Transcript: The New World (Dis)Order – Lecture by President of Finland, Alexander Stubb

We ended up in World War II in 1939. But then in 1945, after World War II, the leaders at the time put together the United Nations. And with all of its deficiencies, it did maintain world peace, or at least it didn’t end up in World War III. So the institution worked.

And then in 1989, that’s actually when I started my studies, an era died with the downfall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Now what happened in my mind is that we got a little bit lazy. Many of us, myself included, believed in Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history, where we felt that it is self-evident that all 200 nation-states of the world are going to revert to the best model of society, which is liberal democracy combined with social market economy and globalization.

And I think a lot of the business people in this room know the sentiment as well. It was all about market, market, market, liberalization, liberalization, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. We probably underestimated the value of international institutions, and I’ll come back to that in a second.

Multipolar or Multilateral?

So my sort of question today that I want to pose in this lecture is a fairly binary choice. And I know that in world politics the choices are rarely binary, but I’ll make it today. The question is, do we want a multipolar world, or do we want a multilateral world?

Multipolar means that nation-states cooperate more or less transactionally around the world without a clear set of international rules. Multilateralism, again, means that nation-states cooperate within a broader framework of international law and institutions. And I think that’s the ultimate choice that we have to make.

The way in which I’ll structure the talk today is, first, I will talk about order. Second, I will talk about balance. And third, I will talk about dynamics before I conclude. So order, balance, and dynamics.

Order: The Cold War System

To kick off with order, I think as political scientists or those who are interested in the study of international relations, we quite often try to find order in a world of disorder. And that is basically because we human beings quite often over-rationalize the past, over-dramatize the present, and therefore underestimate the future. So we try to get this sort of construct in our mind, what the world might look like.

But, for better or for worse, I do think that the Cold War was bipolar. It was systemic. And the competition was between the Soviet Union and the United States. So basically communism, a controlled economy, authoritarian regimes, and limited freedom, versus the United States with democracy, capitalism, and pretty much the champion of the free world, with all of its deficiencies.

But the debate was real. After World War II, there was a systemic challenge. Which system works better? Which one provides and allocates resources better for society? Capitalism or communism?

After the Cold War ended and the United States won it, we entered a unipolar moment, where there was only one world power, which was the United States. And we sort of felt probably that, well, these international institutions are nice, the UN, the WTO, the World Bank, IMF, but we don’t need to tinker that much with their power structure, because it’s the US that’s going to lead the free world anyway, and soon we’ll start seeing this sort of functional movement towards democracy and market economy and globalization.

Many of us thought that Russia would become a democracy, perhaps even China. Many of us thought that at a later time, the Arab Spring would lead to a democratic movement in the Middle East and Persian Gulf and elsewhere. And many of us felt that in a post-colonial world, the African continent would revert to liberal democracy.

Little did we know that this would not happen, and you can start looking at a date when the world started becoming multipolar. Probably the kickoff was somewhere around 9-11, when the West pretty much abandoned its basic values, whereby we started to fight terrorism more than freedom, whereby we started to export democracy by force rather than by example, whereby we abandoned international rules, institutions, and regulations in the name of interests and in the name of protecting security.

Be that as it may, there was still an element around 2001, where people thought that Russia would start cooperating with the rest of the world and with Europe. There was a feeling that China was on the rise, and certainly the fastest growing economy in the world. But at the end of the day, the political system would modify itself to the economic system and become freer.

But at some stage, the West started to decline. The financial crisis starting in 2008, the asylum crisis in 2015, you could argue that Brexit, or the election of Donald Trump, or a lot of populist movements in Europe, were the moment where the world wasn’t anymore looking up to the West. It was actually looking down to the West and looking up to China. So there was a sort of big change in what was going on.

A Multipolar World of Disorder

And now we live, I would argue, in the third form, in a multipolar world, where there is less order, more disorder, where the world is very much a la carte and transactional, where alliances are not necessarily anymore based on values, they are more based on interests, where geographic integration or regional integration is still strong, like in the European Union.

