight shaming or buying secondhand clothes can make a difference at the margins. There is, however, no way to meet the Paris Agreement goals without relying heavily on technology. Must we retire the safest existing nuclear power plants for ideological reasons?

When Alarmists such as Bernie Sanders or Friends of the Earth Europe write off carbon capture as a “false solution,” they overrate the danger of moral hazard, i.e. the risk that people will stop reducing emissions because they think technology can save them. They should listen to the IPCC, which acknowledges that all pathways for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius require the use of “negative emissions technologies.” Instead of writing these off, Alarmists should encourage advocates to put their money where their mouth is: how can we possibly build the equipment and infrastructure for carbon storage without proper market incentives?

Geo-engineering is risky stuff, even as a temporary solution to buy us enough breathing space to cut emissions. For instance, while solar radiation management would slow global warming, it would do nothing to stop other climate problems like ocean acidification, and it might have dangerous side effects like changing rainfall patterns. Yet it is quite likely to occur on a meaningful scale because it costs less up front to dim the sun than to quickly reshape economies. Scientists are working intensely on such technologies, especially in the US and China. Therefore it makes sense for all countries to do research into geo-engineering and strengthen international regulatory frameworks, rather than hope the technology is never used.

Lukewarmists, meanwhile, provide a healthy skepticism and realism. We will inevitably spend large sums on adaptation that, from a global, generational perspective, would be better spent on mitigation. And some Alarmist demands are divorced from political considerations. The German branch of Fridays for Future advocates a carbon price of €180 per ton. This number is the result of a German Environmental Agency calculation of the burden today’s carbon emissions put on future generations. But it takes no account of what Germany’s competitors are doing, what German voters want, or whether low-income groups could afford the tax, as Lukewarmists eagerly point out.

Alarmists’ task is to press Lukewarmists to follow these criticisms to their logical conclusions. They should not accept the hollow claim that raising taxes on meat or gasoline is necessarily an unacceptable burden on low-income groups, as if governments do not have the power to compensate workers by reducing other taxes. They should ask Lukewarmist politicians to borrow from future generations so that we can actually afford to make synthetic fuels and low-carbon steel and cement today. And they should encourage their leaders to play hardball with laggard nations, for example by implementing a carbon border tax to level the playing field and stop Carbonists from gaining a temporary economic advantage.

A Power Struggle for the 2020s

It is a sign of progress that the debate has moved on and split into four camps. Just five years ago, the chairman of the environment committee in the US Senate threw a snowball on the senate floor in order to “disprove” global warming. Thankfully, that chapter of the climate debate is coming to a close.

The success of the Paris Agreement will depend on how political power is shared between the four new camps in the 2020s—in other words, whether Alarmists can take on the best of Lukewarmist and Techno-Mitigator thinking, convert more undecideds, and defeat the Carbonists.

The post Carbon Critical: The Four Camps of the New Climate Debate appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

Artwork © Dominik Herrmann

The New Year has just started, and Croatia’s Prime Minister Andrej Plenković finds himself confronted with a pile of difficult tasks. As president of the Council of the European Union, three hot topics have landed on his lap: the EU’s long-term budget, forging a Brexit deal, and EU enlargement. “Our presidency is coming at a crucial time for Europe, but also for a world,” Plenković said in late October 2019 when presenting his priorities for the country’s EU six-month presidency. The fact that it’s the first time ever that Croatia, the youngest EU member, having joined in 2013, is holding that office doesn’t make things easier.

Krešimir Macan, a former Plenković advisor and now a political marketing expert, believes it will be an “extraordinary presidency.” According to Macan, Plenković will make a special effort to solve the issue of EU enlargement, which is on hold after French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to block Albania and North Macedonia’s EU membership bids.
“If there is anything I believe he will do very well, it will be the [EU] presidency, because it is his great ambition—the desire to show off in front of his European counterparts. I think he has invested a lot in the preparations,” Macan told the Berlin Policy Journal.

Plenković himself rarely misses an opportunity to emphasize that the EU presidency holds the promise of a great diplomatic success and is also “a great opportunity for Croatia to affirm itself.” Critics, however, say that the EU presidency is overrated, and that it is just a matter of rotation between the member states.

“This is not a success by itself, but it is a chance to do something. Plenković hoped to enter the presidency in a quiet period, but he is entering in it in a very unpleasant period, with two huge problems, namely Brexit and the seven-year budget plan,” Žarko Puhovski, a veteran political analyst from Croatia, told the Berlin Policy Journal.

European Ambitions

Plenković was born in Croatia’s capital Zagreb to a university professor father and a cardiologist mother, and studied law at his hometown’s university. Foreign and European affairs have been close to his heart since the start of his political career. Shortly after completing his studies, in 1994, he got a job at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an associate in the Department for European Integration. In 2011, he joined the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), a conservative party that has ruled Croatia for most of the period since the country gained independence at the beginning of the 1990s. He became a lawmaker in the Croatian Parliament, and, in 2013, he was elected as one of the first twelve Croatian MEPs to the European Parliament.

In 2016, after his predecessor Tomislav Karamarko resigned over a conflict of interest, Plenković, not burdened by corruption scandals, became HDZ leader. This moderate pro-European was a perfect fit for party leader, especially after Karamarko had moved the party to the right—occasionally the far right—following the lead of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom Karamarko admired and whose authoritarian and nationalist politics he copied. Under Plenković’s leadership, HDZ, which is a member of Europe’s largest center-right political bloc (the European People’s Party, or EEP), has stepped back into the political center and renounced the party’s authoritarian tendencies under Karamarko.

