A world of order or chaos?: My Speech at Swarthmore College

Two decades into the 21st century, the geopolitical waters are getting choppier for countries like the UK and US due global shifts in political, economic, and organizing power. In my lecture last night at Swarthmore College, I argued that we face a moment of global reckoning, as the corrupting abuses of power are now outpacing the checks and balances that hold it back. This age of impunity is not in anyone’s interest except for the autocrats – and it’s up to all of us to fight back.

"I am delighted to be at Swarthmore today to give the William J. Cooper lecture, and to have had the chance to spend time this afternoon in discussion with some students in the Swarthmore tradition of rigorous inquiry and give and take. This lecture was established to bring the debates about the global system, and America’s role in it, to the College, and I am honored and intrigued to join this tradition. 

The issues today are profound, and the choices stark. I am happy to answer questions about specific issues in international relations or domestic politics, but I am going to use my lecture today to try and explain my take on the riddle of international relations set out by your former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In her telling, international relations in the Cold War was represented by two steamers facing in opposite directions in the Suez Canal; in the post-Cold War period by two boats in the English Channel, with room for maneuver but land visible on both sides; and in the 2010s by the metaphor of a boat on the open seas, with no land visible and no compass as a guide. I am going to provide my view of the currents and wind gusts that are making the waters so choppy today.

My central case is that we face a moment of global reckoning, when the tendency towards impunity – the trend that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely – is outgunning the checks and balances that hold it back. My view is that this is not just undesirable but unstable, and needs to be understood and addressed by us all.

I come to this lecture as the leader of a humanitarian aid organization. The International Rescue Committee was founded by Albert Einstein and his friends in the late 1930s to address the increasingly desperate situation of Jews living under the Nazis in Germany and then in occupied Europe. We honor that tradition as the largest refugee resettlement organization in the US – sadly reduced in the number of refugees we are helping by the decisions of the current Administration to break with forty years of bipartisan support for this successful program. We are also a large international aid organization, helping those whose lives are shattered by conflict or disaster survive, recover and gain control of their lives. We have 13,000 staff and 15,000 incentive workers in nearly 200 field sites in forty countries. 

On our plate at the moment are a growing number of crises. The fallout from the invasion of North East Syria by Turkey. The fight against Ebola in Eastern DRC. The exodus of people from Venezuela to Colombia and other countries in Latin America. These are new emergencies layered on top of longer-term problems. The destabilization by extremist non-state actors in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Nigeria. The civil wars in Syria, Myanmar, and South Sudan. 

I know that humanitarian aid works best when it is independent of politics. When NGOs like mine are winning the confidence of local populations, or negotiating access with combatants, it is important that we do not take sides. The humanitarian principles of impartiality, neutrality, independence, and humanity are born of practical necessity not just high principle.

But I also know that there is a two-way relationship between politics and humanitarian need. To state the obvious it is the failure of politics which causes humanitarian crisis. Perhaps less obvious: untended humanitarian crisis increases political instability. This is the case within countries. Just think about how much harder it is to bring peace and stability to DRC or Afghanistan or Syria because of the amount of bloodshed. It is also the case between countries. Refugee flows are a challenge for the host country as well as the refugees. 

Truly the numbers of people who need our help are symptoms of a crisis of politics, and perhaps more specifically a crisis of diplomacy. There are more refugees and internally displaced – 70 million – today than at any time since World War II. That means there is less effective peacemaking and peacebuilding than at any time since World War II. 