But at the same time, there are these unholy alliances being built around the world. BRICS is a good example thereof, obviously a concoction by the chief economist of Goldman Sachs, with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, which have very little in common, except an idea that the world should not be created in the Western image anymore. Or the Shanghai Organization, or actually alliances that the United States, value-based or otherwise, has built around AUKUS, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US, or the Quad with India, Japan, and the US.

So very targeted, rather than framing it all into a multilateral context, they are very much bilateral in a sense. And in my mind, the world works when there’s a clear power balance, almost a balance of fear between two, three, or four poles. But if there isn’t that, power vacuums emerge and someone is always going to fill those vacuums. So I would argue that right now we live in a multipolar world of disorder.

Three Spheres of Power

My second point today is, what’s the balance then? Well in my mind, and I’m simplifying here, because I’ve been working on a book for five years, it’s approaching its end. I worked on it for three hours with my copy editor on Sunday, and she likes some of it. So in any case, I’m trying to sort of probably simplify the world a little bit, but bear with me on this.

I think that there are three spheres of power, not blocks. You have the global West, the global East, and the global South. And I know we’re in Norway and Finland, it should be the global North, but put us in the global West, please.

The global West is roughly 50 countries out of 200. It’s Europe, North America, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, and a few others, Australia, New Zealand. We want to preserve the current multilateral system, the current order, the international liberal order. Why? We created it after World War II, and because it serves our interests.

On the other side, at the opposite, you have the global East, which in my calculation is roughly 25 countries, led by China, followed far, far, far behind by Russia, Iran, and 22 countries that vote quite often with these two countries, Russia and China, in the UN Security Council. They have very different profiles, but they do have one thing in common. They want to change the current order, because they feel it’s too Western-dominated. And they talk the talk of multipolarity, rather than multilateralism. Because in a multipolar world, you don’t meddle with their business, human rights, fundamental rights, or political regimes, but you allow more space to act bilaterally. China, of course, is extremely good at this. It’s basically created interdependencies around the world through big infrastructure and finance projects.

The one that’s going to decide the new world order, in my mind, is the global South. And I know it’s a little bit unfair to lump 125 countries together, but they do range from middle powers and swing states like India, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Brazil, and Turkey, to smaller players. But what do they have in common? Because of course, some are democracies, some are autocracies. They have in common that they want agency. They want power and say in this system. They do not want to be lectured by the West about what kind of a government or society they should have. And this is the power balance that we’re playing with. So you have the global West trying to preserve, the global East trying to change, and the global South wanting to have a say in the system. And of course, we in the global West have to make a decision. Do we continue the way in which we have in the past decades, even centuries? Or do we start embracing the global South in a completely new and more equal basis?

Dynamics: Competition, Conflict, or Cooperation

My third and final point before I conclude is on dynamics. On the dynamics, again, it’s a simple sort of triangle. We can have a world of competition, a world of conflict, or a world of cooperation. Competition innately can be good if it’s contained, whether it’s competition in economy, whether it’s competition in technology, et cetera, et cetera. The problem with competition is that if there are no rules, it’s not contained, and it can easily spill over into conflict. And this is the world that we are in right now.

I mean, in my lifetime as a student of international relations, we have not had three major wars simultaneously. We’ve had skirmishes and wars, yes, but if you look at what we have with Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, with Israel-Palestine, Israel-Lebanon, and potentially Israel-Iran, these are serious regional conflicts. They’re not six-day wars and skirmishes, or they’re not like Georgia in 2008, where we got a ceasefire in five days. And on top of that, you have hidden wars, which we don’t talk about, like Sudan, with almost 200,000 people dead this year only, with the potential famine of 8 million people. So we have a lot of spillover effects with different types of players in a transactional world. And what we’re lacking is the United Nations as the peace mediator. And that’s why I think, of course, the best form of dynamic is cooperation, which we need to come back to. So if you want to have competition and you don’t want it to spill into conflict, you need cooperation.

A Binary Choice: Multipolarity or Multilateralism

And here’s where I come to my conclusion and our fairly binary choice. I think the choice that Lenin would have right now is the following. Do we want a multipolar world which preserves the status quo or actually weakens the international institutions and therefore potentially is defined by tension and conflict? Is this the world that we want? Is this the type of multipolarity which I would argue a country like Russia is pushing forward, where the dominating factor is raw power and size?