During the last year’s wrangling about the set-up of the new European Commission, some Croatian media speculated Plenković could end up with the top job: commission president (the job went to Ursula von der Leyen). But Plenković never confirmed the speculations; rather, he stressed his support for EPP parliamentarian leader Manfred Weber, the former EPP’s Spitzenkandidat, who was subsequently blocked.

Two Goals: Schengen and the Euro

From the moment he took office as Prime Minister in October 2016, Plenković has called for deeper integration into the EU, emphasizing two important goals: joining the EU passport-free Schengen travel area, and becoming a member of the eurozone.

After sending a letter of intent to the European Central Bank last year to join the European Exchange Mechanism, or ERM-2, Croatia is now in a “waiting room” for countries that want to adopt the euro. It is unclear how long it will stay there, but Plenković wants the period to be as short as possible.

As for Schengen, the European Commission announced in October 2019 that Croatia had “taken the measures needed to ensure that the necessary conditions for the full implementation of the Schengen rules and standards are met.” Although Plenković presented this as a big step forward, the commission’s evaluation of Croatian technical preparedness was only the first step.

Additionally, the issue of Schengen and border regulation is very controversial in Croatia because for over two years, non-governmental and international organizations have been warning about human rights abuses at Croatia’s state borders, which are also the EU’s external borders. According to their reports, Croatian police frequently repel migrants and refugees who are trying to cross the border from neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, sometimes resorting to violence.

While countries in the Croatian neighborhood, such as Slovenia and Hungary, decided to “defend” themselves against migrants by sealing their borders with ever higher wires or fences, Croatia, according to the prime minister “was in a position to raise the wire at the border, but chose to strengthen the police instead.”

At the same time, Croatian authorities deny the claims about violence, pointing out that they have been praised many times in the EU for safeguarding its external borders. Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel has expressed her support of Croatia’s efforts a couple of times.

Pressure from the Right-Wing

While European leaders have only words of praise for Plenković, the situation looks quite different in his home country.

November 2019 saw the biggest protest yet during his tenure. The issue of the demand for higher wages for teachers, who went on strike nationwide for more than a month, brought tens of thousands of protesters to Zagreb’s main square, not only educators and members of teachers’ unions, but also people who were generally dissatisfied. Plenković eventually agreed to most of the unions’ demands and bought himself some peace. The magnitude of the protests, however, revealed a high level of social discontent in the country.

At the same time, the prime minister’s centrist course is strongly criticized by the right end of the political spectrum. In some right-wing circles, Plenković was even described as “the new leader of the left.” In March 2018, thousands of people gathered in Zagreb to protest the parliament’s ratification of the Council of Europe’s so-called Istanbul Convention. The non-EU body, which includes Russia and Turkey, is intended to combat domestic violence against women; the right-wingers claimed, however, that Plenković’s government was promoting “gender ideology.” The convention was ratified in the end, but many HDZ supporters were disgruntled, believing that Plenković had betrayed them.

The pressure from the right has not stopped since. Plenković’s government is often criticized for being supported by representatives of the Serb national minority. Since Croatia’s 1990s wars against the combined forces of the (former) Yugoslav Army and rebelling Croatian Serbs, intolerance toward the Serb ethnic minority has been very strong, and the right is constantly using it for political purposes.

This puts Plenković in an unenviable position, as he has to find a balance between the hard right and the center. He doesn’t want to lose more conservative and nationalist voters. At the same time, he is struggling to preserve the image of a statesman who cherishes European values such as diversity and tolerance.

His Biggest Threat: His Party

Plenković, whose favorite word is “stability,” actually has a hard time keeping control, especially in his own party. Because the HDZ was unable to form a government on its own, it was forced to enter a coalition. Its junior coalition partners are constantly raising new demands, having threatened to leave the coalition on many occasions. But since the 2020 budget was passed by parliament in November 2019, experts consider the relationship between coalition partners is stable—for now.

Observers agree that Plenković’s biggest challenge is to hold on to the leadership of the HDZ, since a considerable part of the membership, the hard-liners in particular, is not happy with his politics. Macan, Plenković’s former advisor, says that the way the prime minister is leading his party is causing the greatest disagreement.

“He directs it as a ‘normal,’ Christian democratic, center-right party, like the German CDU. But until recently the HDZ was a de facto movement, a broad tent that included people from the center to the far-right,” Macan said.
Intra-party elections are due to take place this year, and the big question is whether a strong personality, someone able to unite all the malcontents, emerges and challenges Plenković for the party leadership. Some party functionaries from the so-called right-wing faction have already publicly stated their intention to run against the prime minister.

Timing is important: will the intra-party elections take place in the spring, as announced earlier, or in the fall, after Croatia’s next regular parliamentary elections? If his party wins the parliamentary elections, it will be easier for Plenković to retain his position in the HDZ.

Puhovski, the analyst, says that the period before the intra-party elections could affect Plenković’s conduct of politics and his managing of the EU presidency. “He will not be able to devote himself to the relations among European countries as much as he wants to. With one eye at least, he will look at the internal affairs of the HDZ,” Puhovski predicts.

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© REUTERS/David Gray

“The AI Arms Race,” “Information Iron Curtain”, or even a new “Tech Cold War”: there’s apparently no shortage of hyperbolic headlines harking back to pre-1989 times, when it comes to describing the now fierce competition between the United States and China over influence in global affairs that is progressively waged also over technologies. The current fight in Western countries about allowing the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei a role in the build-up of their 5G networks is just one example of this.

At the first glance, one could perhaps argue that the re-emergence of two superpowers clashing over global dominance is reminiscent of the old Cold War days when the US battled it out with the Soviet Union. However, appearances are often deceptive, especially in light of the mounting importance of technologies for global competition, and analogies that are leftovers of a bygone era are misleading.