This interests me because I come here today not just as a current NGO leader, but as a former politician and former UK Foreign Minister. And I have been asked to focus tonight on changes in geopolitics which frame our humanitarian work, rather than humanitarian work which is symptomatic of failings in geopolitics. Think about this:

• It is 100 years since the collapse of League of Nations, an early victim of American ambivalence about international engagement, and a timely reminder that the forces of isolationism are not new in American politics. America has never settled the question of its appetite for global responsibility. 
• It is thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet bloc. Germans were celebrating two weeks ago. But ask most voters in the West and the tale they tell of the last thirty years is of wage stagnation, rising inequality and stalled hopes, rather than the glad, confident morning of the early 1990s. And by the way, one symptom of that shift is described in an article by Tanisha Fazal and Paul Poast in Foreign Affairs that I read last week: “Following the collapse of the Berlin Wall there were fewer than ten border walls in the world. Today there are over 70, from the fortified US-Mexican border to the fences separating Hungary and Serbia and those between Botswana and Zimbabwe.”
• And for first time in 120 years, Yascha Mounk reports in Foreign Affairs that autocracies are today worth more to the global economy than democracies. He says, “It has been a terrible decade for democracy. According to Freedom House, the world is now in its 13th consecutive year of global democratic recession. Democracies have collapsed or eroded in every region, from Burundi to Hungary, Thailand to Venezuela. Most troubling of all, democratic institutions have proved to be surprisingly brittle in countries where they once seemed stable and secure.”

I’m recently back from China where they are talking about a once in 100-year change in the global balance of power. They are talking with some confidence about the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021 and the centenary of the People’s Republic in 2049. Meanwhile the countries I know best, the US and UK, are suffering political dysfunction on a grand scale. Democratic politics, for so long the spur to social and economic advance, is now marked by polarization and gridlock. The prospects for the next thirty years are clouded by unresolved issues at the heart of the social contract. And in the case of the UK it would be a brave commentator who insists that the UK is certain to remain a united territory over the next twenty years as the Brexit wrecking ball wreaks its damage. 

Here is what I see happening around the world: five multiple, connected, simultaneous but distinct shifts in power that constitute a new global reckoning in which the forces of impunity are strengthened at the expense of the forces of accountability. 

First, economic power shifting to a new superpower. Chinese GDP has grown nearly 600 per cent in PPP terms since the turn of the century. 1000 per cent in dollar terms. In total the share of global GDP accounted for by the US and the European Union has declined from 57 per cent to 45 per cent in the same period. 

Many of you will know that Professor Graham Allison calls this a Thucydides moment because it represents the time when a dominant power faces a rising power. He has studied 16 cases since 1500, and concluded that in 12 cases the clash led to war. That is a danger. But I am not convinced by the arguments about a new “Cold War”. China and America are far more integrated economically than America and the Soviet Union ever were. And while there are potential flash points around Chinese insistence on Pacific primacy and American insistence on a Pacific role, there is nothing like the fight over the land mass of continental Europe at the heart of the Cold War.

Instead, in a world as interdependent as this one, I worry about what Professor Allison’s colleague Joseph Nye calls a Kindleberger moment, after the great economist Charles Kindleberger. He posited that the great danger of a rising power was that it refused to take on the role of promoting global public goods, in the way that hegemonic powers like the UK or America have done. Joseph Nye writes, rightly in my view: “China benefits from the United Nations system, where it has a veto in the Security Council. It is now the second-largest funder of UN peacekeeping forces, and it participated in UN programs related to Ebola and climate change…. On the other hand, China’s rejection of a Permanent Court of Arbitration judgment last year against its territorial claims in the South China Sea raises troublesome questions. Thus far, however, Chinese behavior has sought not to overthrow the liberal world order from which it benefits, but to increase its influence within it. If pressed and isolated by Trump’s policy, however, will China become a disruptive free rider that pushes the world into a Kindleberger Trap?"

The second power shift is away from liberal democracy. This is not the end of history promised in 1992 but history going into reverse. Since 2006, 113 countries have seen a reduction in democratic freedoms: freedoms of the press, independence of the judiciary, integrity of electoral systems. We see a parallel to this in the international sphere in what I call the Age of Impunity: aid workers killed in the line of fire, double what they were 15 years ago; civilians killed in conflict, up to 70 per cent of the total. 

This is not just a function of economic shifts in the political balance of power. It is also the function of political mistakes. The Iraq War in foreign policy and the financial crisis in domestic policy have created a narrative shared by populists at home and autocrats abroad that liberal democracy does not work, that the law is for suckers, and that it is time to play hardball. 

Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes have studied the retreat of liberal democracy in Eastern Europe and write as follows: “Liberalism’s reputation in the region never recovered from 2008… confidence that the political economy of the west was a model for the future of mankind had been linked to the belief that Western elites knew what they were doing. Suddenly it was obvious that they did not. That is why 2008 had such a shattering ideological, not merely economic, effect.”

Liberal democracy is suffering from a delivery deficit that is driving a democratic deficit at home and an accountability deficit abroad. 

Third, economic and political power is shifting to the global level from the national level. In the 1970s the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote a book in which he predicted that the nation state would become too big for the small problems and too small for the big problems. 

In fact the nation state has been more resilient than Bell predicted. However, countries like the US, China, Russia, and India are unusual in being big enough to be global players in their own right and not dependent on formal alliances. For other states of medium or small size, alliances are essential. Yet they are too weak. Europe has the EU, Asia has ASEAN, the Middle East has the GCC and the Arab League, and so on. 

These regional alliances are a basic recognition that the nation states of the world need to work together to master a more globalized world, and that proximity still matters. But these regional coordinating mechanisms of varying strength are marked by their lack of strength. Only Europe is a superpower, and in the European case that only extends in the regulatory domain. If you think about the problems that Europe confronts – refugees, slow growth, financial instability – they require a more integrated Europe not a less integrated one.

I am not going to dwell on Brexit, though I am happy to answer questions about it, but I do want to highlight one of the illusions of Brexit: that there is such a thing as a regulatory declaration of independence for a country the size of the UK. From food safety to product standards to intellectual property, there are European rules, Chinese rules, and American rules. There aren’t British rules. Our values and interests lie in cleaving towards the European model. This is where our supply chains are; it is where half our exports go; it is where our negotiating strength lies. It is also where we find countries closest to us in mindset, values, and way of life. American rules are designed for Americans. Chinese for Chinese. We need to choose. 

Fourth, political power is shifting towards individuals in networks and away from organizations in hierarchies. This is asymmetric power or insurgent power. It is evident in politics as much as business. Just think about the international relations hotspots of the last few months: Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Iraq, Catalonia. In all these cases people are organizing to challenge their governments in the name of economic improvement and political accountability. 

The message I take is that in the modern world, every government, whether democratic or autocratic, lives in coalition with its own people. Obviously the odds are stacked more in some systems than others. No one would pretend that it is equally easy to organize protest in a dictatorship than a democracy. But everywhere one feature of globalization has been that the bar for the legitimate exercise of power has been raised. Fail to meet it and people will organize on the streets.

In a more educated world, this shift in power should be a force for respect for the rights of people, but it can obviously also be used for the forces that want to demonize and disrupt.

The fifth shift in power is that all this is happening when:

• Resource stress is growing, exacerbated by climate change. This is driving up the cost of living, testing systems of resilience to the limit, and shifting risk and therefore power from the exposed to the protected;
• Ungoverned space is growing, as non-state actors push back against government power;
• Technology is constantly disruptive, putting power in the hands of malign actors as well as self-organized protesters, and always offering power to insurgents;
• Interdependence and integration are greater than ever, and in some domains growing faster than ever, yet global governance is weak and frayed.

These five shifts constitute what I call a new global reckoning. And the assumptions and trends of the post-Second World War order, which provide the framework for our thinking about how to resolve these tensions, is now in retreat. 

What was that order? It was called the liberal international order (at least after the New York Times coined that phrase in 2013). 

It was liberal because it put individual rights on a pedestal alongside the rights of states for the first time ever. These rights were enunciated in the UN Charter, the Convention on Human Rights and a range of other texts, including those demarcating rights for refugees in the UN Convention on Refugees and for civilians caught up in war in the Geneva Conventions.

It was international because all states signed on. Capitalist and communist, democratic and autocratic, all states were brought into the family of nations. They signed up to these rights, even if they didn’t believe in them, and even if the ability of the international system to insist on them was weak.