Or do we want a multilateral world where the power structure in the international institutions is changed, including, for instance, the UN Security Council, which is an anomaly from the aftermath of World War II, where there’s no representation from Latin America, no representation from Africa, and only China from Asia? Or do we want to revamp the rules of the WTO? Do we want to revamp the power structure of the World Bank and the IMF, which, after all, are both into development and finance? And if we decide to do that, I think we move to a world of cooperation. But the big worry I have now, when we go back to 1918, 1945, and 1989, is that which choice do we make?

I think the choice that was made in 1918 or post-1918 was wrong. It was a multipolar world with weak institutions. The choice between World War II with the United Nations was right. Yes, it’s not perfect, I fully admit that, but at least it contained war. Or do we just sort of let things float around and expect it to correct itself at some stage?

I think the change in order, balance, and dynamics will take anywhere between a decade to two decades. I predict about a decade we should have some kind of an order, but in the meanwhile, I think, unfortunately, we live in a rather disorderly and, at times, dangerous world.

So this was my thesis today. I hope we can move towards a multilateral world order where agency and change has happened and where cooperation is more predominant than conflict. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. President, thank you so much for a highly interesting and engaging talk. Now, I would actually like to ask my colleague to join us here on the stage. He is a professor here at our school at the Department of Law and Governance. He is the former director of NUPI, the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. Today, he is also considered one of the country’s leading experts on geopolitical issues and politics. And now, I am looking forward to hearing him and the President further discuss this new world disorder that we currently find ourselves in. Please, the floor is yours.

Q&A with Professor Ulf Sverdrup

ULF SVERDRUP: Thank you so much, Karin, and thank you so much, President. Can I call you Alex?

ALEXANDER STUBB: Yes, you can.

ULF SVERDRUP: So, I’m fortunate. It’s fantastic that you are here. We know each other for like 50 years.

ALEXANDER STUBB: Well, 50 years. We first met in 1996.

ULF SVERDRUP: That’s true. And as Bob Dylan said, you have this song, “I knew the bride when she used to rock and roll.” But, anyway, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for giving an extra stair as well. And I think that most academics face difficulties with meeting their publishers, and they often say, I’m running out of time, I’m a bit delayed, but being a president, or becoming a president, I think is a decent reason for being a bit delayed with your book.

Now I have prepared a few comments, but we also love for intervention from the audience as well, and particularly from the students, so please, I will invite you in a bit later, so please be ready to have some questions.

On Multipolar versus Multilateral Systems

But could I just ask you first, when you said we have a choice between doing the multipolar or multilateral, and of course some of us might have a choice, smaller countries will certainly have a preference for a multilateral world, but we might not be the one who is most powerful in making those choices. One country that will be very important in making this choice will be the US. They have an election in less than a month, and to me it seems that that particular choice that you put up is an issue at the table in the conversation, where it seems that a democratic candidate is preferring a reformed multilateral system, whereas Donald Trump and J.D. Trump prefer much more of a multipolar world.

ALEXANDER STUBB: Well, yeah, I mean, to be honest, you sound a little bit like a reporter at the Fox, forcing me to take a binary choice between two candidates. So I mean, I do think obviously that the fact that we have over 70 democratic, more or less, democracies here in the world, the most important one, and the one that all eyes are on right now, is the US one.

I would probably use, on American foreign policy, I would use their national strategy report from October 2022 as my guideline, and that probably paints a slightly more complex picture in the sense that the United States is probably not leaning on traditional international multilateral institutions as strongly as it used to. Take the WTO as an example, or the International Criminal Court as another example.

But what the United States is doing is two types of alliances in global politics. One of these sort of bilateral or trilateral that I mentioned earlier, the Quad and AUKUS, and the other one is then NATO, which is probably its strongest sort of beacon of stability in terms of alliance.

And my answer to you in which way is the new American administration going to lean is to say that it is in the interest of the United States to maintain a superpower status, because what it wants to do is to contain China, and if you want to contain China, you need allies. You cannot do it alone.