“Brave” New World

The probably most obvious fundamental difference from Cold War times—as trivial it might sound—is the absence of an unequivocal political block confrontation. The “Western world” is not engaged in an official system and military contest with China, in contrast to the much more ideologically charged conflict between NATO members and the Warsaw Pact countries prior to 1989. With the present structure of international politics, the US, for instance, cannot take for granted that its organizational or like-minded “allies” will automatically join it in banning Huawei from their own 5G networks.

This is closely connected to the ever-growing economic interdependence on a global scale. China’s state-capitalistic system is much more integrated into the world economy than the rather old Soviet closed-off system and—as can be seen in the current trade conflict—is also deeply intertwined with the US economy. Moreover, this increasing economic entanglement has been propelled by digitalization itself, as technological systems are often shaped by individual modular components with different countries of origin. And within these global supply chains, the US and China are―to some extent― dependent on each other.

In several areas, including tech-related ones, it seems that Washington is forced into competition with Beijing over who offers the better (and perhaps cheaper) products and services, including to some longstanding US allies. Given this political and economic setting, these allies often don’t feel obliged to choose one side. This is due to the lack of two closed blocks. This is for example shown in the way some NATO members have simultaneously “signed up” for China´s Belt and Road Initiative or the 17+1 format. Hence, calling the ongoing dispute between China and the US a “Cold War”—even without considering the increasing impact of digitalization—would already barely reflect the current realities.

“General-Purpose” Technologies

Often overlooked, but no less important, are the new technologies themselves, which also mean the Cold War analogies do not work. Since the inception of the internet age, the sheer quantity and nature of emerging technologies have led to a rapid and structural transformation. During the Cold War, the number of technologies with relevance for the US-Soviet power battle was comparatively limited. Nowadays, the list of relevant innovations with important implications for various sectors seems to be getting longer by the day. Hence, data-driven technologies, for instance, have a much bigger impact on a country´s GDP today than say, nuclear production, did before.

Many of those technologies don’t just have a dual-use nature, but rather a “general-purpose” one. For instance, the application of artificial intelligence systems is often compared with the invention and use of electricity by pointing to the range of application possibilities. Furthermore, AI innovations can now be developed and shared without the huge industrial effort that, for instance, building intercontinental ballistic missiles meant. Today’s innovations have few parallels with the Cold War ones, which were characterized by huge logistics requirements and complex and lengthy manufacturing phases. However, this also means that countries like the US can no longer control them the way they did in the early days.

The Innovation Edge

This is boosted by the fact that—in contrast to the Soviet Union—China is heavily investing in all of these technologies and genuinely challenging the US innovation edge, especially by pushing forward with the “military-civilian fusion” to fully leverage the general-purpose applicability.
Also, the sources of major technological advances have shifted from the public sector (or the “military-industrial complex”) to commercial companies, most notably illustrated by the tech giants both in the US and in China. This growing reliance on the private sector requires much more sophisticated long-term strategies: while the US has to find ways to ensure that the access to those innovations stemming from US-based “multinational companies” will not be impeded, China will attempt to use its state-capitalistic companies without stifling innovation; in both cases, permanent readjustments are needed.

And last but not least, nowadays there is the contradictory development of digitalization connecting people across borders via information and communication technologies and leading to a democratization of interaction, but at the same time also handing nation states the tools that allow them to put into practice totalitarian visions to an unprecedented degree. China´s application and export of surveillance technologies or internet censorship are cases in point. Hence, technologies and its usage have much more impact on the ideological battlefield internationally.

New Parameters

These are just some of the profound differences from the Cold War period. At the same time, it is telling that within both the US and China, some are pushing for technological decoupling and thus showing a longing for the old Cold War structures. However, such a process would be messy and expensive, if doable at all.

The analogy of a “Tech Cold War” suggests parameters that are far too static and structured to describe the current situation. Conversely, Washington and Beijing find themselves in a perpetual mode of competition and negotiation vis-à-vis third countries, and even with actors in their own countries. If they want to avoid harming themselves, they will need a much more nuanced strategy and a better understanding of the impact of technologies in various areas including economic and military competitiveness and the international order.

It is of utmost importance that those dynamics are understood as precisely as possible—not only for the two main competitors, but also for countries and regions like Europe, who run the risk of becoming of pawns caught between the two fronts.

The post The Tech Cold War Illusion appeared first on Berlin Policy Journal - Blog.

© REUTERS/Edgar Su

We live in troubled times. Compared to the rather static geopolitics of the Cold War, today’s geo-economic confrontation between the United States, China and Europe is a far more dynamic phenomenon. What is at stake is securing influence outside of one’s own territory by using geo-economic instruments to reinforce one’s own power position. To this end, governments are attempting to control data streams, financial and energy flows, and trade in industrial goods and other technologies. Asymmetries in the international system are increasing. To maintain or to regain the capacity to act, Germany and Europe must engage in comprehensive strategic rethinking.

Change in Four Dimensions

Economic power has always been a decisive element in the international power system. Economic strength, combined with state monetary policy, represents the material basis on which to develop military capacities. At present, however, the relation between economic strength, state power and influence in the global system is being transformed along at least four dimensions.

First, reciprocal dependencies—“interdependencies” —were long regarded as a stabilizing factor within the international system. Now, however, they are seen as contributing to growing uncertainty. Entanglements of trade and investment, along with ever longer supply and value chains, have considerably increased the vulnerability of many states, as well as their susceptibility to blackmail in foreign economic activities. The trend has affected weaker developing markets but also highly-developed open economies.