And it was an order because for the first time there were international institutions, unlike the League of Nations which I mentioned earlier, with the power and resources to manage trade-offs, broker compromises, and try to promote adherence to the new commitments that sought to learn the lessons of the inter war period.

Of course the Cold War blighted the ambitions of this liberal international order. Too often the promises made to people about their human rights were honored in the breach rather than the observance. Just think of South Africa under apartheid or the countries of Eastern Europe under the Warsaw Pact.

But the benchmark was there. And after the Cold War ended thirty years ago there was a period of policymaking that tried to make good on the commitments made in the 1940s and 1950s in the UN Charter and in other documents. It was called the Third Democratic Wave because of the way democracy spread in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, and in Africa (notably South Africa). But it was also a period of international responsibility and accountability, culminating in the passage of the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect in the UN General Assembly in 2005.

Today that benchmark of the liberal international order is in danger of breaking down. As Richard Haass has written: “After a run of nearly one thousand years, quipped the French philosopher and writer Voltaire, the fading Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. Today, some two and a half centuries later, the problem, to paraphrase Voltaire, is that the fading liberal world order is neither liberal nor worldwide nor orderly.”

So where does that leave us?

I am lucky, because in my work every day I can try and put my values into practice. I can raise money to deliver more services; reshape strategy to deliver better services; bear witness to the abuse of individual rights in Syria or the US southern border in the hope that policymakers are willing to listen.

But we all have a deeper duty as well: to understand how to create countervailing forces to those that abuse power, dilute rights, erode the international order. For me four factors will determine our success. 

First, the ability to build foreign policy engagement depends on domestic strength. Foreign and domestic policy are linked not separate. I was told in China that diplomacy reflects domestic politics. I would add that international strength will not be rebuilt without national strength. It is not an accident that the Western world was strongest economically and internationally when it grew for the benefit of a broad-based middle class. And it is not an accident that the decline in Western global influence has been associated with a broken social and economic contract at home. 

Inequality is a domestic policy issue with foreign policy consequences. Leave people out of the domestic bargain at home, and they will not buy into an international project abroad. And a foreign policy born in the hearts of a few and carried in the hearts of none, as Henry Kissinger wrote, is doomed to fail. 

That means pulling economics and politics back into balance. At the moment the economics say that international coordination is essential. The politics say the opposite. The economics say that immigration is a good thing; the politics the opposite. Economics say open trade is a good thing; politics say the opposite. Economics say invest in the welfare state for the young; but the politics, in which older people are much more likely to vote, say the opposite. 

We need to right this ship. In the debate in the US you can see some of the ways in which that might be done. For example the economics of a low carbon economy are job creating as well as environmentally positive. The fair taxation of wealth is economically efficient and politically popular. Investment in infrastructure is economically essential and politically beneficial. But the politics and the policy need to line up.

Second, our ability to make the case for alliances based on values not just interests. Sometimes that is called “the West”, which suggests a geographic entity across the Atlantic. That was certainly the origin of the idea of the West. Churchill and Roosevelt met in Newfoundland in 1941 and signed the Atlantic Charter before America entered the war. It set the terms of post-war peace and laid the intellectual foundations for the United Nations. Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called it the “birth certificate of the West”.

But the alliance is more than geographic. It is built around the world’s democracies, including Japan and Australia. Today it is more needed than ever, for geopolitical reasons. The agenda for such an alliance could not be more serious. It is needed for defence against cyber attack, which is now a feature of Russian tactics in foreign elections, with the clear aim of delegitimizing the process and the results. It is needed to uphold international law, including for the most vulnerable, like those we at the IRC serve. It is needed to safeguard the global commons, and provide a values-base for engagement with countries like China when it comes to the governance of the global commons, be it in respect of the digital economy, global health, or the environment.

To talk like this is obviously to invite attention to the elephant in the room. President Macron of France referred to this in his Economist interview a fortnight ago: “We find ourselves for the first time with an American president who doesn’t share our idea of the European project, and American policy is diverging from this project.” While America is seeking bilateral rather than multilateral engagement, a smaller rather than larger role in the world, and a transactional rather than normative approach to international affairs, then Europe is left to carry that torch. 