So therefore I think the first go-to place of whoever is chosen as the President of the United States is going to be Europe and NATO. Then of course there are going to be side effects on the conflicts and timing and so on and so forth. I actually expect there to be movement on the two key conflicts, Russian aggression in Ukraine and the Middle East, in the interim period from the 5th of November to inauguration, because I think all of us are now waiting for the election result.

I of course would prefer the U.S. to be more strongly engaged multilaterally and be willing to change the U.N. Security Council as well. But as you said, I come from a small state. It is in our vested interest that multilateralism rather than multipolarity rules the world. If you are big, if you are the biggest military power in the world and one of the strongest economies, your view might be a little bit different.

Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

ULF SVERDRUP: Okay, so let’s move on to another topic, because basically what you said is that we have had this globalization period with huge push for market liberalization, more autonomy for market actors. But here at the business school, also students and others are concerned about how geopolitical risk shapes the environment for businesses to operate. But you also, as governments, also see the importance of business in providing security, building resilience.

There is this quote from a French politician, I think he said, “Wars are too important to leave to the generals.” And Jens Stoltenberg, he paraphrased this a few years ago when he gave a talk in Norway and said, “Business is too important to leave to business people.” And I think it indicates this idea that, okay, we are into this new environment. So you see very much about geopolitics, but also this equivalent of geoeconomics. So how do you, in Finland, view this? You’ve been very, your business has also been deeply affected by the change in geopolitics.

From Market to State

ALEXANDER STUBB: Perhaps I’ll make two answers. One is general, and then one is a bit more specific to Finland. And I want to come back to the students who might be sitting in here in the audience today. And I compare to the time when I started studying in 1989, that was really sort of all about market liberalization. It was all, in Europe, all about four freedoms. It was about competition policy, about trade policy, about the rejuvenation of GATT into the WTO, into basically decentralizing your value chains into big business and small business. So it was market, market, market.

But at some stage, and I guess you could argue perhaps after 9/11, security came into it. And when security comes into it, you start using state as a pretext. And right now, I would argue that it’s less about market, market, market, more about state, state, and state. So there’s a lot of talk about strategic autonomy. There’s a lot of talk about de-risking, perhaps even decoupling with China. And a lot of the risk right now is focused on technology, the way in which companies use that or deviate.

Give you an example. I wrote a column in the Financial Times in 2016, which had a rather provocative title, “For China, Europe is the New Africa.” And my argument was that the Chinese were mining European technology and patents in the same way that they were mining African critical minerals, and that we needed to be aware of the fact that not all intentions were, so to speak, good.

Two weeks after that, the Americans told the Germans that you’re about to sell a company called Aixtron, which has military intelligence to the Chinese, so should you be careful? At the time, I warned that just be aware that this happens, but don’t go full-on protectionist. Think about the rules that you can do.

But right now, with technology, probably with COVID and the whole idea that you need to start bringing back your value chains closer, and then the war in Ukraine linked to, of course, say, food security and energy security, there is this pretext, a narrative about us needing to protect our economies. And for countries like Finland and Norway, this is a problem, because our economic growth has always been based on the liberalization of markets and on open markets.

So we’re going on in this battle. The sort of optimist in me says that if there was a pendulum swinging from market to state, it’s almost taking extreme right now, and then it’s going to start coming back. But we in Europe need to lead the way, I think, on that, whether it’s the green transition or otherwise.

Now, in Finland, again, when you have 1,340 kilometers of border with Russia, and when historically you’ve been dependent on the Russian economy, you sort of build up guards. You’re sensitive to what is going on, and you can actually change tack quite quickly. But part of our business psyche and thinking is also about security. So that’s why we have a very strong security of supply system. That’s why most of the business leaders from Finland here today have done a three-week course on national defense, on top of actually doing their military service. That’s why in our security of supply system, we have contracts with big business on how we ensure energy supply and food security in times of crisis. So it’s very much an overall picture.

But of course, if you were to ask Finnish business today, are they overregulated? Do they have tax issues? Does Europe regulate too much? They would probably say yes to all of them. So my only suggestion to the students here is that, and to the companies, if your company today does not have a chief geopolitical officer, you’re going to be out of business pretty soon.

This is a perfect commercial pitch, President, for what we are doing here at the ESL, because we are starting this top-level course in managing geopolitical risk. So thank you for that pitch.