Second, we can observe increasing shifts in power and greater asymmetries in the international economic and financial system. This is partly driven by the return of protectionism, but the systemic conflict between the Western world and authoritarian regimes also plays a role. Another factor is the extremely heterogeneous adoption of digitalization and technological revolutions across different regions and countries: this has also fueled shifts and imbalances in economic power.

A Tool of Political Strategy

Competition to control crucial new technologies—artificial intelligence, cloud computing, quantum internet, 5G—has long been under way. Strength in innovation and technological advantage are directly relevant to security questions. Even in the energy sector, technical know-how and market leadership have a strongly political component, as well as an economic one: this is particularly the case with low-carbon technologies. Battery manufacturing and intelligent electricity networks are also good cases in point.

Third, the interdependence of economic, technological and security dimensions now determines states’ scope for action in traditional foreign policy areas and in foreign economic policy. Take the global extension of supply chains and systems of value-creation. These originally received political support, since they were regarded as a development opportunity for countries with low price levels. If components were produced in low-cost locations, or so went the idea, it was certain to benefit the manufacturing companies, the countries where production was located, and consumers in importing countries.

Fourth, inter-state conflicts are less and less a question of military action. This is primarily due to decreasing social acceptance, above all in Western societies, of traditional patterns of military conflict. The shift means that events like Russia’s violent takeover of the Crimea or the war in Syria are now the exception and not the rule. By contrast, we are seeing a sharp increase in countries’ deployment of economic and financial instruments to strengthen their power base, including outside their own territory.

The overall picture changes, however, when foreign direct investment increasingly becomes a tool of political strategy. This could lead to a debate in which implications for security policy overshadow questions of the social impact of globalization.

Parmesan and Irish Butter

A striking example of a simultaneous pursuit of economic and foreign policy interests is US foreign policy under president Donald Trump. The revised US National Security Strategy, published in 2017, equates economic security with national security, and makes the former an explicit element of foreign policy. This has formed the basis for legislation limiting foreign direct investment, like the 2018 Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act. Takeovers of American companies can now be selectively prevented on national security grounds, as in March 2018, when the US government blocked an attempted takeover of semi-conductor maker Qualcomm by a Singaporean firm.

To correct its vast trade deficits, the US has imposed tariffs on imported goods. Restricting flows of imports is intended to force compliance on the part of the foreign country in question. This is why the Trump administration has gradually racked up tariffs on Chinese goods, now totaling almost $550 billion, affecting a large proportion of all US imports from China. Against the EU, the US government imposed special import duties on steel and aluminum. Since October, new US tariffs have also hit a further range of European products, including German and French wine, parmesan cheese from Italy, Spanish olive oil, and Irish butter.

These sort of trade disputes can quickly have an effect on other economic flows, including relations between currencies. In response to punitive US tariffs, China is allowing the renminbi to weaken against the dollar. This aims to negate, or at least minimize, the effects of the new US tariff policy. As a result, the euro has considerably strengthened against the renminbi since April 2019, a trend which already has a negative effect on exports to China from eurozone countries, above all Germany.

China’s Power over States and Companies

China is also pursuing another model of geo-economic power projection. Its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) creates economic dependency that can then be turned to political purposes. The means China uses to this end are many and various: investment, agreements on raw materials and trade, energy, and infrastructure projects in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The strategy is already working: in the UN Security Council in June 2017, Greece blocked an EU motion condemning human rights abuses in China. The previous year, Cosco, a semi-state Chinese shipping firm, had taken a majority holding in the important Greek port of Piraeus.

And there is another emerging theme for German firms to come to grips with. China not only tightly controls and spies on its own society and economy, its social credit systems and lack of data protection are forcing foreign companies to adhere to standards at odds with Western ideas of good governance and data protection.

Of course, the US and China are not the only powers using economic means to achieve political goals. Russia, for example, makes very precise use of its energy resources and infrastructure to stabilize its own political alliances and to drive wedges into other groupings. The Nord Stream 2 project is one prominent instance. The undersea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, now at an advanced stage of development, has given rise to substantial tensions within the EU and NATO. Germany insists on its sovereign right in economic policy, emphasizing the importance of good relations with Russia. Berlin’s allies, however, continue to warn of probable German overdependence on Russian natural gas, while also criticizing how Nord Stream 2 routes gas supplies around Ukraine, depriving that country of its most important bargaining chip.

Globalizing the Power Struggle

This is a clear example of how the use of geo-economic instruments can make it difficult for Western countries to support reform processes in non-democratic or non-market-oriented states. Other examples include the founding of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, largely at the behest of China, and the creation of the New Development Bank, established by the BRICS states. Both banks were created by non-Western states as counterweights to the still-dominant Bretton Woods system. Since their credit-granting decisions are no longer subject to the conditions imposed by the West, the new supranational banks undermine the norms and standards established under the old financial order.

In addition, Brazil and South Africa are using state-owned banks and companies to develop asymmetrical relations with neighboring countries. In the Middle East, oil-rich states like Qatar and Saudi Arabia use direct financial transfers to expand their regional influence.

For decades, economic relations underwent steadily intensifying globalization. However, today it is possible to discern new and contrary trends. If great powers like China and the United States weaponize economic instruments such as tariffs, investments, sanctions, currency manipulation, and energy and data flows, there will be far-reaching consequences for the international economic system. The same is true of new control mechanisms like the screening of foreign direct investment, the partial unbundling of global supply and production chains, and new interventionist state industrial strategies, functioning on both regional and national scales.