There are big challenges, internal challenges, facing the EU. Creditor-debtor and East-West there are tensions. Growth is caught between overly-austere German macroeconomic policy and insufficient-dynamic European economies. The institutions of the world’s most successful part supranational part intergovernmental institution are complex. And Europe’s eastern neighbor is a menace. 

Nonetheless I am more confident about Europe’s prospects for the next decade than the last. The resilience of the European model through a decade of austerity has been striking. The new agenda set out by the European Commission – around the digital and low carbon economy, is ambitious. And the trauma of Brexit has provided a sharp antidote to ideas of Frexit or Swexit. But nonetheless our prospects would be much stronger with your support. And obviously that is an open question.

Third, we need to resolve core questions of what it means to govern an interdependent world. This means establishing the rules of the road. And that means addressing the limits of national sovereignty and the extent of international responsibility. Climate change is the ultimate proof: it will not be resolved by the doctrine of state sovereignty alone, and unless we can agree on something better then we all lose. The fact that we lose unequally makes the work of coalition building all the more challenging. 

China’s fundamental principle of international affairs is the doctrine of non-interference. It dictates what happens at home is a matter for the government at home. And America is sometimes on the same side. Both countries are allergic to external interference in their internal affairs; both countries don’t want to be fettered by international institutions. But this invites us to fall into the Kindleberger Trap I described earlier – where the rising power and dominant power refuse to manage the global commons.

The global commons are under governed, misgoverned and ungoverned in ways that are threatening to our way of life. This applies to resilience against economic shocks, protection of biodiversity, promotion of public health. But it applies in spades to the climate crisis. We are living collectively as if there were three planets rather than one, yet the energy consumption of the average citizen of Niger is 45 times less than that of the average citizen of the US.

This reflects many failings. Short termism. Injustice. Abuse of power. But it also reflects the weakness of the global system. I introduced the first legally binding forty-year emissions reduction requirements in the UK. We set a forty-year carbon budget. And established a Climate Change Committee to set the carbon budget. But a carbon budget for one country is not sufficient and no protection.

I used to say when I was Environment Secretary in the UK that we were living as if there were three planets not one. The truth is we need a single carbon budget for the whole planet, and then national carbon budgets that live within it.

This requires a new way of thinking about the sharing of responsibility and the sharing of sovereignty. Call me utopian but unless we are able to do it, we will betray future generations. 

The fourth prerequisite concludes my lecture and takes me back to my day job. We will not rescue our future nor ourselves if we allow the most vulnerable in the world to fall behind. This is a matter of self-interest as well as morality, because in an integrated world problems do not stay in one country – “Las Vegas rules” do not apply. 

We now have two classes of poor. Those in stable but unequal states who need different kind of domestic policy. And those in conflict-ridden unequal states who will not get a new deal from their own government and need international help. It is incredible that today there are more extreme poor in Nigeria, population of 195 million, than India, population of 1.3 billion. This illustrates a general trend. Extreme poverty is now driven by conflict. And those Nigerian figures don’t include the 1.2 million people beyond the reach of humanitarian agencies in the north east of the country.

We at IRC are changing our humanitarian focus from the word ‘survive’ to the word ‘thrive’. That’s because the old model of aid was about helping people survive until they went home. But now they don’t go home. And if they are not helped they becomes a source of instability in the countries to which they have fled. This makes the lofty goals of the UN Sustainable Development Goals a necessity not a luxury for a sustainable planet. 

I mentioned earlier President Kennedy’s speech on 4 July 1962 in which he called for a declaration of interdependence. He asserted “the indivisible liberty of all not the individual liberty of one”. That is what we need today – except even more so.

A world of impunity is not in anyone’s interest. But that is the current direction of travel. In liberal democracies, in autocracies, and on the battlefields where we work. The task of pushing back is one for us all, in NGOs and in universities and well as in politics and business. I look forward to being there with you.