Sticking to this, because I think that Finland, I have this history of what you call total defense. I think this…

Comprehensive security.

Comprehensive security or different versions of it. And I think that you are way more advanced than most countries. All Nordic countries in general are pretty advanced. And I think that a lot of other European and NATO countries have to move in this direction. So it would be interesting to see how this new NATO member Finland will develop this. But just since you are at this specific point on Nordic defense and the total defense or comprehensive security, just one point on communication between Norway and Finland. Since you joined NATO, defending Finland is not so easy for the alliance. It would change also the logistical system, I think, in the Nordic region. So we would have to develop more transport corridors between East and West. So how is this on your radar? Did you first kind of visit as a president, went to Northern Norway?

Yeah.

To Alta.

To Alta. Yeah. As one does.

Comprehensive Security and Civilian Resilience

So, yeah, I mean, I think, again, two answers on that. One on comprehensive defense, comprehensive security. Because to me total defense sounds a little bit too much like, I don’t know, Rambo. Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s like, you know, that’s not…

In Norway we call this total preparedness.

Okay. But comprehensive security. So I think our thinking is based on the idea that you fight wars on the battlefield, but you win wars at home, which means that you need to have civilian resilience. And over the years we have not only built them up but continued to maintain them. And to our concept of comprehensive defense, I mean, you can put about 20 to 30 different pillars, but the key pillars, for instance, are civilian shelters. We can house about 4.5 million Finns out of 5.5 million in these civilian shelters, which in peacetime we use for car parks or sports facilities.

We have a very comprehensive system of security of supply, as I mentioned, on food and energy, and we’re actually doing dry runs on it right now. So if there is a scale in conflict or societal preparedness for conflict from one to seven, we’re now at stage three in terms of doing dry runs and making sure that we’ve taken the dust off the system, and we do a lot of testing on that.

Comprehensive security will also count things like cyber attacks, because obviously we’re so technologically dependent nowadays, not only you and I, but our whole society is that if the data system breaks down, the system will collapse. On top of that, there are elements in comprehensive security which have to do with just basic infrastructure, security of, say, electricity, and we pack all of this together.

And interestingly enough, my predecessor, President Sauli Niinistö, is right now writing a report for Europe, the European Union, on comprehensive security. So I think it’s linked, and this is then answering probably your second question, to both the EU and NATO, and there is a lot of traction from our allies, both in the EU and NATO, to learn about the system that we have created over the years. But linked to this, then, is the second question of infrastructure and connections.

So with me here, I have our Minister of Transport and Interim Interior Minister, Lulu Ranne, who’s been working a lot on what kind of an infrastructure we can create, say, from Finnish Lapland up to Narvik. Because you have to understand that Finland is an island. So if the Baltic Sea somehow is disconnected, we are disconnected. And that means that there needs to be railways, there needs to be functional roads, and other infrastructure going through the north. And I keep on saying to, when I travel in the east of Finland or north of Finland, I say, okay, you know, the door is closed to the east, to Russia. But that creates a lot of new opportunities then westbound, including, of course, infrastructure.

Finland is not that difficult to defend. You’ve done it before. We’ve done it before, and we know how to do it. But I must say that it’s very nice that we don’t have to do it alone anymore. And that means that you will see inside NATO a very close connection between Finland, Sweden, and Norway. And, of course, Alta was a good example thereof, when Finland participated with 4,000 soldiers in Nordic Response 24, the biggest international training exercise we’ve ever done. And you could see how the system works.

Fun fact, my son, who was doing his military service at the time, he was there in the exercise in Alta. So he was on an American warship, and I flew over it with a helicopter and took pictures and waved. Fantastic. So another fun fact that I’ve just learned is that the border of Finland to Norway is longer than the Finnish border to Sweden. So this is interesting. Next time you’re on a quiz, you might have learned something.

But picking up on your son, we have some Finnish students here as well. Could we have a question from some of our excellent students from Finland? Do we need a microphone? So this is Winston Badegård, who was in the same company with my son. This better be good, Winston, or I’m going to tell Oliver. He’s been drinking beer at our place.