This change is all taking place in a world economy currently experiencing weak growth, with central banks playing an ever larger role, and with debt continuing to rise. All of these developments create increasing interdependency, and also a larger number of potential targets. Geo-economic instruments are deployed in this way to bolster states’ power positions, in turn changing the basic framework of both the world and regional economies. These changes demand a substantial rethinking of states’ scope for action and the effectiveness of classical foreign and security policy.

Open and Vulnerable

Of all countries, Germany is particularly badly hit by these trends. According to the Federal Economics Ministry, the German economy has an openness index of 87.2 percent, making it the most open of all the G7 states. Around 28 percent of German jobs are directly or indirectly dependent on exports. For manufacturing industry, the figure is as high as 56 percent. Moreover, in 2017 German direct foreign investment reached a new high, at €1167 billion, with the United States its largest recipient.

In the other direction, direct foreign investment into Germany also hit a new record that year, totaling €741 billion. In this new geo-economic context, the openness which once served as Germany’s growth guarantee and the basis of its prosperity now puts the country in a particularly vulnerable situation. Moreover, this fact now sets new limits on its foreign policy options.

In 2018, Germany’s most important export partners were the United States, France, China, the Netherlands and the UK. Its most significant import partners were China, the Netherlands, France, the United States and Italy. This constellation demonstrates the difficulty confronting Germany in any escalating Chinese-American rivalry. China is a key guarantor of Germany’s economic model, but despite severe differences of opinion between Berlin and the current US administration, close trans-Atlantic relations remain crucial for Germany, in security cooperation, economic and financial relations, and in the confrontation between democratic and autocratic systems.

In other words, the political and economic aspects of geo-economic “statecraft” have to be considered alongside strategic factors. Germany’s “National Industrial Strategy 2030,” recently unveiled by the Federal Economics Minister, is a step in this direction. But the ensuing debate has revealed deep-seated instinctive reactions, with divisions between supporters and opponents of state economic aid.

The discussion about Huawei’s access to the German 5G market suggests that the intersection between economic and security policies and the debate on fundamental values has seen only limited progress, doing little to reconcile short-term economic considerations with long-term strategic questions. In addition, the significance of geo-economics is still not widely appreciated in the German public sphere. According to a Forsa survey in April 2019, 60 percent of Germans are opposed to using the country’s economic power to achieve foreign policy goals.

Making Europe Competitive

In order to successfully assert itself within the new framework of geo-economic competition, Germany must contribute towards making Europe more capable of concerted action. The new European Commission has taken the first steps in this direction, by giving responsibility for a host of central geo-economic portfolios – economy, trade, the EU’s internal market, climate, competition and digitalization, as well as foreign relations – to a new set of Commission vice-presidents. The guidelines for the new Commissioners envisage Europe exerting greater sovereignty with regard to these issues.

However, concretely implementing this new policy, while also cooperating with member state governments, will present a serious challenge. As a prerequisite for any stronger stance toward the rest of the world, the EU and the eurozone must consolidate their internal relations and strengthen their own competitiveness. Thus, for example, to ensure that the euro can play a stronger international role as an investment and trade currency, EU countries must deepen the banking union, move toward a capital market union, and create a shared safe European financial asset.

To reduce dependency on technology from non-EU states, Europeans must improve overall conditions to encourage greater competitive capacity in high-tech fields. Europe must develop its own technological strengths, a prerequisite if the EU wants to establish worldwide norms in future technologies. Achieving this will require investment in research and development, using funds both from the EU itself and from the European Investment Bank.

Some welcome initiatives are already in their early stages, for example, the development of a European data cloud and the establishment of an overarching authority on security-critical technology infrastructure, analogous to the European Medicines Agency. The European Battery Alliance, established in 2017, brings together stakeholders from every part of the battery value-creation chain, and its voice will be listened to in negotiations on next Multiannual Financial Framework.

Two Trump Cards

Attention must be paid to protective measures as well as increasing competitiveness. Protection here could, for example, include more robust screening of foreign direct investment and skepticism when foreign state-controlled investors seek to acquire a stake in key German or European companies. In order to defend against secondary sanctions, like those imposed by the United States in relation to Iran, the European Council on Foreign Relations has suggested an EU-specific agency which could implement counter-measures to protect European industry.

The shaping of economic relations with important players in the new geo-economic world goes far beyond implementing shared trade policies. The European Union needs a clear strategy on which relationships should be cultivated in trade, investment, development, energy, climate, and security: specifically, with whom should it have close partnerships, with whom competitive relations and with whom good neighborly prosperity? To determine this, security interests and economic interests must be considered at the same time.

In this context, the EU can rely on two trump cards. First, the euro, which in spite of all its crises has never seriously had its value as a currency put into doubt. Second, the EU’s internal market, which can easily keep pace with the United States and China. Meanwhile, the current challenge for the EU is to activate the effectiveness of its market power, along with the political and military strength of the Union and its member states, while strategically protecting and developing its own geo-economic advantages.

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© Murat Cetinmuhurdar/Presidential Press Office/Handout via REUTERS

Helmut Kohl once described Germany as “only surrounded by friends.” The re-unified country, had “found its international place,” the former chancellor reckoned, “without breaks (…) with the foreign policy tradition of the old Federal Republic.” That is very hard to argue today. Rather, Germany is seeking its place again. The international order is crisscrossed by fault lines, and the foreign policy tradition of the Federal Republic must prove itself in an environment full of old-new great power rivalries.

Ambivalence permeates almost all foreign policy relationships. US President Donald Trump, of course, comes to mind first. But he is only the most flagrant case. German diplomacy moves in a world full of two-faced frenemies, as a cursory glance at (some of) the most important opponents shows.

Janus-Heads Everywhere

China is Germany’s most important future market, but its technology-driven authoritarianism also poses the greatest threat to freedom worldwide. The United States is urging Germany to decouple itself from the People’s Republic: this is the background to the dispute over Huawei. “Decoupling” is out of the question for Germany because of the density of economic interdependence, but the protests in Hong Kong and the revelations about the Gulag system in Xinjiang make it seem advisable to reduce economic and political dependence on Beijing wherever possible—especially with such a crucial infrastructure as 5G.

India offers itself as an alternative, democratically governed growth market, but under Prime Minister Narendra Modi it is also drifting dangerously toward authoritarian nationalism, with repressive, Islamophobic domestic politics and an aggressive, revisionist foreign policy—as recently demonstrated by the brutal suppression of autonomy in Kashmir.

Thanks to its geopolitical gains in zones of disorder (Syria, Ukraine), Russia is back in the geopolitical game. German policy on Russia, however, flitters helplessly between pipeline construction and sanctions. Moscow will gain even more influence over Germany’s energy supply through the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, while Putin is arming his country more and more aggressively against Germany’s eastern neighbors and is quite openly positioning himself as a champion of an illiberal global movement. The new pipeline also weakens Ukraine’s negotiating position vis-à-vis Russia, which Germany is actually trying to strengthen with sanctions against Russia.

Turkey, Poland, the UK

Since the refugee deal, Turkey has been Europe’s de facto border guard, caring for millions of Syrian refugees and keeping them comfortably far away from the Europeans. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan believes, of course, that he can blackmail the EU with these refugees, whom he keeps threatening to “send”—just as he puts NATO under pressure with his overtures to Putin. His intervention in northern Syria, which violated international law, triggered a debate about Turkish NATO membership and has led to a far-reaching ban on arms exports to a country that is still a NATO ally.

Poland—twice as important for German foreign trade as Russia—has been courted by Berlin for years, and yet the PiS government regularly threatens to demand reparations for German crimes during World War II. Warsaw is pushing ahead with its efforts to dismantle the separation of powers and is subordinating Holocaust remembrance to an all-dominant national narrative of victimhood in a troubling way (which Germany criticizes only cautiously for fear of further fueling demands for reparations).

The United Kingdom is leaving the EU, reducing its geopolitical heft and indirectly exacerbating the problem of burden sharing within Europe because Britain has always made an above-average contribution to collective defense (spending constantly more than 2 percent of GDP for defense). If in the future more than 80 percent of NATO spending comes from non-EU countries, Germany in particular will be singled out for its shortcomings. Keeping the breakaway UK as a partner after Brexit will be one of the most difficult tasks in the coming years.

The Cost of Moral Clarity

The list could go on. As different as these cases are: politics in a world full of frenemies demands a high tolerance for ambiguity. It must do without grand gestures and pseudo-radical proposals that suggest “moral clarity” but often achieve the opposite of what is desired.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of them in the German debate, such as the idea that cutting Poland’s EU agricultural subsidies because of the PiS government’s controversial justice system reforms would somehow bring PiS back on the path to the rule of law. Similarly, pushing Turkey out of NATO (fortunately almost impossible according to the statutes) would be against the interests of Germany and the alliance. Erdogan would simply tie himself to Putin even more closely.

And capping defense spending on the grounds that more should not be given because “a racist sits in the White House” (SPD parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, Rolf Mützenich) would confirm Trump’s prejudice that the US is exploited by its unappreciative NATO partners, who despise their protector. Equally short-sighted are the widespread fantasies of punishing the renegade British―some Germans would love to see them feel the negative effects of their exit from the EU club.

Such proposals serve more to set moral boundaries than to achieve a strategic goal. As Jan Techau of the German Marshall Fund has argued, the overriding need for self-affirmation in the German foreign policy debate leads to a paralyzing uncertainty of action: “Moral insecurity leads to a compensatory, self-centered moralism, which in turn produces the feeling of moral superiority.” But this psychological need is not the only explanation for the German foreign policy paralysis.

Three Shocks

Three shock-like experiences have provoked confessions by leading German politicians that they want to assume “more responsibility:” the Ukraine crisis (2014), the double blow of the Brexit referendum and the Trump election (2016), and finally the alienation between Paris and Berlin (2019). The sacred vows that Germany would become more involved had barely been made before they were overtaken by the next crisis.

The first shock was seeing how Putin’s Russia has gone from being an unwilling partner to an open opponent and has forcibly redrawn borders within Europe. The US and the UK, the two founding nations of the Atlantic system, the two nations that first reeducated Germany as a model pupil of the liberal world order, are taking a nationalistic turn. They see the EU—the decisive medium for Germany’s political and economic resurgence—as “a foe” (Trump).

And now France, Germany’s most important remaining partner in Europe, is going its own way. French President Emmanuel Macron single-handedly blocked the accession process for the Western Balkans and launched a new Ostpolitik with Vladimir Putin, also without discussion. He also declared NATO to be “brain dead,” thus confronting Berlin with the impossible choice between an Atlantic alliance or European defense. An ancient dilemma from the 1950s has returned: Germany is supposed to decide between Washington and Paris.

Catch-22 of German Security Policy

This calls into question Germany’s preference for not taking sides but rather striving for European cohesion and the expansion of NATO at the same time. This has been a constant of German foreign policy since the failure of the European Defense Community in 1954 and Germany’s subsequent accession to NATO.

For a long time, it seemed not only that the two weren’t mutually exclusive, but that they were almost conditional on each other: NATO was the security policy framework that made European unification possible. Trump and Macron are now questioning this, and their attacks complement each other in this respect. Trump (like his predecessor Barack Obama) no longer accepts that the US should forever be Europe’s guarantor of security, while the Europeans (in his eyes) are fleecing the US economically and at the same time building new gas pipelines to Russia. Macron, on the other hand, has concluded from Trump’s unpredictability that it is an imperative of European sovereignty to build an alternative to NATO as soon as possible.