Question About Nordic Military Cooperation

WINSTON BADEGÅRD: Mr. President, good morning. I’m a student here at BEI from Finland, so I’m very interested in the Finnish future and the Norwegian future as well. As you said, I was in the military with Oliver Stubbe. It was very fun. We were in the reserve officer school together. This question, it’s kind of irritating that you actually took it up already. This was my question about Alta, this training. We are in NATO and Norway as well, and I wanted to ask how this Alta training could help the Norwegian and Swedish military, how would I say it, how they fight together. How would Alta help us in the future in case of an attack?

ALEXANDER STUBB: That’s actually a really good question, because that gives me a possibility to explain it a little bit more. I sort of tag on to when Ulf said Finland is difficult to defend. To a certain extent, yes. But what I think a lot of our allies want to do is to train together with us to understand what it’s like to defend a 1,340 km border, which essentially is open with Russia. And I think Nordic Response 24 was one of those exercises. I don’t remember how many countries, Raste, where are you? How many countries were in it from the alliance? 20 plus? Were you at Alta actually? You were in another place at that time. But in any case, there were Italians, there were French, there were Americans, Norwegians, etc., and Swedes, etc., etc.

So what we want to teach our allies is how to defend in those circumstances. Alta, of course, it was very much around the fjells and the fjords and different circumstances. So without revealing any military secrets, there was a Finnish company which was working very closely with an Italian company on different types of amphibious tasks. And, you know, things don’t always go smoothly in training. So you learn from each other.

The good news in all of this is that instead a lot of people talk about permanent bases, etc., etc. I mean, yeah, those will happen. But the bottom line here is that the training activity that we are now providing or giving to our allies is to such an extent we’re not even sure we can absorb as much of it. And this just shows not only the respect that a lot of our allies have for Norwegian, Swedish, or Finnish military, but also their willingness to learn and train in circumstances. So we’re going to increase this. Alta was a very good exercise, but only one of them.

Please wave your hand if you have some more questions. But before we take in another question, let me have this one over there. Yeah.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Good morning. Hello, Mr. President, and thank you for this very interesting introduction. I come from a quite different background. Actually, I’m a German national, and I’ve lived in France for a long time. I know you’re going to Germany as well, and I was wondering actually how you see the role of these two big countries in Europe in the current situation.

ALEXANDER STUBB: Sure. Actually, we’re going to Berlin together with the Crown Prince. We’re going to go there to the 25th anniversary of our embassy buildings, Nordic embassy buildings, and I’m looking forward to it. I have a meeting with both Steinmeier and Chancellor Scholz as well.

The Franco-German Axis

Now, first of all, on the Franco-German axis, I think now after Brexit, it probably should be stronger or more important than ever. But there is a certain sort of romantic concept of the Franco-German axis, believing that they always work in the same direction. But obviously the beauty of it is that, as a matter of fact, they quite often work in different directions. But when they agree on something, they can move forward. We’ve seen that on defense. We’ve seen that on institutional reform. We’ve seen it actually on COVID, on next generation Europe, et cetera, et cetera.

But there is an innate tension. And you could argue a little bit in a simplified fashion that Germany is more into industrial policy and internal markets, whereas France is more into probably industrial policy from a different perspective and also projecting European power. And Germany is not about projecting European power in the same way that France has been over history.

So it’s always a very challenging, and a lot of people simplifying into a relationship, whether it’s Chirac and Merkel, or Sarkozy and Merkel, or any other French president, Macron and Merkel, or Macron and Scholz. But it’s a little bit more complicated than that. It’s always linked a little bit to the issue.

So during the Euro crisis, the Germans had a certain view, which simplified was austerity. Whereas the French were more lenient. Now, on the war in Ukraine, in the beginning of the war, France actually was quite bullish about it, whereas Germany was a little bit careful until Zeitenwende happened. But Zeitenwende for Germany has been very complicated. It’s been a bit of a Zeitungsplan, if you know what I mean.

And the reason for that is very simple. You know, German foreign security policy has been strongly engraved into an identity, which was posed to World War Two. And to change that identity takes time. For Finland, it was easy. We changed tack like this, basically over three nights, 23rd, 24th, 25th of February 2022. But it takes time.