This results in a kind of catch-22 of German security policy: if Germany were to reach out to Macron over his project, Trump would have another reason to question the alliance. And the Eastern Europeans do not trust Germany and France to defend them against Russia. So they would try to bind themselves even more closely, bilaterally, to the US. In terms of defense policy, Europe would be divided into different zones of (in)security—the opposite of the desired European sovereignty.

The Fragile Munich Consensus

Although key German interests are at stake here, Berlin is purely reactive in this debate. While Trump, Macron, Putin, and Erdogan drive the action, the German government largely limits itself to reviewing the initiatives of others.

Why? It was only six years ago that the “Munich Consensus” was reached at the Security Conference in January 2014—when Germany’s federal president (Joachim Gauck), foreign minister (Frank-Walter Steinmeier) and defense minister (Ursula von der Leyen) made almost identical speeches that all saw Germany taking “greater responsibility” in the world. They encouraged the country to face these challenges self-confidently. Gauck conjured up a “good Germany,” an adult, widely respected country. It had something to give back to the world, he said; Germany had to change from a consumer of order to a producer of order.

Shortly after those Munich speeches, Putin began a hybrid attack on eastern Ukraine, occupying the Crimea with “Green Men” without badges. The Russian leader to whom only six years earlier Steinmeier had offered a “modernization partnership” was waging war to move borders in Europe.
The world of “new responsibility” was not supposed to be this rough. When Berlin foreign policy-makers are asked when the latest uncertainty about Germany’s role in the world began, they mention the Crimean invasion more often than any other event.

Wooing Berlin, Disrupting Europe

According to the Munich Consensus, Germans had to do more to maintain the existing order. But the notion that this world order could be questioned not only by its opponents, but from within—by its previous guarantor, the US—was beyond the power of foreign policy imagination at the time.
That’s why the Brexit decision and Trump’s choice were so shocking. Angela Merkel’s lapidary remark in a Trudering beer tent in May 2017 summed up the new situation in a nutshell: “The times when we could rely on others completely are to some extent over.” The situation didn’t seem hopeless at the time, however: a few weeks before Merkel’s campaign speech, Emmanuel Macron had defeated Marine Le Pen. That September, Macron gave his great Sorbonne speech, in which he set out the program for a sovereign “Europe that protects.” He had deliberately scheduled the speech with Germany in mind, right after the Bundestag elections.

After Chancellor Angela Merkel’s failure to build a coalition with the Liberals and the Greens, her third “grand coalition” with Germany’s Social Democrats started in March 2018 on the basis of a coalition agreement including a passionate chapter on Europe that called for a “breakthrough.” But little action followed these noble words. Macron did not receive a concrete response from Berlin to his numerous proposals. How could it have done so? The coalition was always divided on crucial issues such as European defense, migration, or the European budget and was therefore unable to speak or act.

The deafening German silence on Macron’s European sovereignty initiative leads directly into the recent crisis. After his enthusiastic proposals for reform were rebuffed, the French president switched over to disruption and questioned the EU accession process for Northern Macedonia and Albania, EU Russia policy, and finally NATO.

Now, he is getting his reaction: German politicians haven’t for many years talked about NATO as enthusiastically for many years as they did after that “brain death” remark. Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer tried in several speeches to revive the Munich Consensus: Germany must do more for common defense, she said, not just as a partner but with its own initiatives, perhaps even northern Syria, Africa, or East Asia. After some hesitation, both the chancellor and Foreign Minister Heiko Maas also made a passionate case for NATO as Germany’s only reliable life insurance. The 2-percent promise would certainly be fulfilled—around 2030.

Twilight Period

It would be very bold to make forecasts about this crucial year of 2020. But one thing can be said: domestic and foreign political instability are a dangerous combination.

A foreign diplomat who has been observing Germany for decades (and prefers to remain anonymous) explains the “paralyzing ambiguity” of German foreign policy as the effect of a “twilight period.” Germany is in a double transition: Angela Merkel apparently cannot and does not want to provide any more impulses. And while Germany is waiting for a change of power at home, foreign policy is also in transition, during which the American-centered order is crumbling without a new one being foreseeable yet. Germany is fleeing the double stress of domestic and foreign insecurity and in a way is playing dead.

The unspoken question is: what if Donald Trump wins a second term as President of the United States in November 2020? That is the question that hangs over all strategic considerations—not only in Germany. Uncertainty about the outcome of the impeachment process and the presidential election influences calculations in Beijing, Moscow, Paris, London, Brussels, and Berlin.

American elections are usually not decided by foreign policy. However, this election will undoubtedly be decisive for the foreign policy orientation of the US. It will determine whether the world has to prepare for another four years of disruption in the name of America First—an America that knows only opponents or vassals—or whether a (at least partial) return of the US cooperating with its allies again seems conceivable.

Expect More Shocks

And yet it would be wrong to fixate on this question. It is risky to bet on Trump’s exit. Not only because his re-election doesn’t seem unthinkable. Even without this president, there would be no return to a status quo ante.

NATO would breathe a sigh of relief if Trump lost, but the pressure for more burden sharing would remain, and the doubts about the commitment to collective defense would by no means disappear. They would perhaps even grow under an explicitly left-wing US president. A Democratic successor to Trump would perhaps choose less aggressive means against China. But the perception of Beijing as a systemic rival is a consensus position in America.

A more confrontational tone could even find its way into Russia’s policy if insights from the Mueller Report and the impeachment hearings become the basis of policy: a Democratic president would have a score to settle with the election manipulator Putin while the Republicans would boost their profiles by continuing to act as Russia apologists, in a blatant reversal of their previous role.

The questions that have thrust themselves on German foreign policy under Trump’s presidency would remain, even if he had to move out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. How can we succeed in building a European defense without further damaging NATO? Can Europe agree on a Russia policy with gestures of détente coming from Paris and new-old fears rising in Warsaw? How should Germany behave in the new Cold War between the US and China?

There is no end in sight to the turbulence, not for domestic or foreign policy. The three shocks of recent years will not be the last. One thing is clear: German (and European) foreign policy can no longer be geared to who sits in the White House. This is a helpful insight for which we should be grateful to Donald Trump.

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By winning 365 of the 650 parliamentary seats, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have changed Britain’s political landscape for the next five years, possibly for the next decade. After the last three to four years of knife-edge votes and parliamentary paralysis, the coast will be clear for them to introduce whatever legislation they wish.

The 80-seat majority at the December 12 election was at the very top end of predictions, indeed beyond the expectations of most Tory strategists.

Johnson will move quickly. He will have learnt the lessons of Tony Blair, who failed to capitalize on his landslide in 1997. Brexit will take place on January 31, this time without any last-minute hiccups. A budget will be introduced in March that is likely to include spending commitments on the National Health Service and infrastructure, particularly to reward his new-found voters in the North of England and the Midlands. Expect also early decisions on a series of ideologically driven challenges to the civil service and the BBC, two right-wing pet hates.

A detailed analysis of the results suggests, however, that overall support for the Conservatives is by no means as comprehensive as may initially have seemed.

Leave United, Remain Divided

Their big margin of victory can be attributed to three factors—the demographic particularities of Brexit, the electoral system, and clever strategizing.

Brexit: the Conservatives were clear winners in constituencies that voted Leave in the 2016 EU referendum. They won almost three quarters of all these seats. The writing was on the wall for pro-Remain groups when Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party announced at the start of the campaign that it would not compete in constituencies that the Tories were defending.

The Leave caucus found itself united. By contrast, the Remain one was not. Some small-scale alliances were formed involving the Liberal Democrats, Welsh nationalists, and Greens; but these were marginal and had very little effect. The fact that the Lib Dems (who had advocated revoking the original Article 50 decision) and Labour (who couldn’t quite work out what its position was) fought furiously against each other was a gift to Johnson.

As a result, the Remain vote was split, with a crowded field of parties sharing the seats between them.

The Conservatives won an impressive 294 of the 410 seats that had opted to get out of the EU. Labour secured only 106, in spite of Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to accede to the demands of most of his parliamentary party to endorse a second referendum.

Corbyn Trumped Brexit

His equivocation on the issue didn’t do him an enormous amount of good on the other side of the divide either. Of the 240 seats that had a majority opting to remain in 2016, Labour won only 96. The Conservatives trailed, but not by much, with 71, confirming the assertion that Johnson’s role in securing Brexit was regarded as less of a threat to voters than the prospect of a Corbyn government. In heavily pro-Remain Scotland, the SNP pro-independence and pro-EU party won a hugely impressive 48 of the 59 seats available.

The constitution: Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system was designed to ensure “strong” government. This is in direct contrast to, say, Germany or other countries, where consensus is regarded as the goal. That is why the UK has had so few coalitions. Even though the one it had between 2010 and 2015 involving the Conservatives and Lib Dems was stable, conventional wisdom has been hostile to any change in the way votes are distributed.

One can understand why any governing party would be resistant. The winner has a disproportionate amount of power. On a purely proportional system, the UK would have had a hung parliament, and the Tories’ 43.6 percent share of the vote would have required them to try to create an alliance with another party. The Lib Dems and Greens have long been the biggest losers in the present system. This time was no different.

The message: Conservative strategists realized long before Johnson called the election that they did not need to be popular. They needed merely to emphasize the unpopularity of Corbyn. The plan worked perfectly. Labour had their worst return of seats in any general election since 1935. They fell backwards in every region of the UK, declining by an average of 8 percentage points. In the northeast of England, their previous heartland, they shed 13 points—almost all of the swing going to the Tories. Even in the most affluent London and the southeast, they lost over 6 percentage points—mainly to the Lib Dems.

The following figures perfectly demonstrate the unfairness of the system. The Lib Dems gained an extra 4 percent of voters, yet lost one seat, ending up with a paltry 11. The Greens and the SNP went up too. The Tory vote only increased by 2 percent overall, but in spite of that small rise, they are seen to have triumphed.

Thanks therefore to a skewed voting system, an unpopular Labour leader, smart Tory strategy, and the failure of pro-EU parties to unite, the UK faces a long period of hegemony by a right-wing populist-nationalist party voted in by less than half of the population. That is the depressing state of Britain’s constitution and political culture.

A More Diverse Parliament

Yet some other data suggest that long term trends may be different. Northern Ireland, on the front line of the Brexit battle, now has for the first time more nationalist than unionist MPs. Parliament will have a record 63 members who come from an ethnic minority, an increase of 11 from two years ago. And a total of 220 women have been elected. This is 12 more than the previous high of 208 in 2017 and constitutes just over a third of the total number. Labour and the Lib Dems have more female than male MPs.

A more diverse parliament, just like a more diverse corporate boardroom, is a good thing in itself. Whether it produces a different mindset is much harder to say.

What is clear from these results is that the United Kingdom is a patchwork of voters with very different backgrounds and priorities. That one party and prime minister have acquired unbridled power, in effect able to do whatever they like for a minimum of five years, is the most dangerous of the many quirks in the British system.

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