But I think the base case we need to think about, and I’ll finish on that, we need a strong Franco-German axis in order for Europe to work properly. But we should be a little bit more lenient on how quick that axis is to be formed. We need German and French leadership. There is an additional point here. Polish leadership has come in very strongly as well, because the nexus of power has moved eastbound in Europe.

European Reform and Political Challenges

ULF SVERDRUP: Could I pick up on this question? You mentioned the report that is going to come out pretty soon, and we had the Draghi report calling. And basically, both of these reports, I guess, will call for significant reform in Europe. They will require a lot of European leaders, also taxpayers, to invest in Europe. You belong to the conservative political family, or maybe…

ALEXANDER STUBB: I used to. I’m not a party member. I would not define myself as conservative.

ULF SVERDRUP: Okay, okay, so that’s good. But I just wanted to go in the direction of, okay, at the same time as we have the weaknesses in German and French leadership, we also see in many countries a strong far-right side. Some of them are moving in an illiberal direction. Some of them are endorsing Russia. It’s a huge concern, I think, for the future of Europe, and how to deal with that. And it’s a challenge for mainstream political parties, how to deal with this in a democracy. So that’s where I want to do it, of course, from a mainstream political approach.

ALEXANDER STUBB: It’s good, because if you have started asking me questions about Draghi’s idea about mutualization of debt, I would have answered that this is where I limit my freedom of speech, because according to the Constitution, it’s the government that deals with the European Union.

But in a broader sense, I think, again, as a liberal institutionalist or liberal internationalist, I think we got globalization wrong, and we are paying for the consequences. In other words, the big narrative was that globalization will lead to economic growth and development for all. But when that didn’t happen, there was sort of a rejection of globalization by a certain wing of the population. Some of them you might call populist, some of them you might call extreme right, some of them you might call extreme left. I don’t care what you want to call them, but there was a real sentiment that what’s in it for me?

One of the best ways I heard it explained was when I was in a post-Brexit town hall debate in London. There were two who were sort of lamenting Brexit, myself and a British MP, and two who were rejoicing it. And the guy, the MP who was lamenting it with me, he said he doesn’t understand why did Brexit happen, because British GDP has grown since membership in 1973 by X, Y, and Z. Spontaneously, one guy stands up in the audience, “Yeah, mate, perhaps your GDP, but not mine.” And I think that was the moment for me when I understood, well, he’s right.

And that means that when you don’t feel like you have agency or belief in the system, when you’ve educated yourself, when you’ve tried hard, and even if you have a good security or welfare system, if you feel that you don’t have an opportunity or a chance, and you look at your neighbour and think, yeah, that guy got it quite well, then you start looking for alternative solutions. And those alternative solutions in populism are quite often simple. And of course, we live in a complex world where there are no simple solutions. So that’s why you get this wave of anti-globalization, anti-immigration, the rejection of the other. And this is the dilemma that we are in right now.

Managing Populism in Democracy

And then the question is, how do you contain it, or how do you manage it? In very simple terms, in an autocracy, you don’t need to manage it, because information is centralized, and authority is ultimate and totalitarian. In a democracy, it’s more difficult to manage it, because information is open, speech is free, and the opportunity to change the system is there. But we need to find this sort of mechanism to change it.

My approach has always been to populism, whether right or left, embrace it, have dialogue and discuss, rather than reject it. We have to understand that the grievances of people who vote for populist movements, whether right or left, they are real, they exist in the minds and in the lives of those people. And then it’s up for those who want to be in the moderate centre to find solutions which serve all.

ULF SVERDRUP: Excellent. I see the monitor here is flashing, so we’re getting closer to an end. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you so much, Alexander, for visiting Business School and for having this conversation. And then we give the floor to Karin to come back.

Closing Remarks

KARIN: Mr. President, thank you so much. I really enjoyed listening to your conversation, and I’m sure we could have done much more of that. But everyone, I just want to give one more hand for President Stubb and Professor Sverdrup. Please, an applause.

Your Royal Highness, Mr. President, Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our program here today. Thank you all so much for joining us here, and we absolutely hope to welcome and see you back again here at BI Norwegian Business School. Thank you.

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