Mark Leonard is co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the first pan-European think–tank. His latest book is Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mark Leonard discuss why Europe is behind, the global impact of China’s rise, and whether Europe can learn to defend itself without the United States.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I really look forward to this conversation. I look forward to talking about your new book. We just spent a few days together in Vienna at the annual meeting of the European Council on Foreign Relations. How is Europe’s situation in the world looking right now?
Mark Leonard: It’s looking pretty bleak. There is a real sense of jeopardy. You’ve had for a few years now the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has brought physical military conflict back to the continent. On top of that, there has been a big shift in relations with China. People have gone from an age of optimism about their economic relations with China to a fear of deindustrialization as Chinese excess capacity floods European markets, and Germans are worried that Baden-Württemberg is going to turn into Detroit.
On top of that, you have the United States, the protector of first resort for the last few decades, that has become at best disengaged from European security and at worst a predatory power. We’re also seeing a big divergence between the ways that Europeans look at the world—whether it’s on Ukraine and Russia, whether it’s on Iran and the Strait of Hormuz—from American priorities. Europeans are feeling both very uncertain and very alone. That is leading to quite profound changes in European politics and European identity. We’ve been going from Europe as a peace project to Europe as more of a war project for the last few years, and that’s only becoming more and more pronounced.
In many countries, this is leading to a big fear of the far right, which is looming over the domestic politics of many of the biggest countries. Whether it’s the danger of Rassemblement in France, the Alternative for Germany in Germany, or Reform in London, that kind of adds to a sense of insecurity. It’s both a symptom and a product and a kind of accelerator of insecurity.
Mounk: One way of thinking about this is that Europe—and perhaps particularly certain nations within Europe, like Germany—had built the entire post-war model on a certain set of assumptions that have proven to be wrong. One formulation of this around Germany is by Constanze Stelzenmüller, who said something like: Germany used to outsource its security to the United States, its energy needs to Russia, and its demand for goods to China—and each part of that model has now collapsed.
You could obviously talk in this context about the fracture in the transatlantic relationship, about how far Europe is behind on some of the technologies of the future, including things like electric cars, but also things like artificial intelligence. My hunch is that around 2016, Europe was really in denial about the ways in which its model was running out. They thought they could somehow continue to deal with Putin without that much disruption. He was a nuisance, but a nuisance they could contain. They thought that Trump would somehow be impeached or go away and America would go back more or less to how it was—that it was just a matter of getting through those four years, or perhaps getting lucky and only waiting two years, until America went back to normal.
This time around, with Trump’s reelection, the second China shock playing out in Europe, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, I feel like Europeans have started to realize that that was a piece of wishful thinking. I’m a little bit skeptical about how deep that insight goes, though. Everybody says it, everybody sort of knows it, but it’s not clear to me that there’s a real recognition that there’s going to have to be fundamental change in how Europeans govern their own societies and engage with the world if they want to be safe, prosperous, and competitive in this new world. Am I being too skeptical here, Mark?
Leonard: No, I think you’re absolutely right. In a way, that’s what my book is trying to do, because I think we’re in a situation now where rhetorically people talk about a rupture, but then the next thing they do is behave as if we could preserve the status quo—maybe without the United States. In a sense, that’s what Mark Carney was doing when he made that speech in Davos: talking about this rupture and then putting forward the illusion that middle powers could come together and preserve the rules-based order, as if that were remotely an option—the idea that Europeans are going to be able to work with the Canadians and South Koreans and the Japanese to keep the World Trade Organization alive, to open the Strait of Hormuz, to stop the war in Ukraine. It’s obviously a chimera.
What we’re having to very slowly come to terms with is that the entire edifice around which our economic policy, our security policy, and our ideas of how relationships should work with different countries have now been overtaken by events. We need to start from ground zero and work out how to survive in a world where there is very little exogenous order—and the only order we’ll have is the order that we can create for ourselves. That won’t be a global order, because we don’t have the power to determine what happens on the global stage. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily have to give up on all of your values and your goals and the big advances which have been made within Europe. Europeans are still very prosperous, with a lot of capacity. But it does mean behaving and acting in a totally different way, and that is something that almost nobody has really managed to tackle in its entirety.
You see different things happening: Germany spending much more on defence, Finland and Sweden joining NATO. But that sort of comprehensive rethinking of who we are, how we work together, and what the world around us is going to look like—that is very, very painful. For Germany, I think it’s the most painful, because the whole constitution of post-war German identity was bound up in this global order, bound up with an idea of returning to the West. The fact that America has changed creates a massive crisis—not just for German security, but also for German identity.
Mounk: In the German case, my sense is that Germany created—stumbled into, was forced to adopt—some mixture of those things: a model that worked quite astonishingly well in the post-war period. Germany was in many ways the most successful European country from 1950 until a decade or so ago. It had its moments of crisis and challenge, including the very difficult process of reunification. By and large, though, it was the European Musterkind—the example of how things go right in Europe. Many of its institutions ended up being quite influential; the European Central Bank is based on the German Central Bank, and all of those kinds of things.
What the German political and intellectual elites learned is that the only responsible thing to do is to support and mildly reform and sometimes renovate—but not fundamentally challenge or rethink—the model inherited in the 1945 to 1955 moment. By and large, that served the country very well for 65 to 70 years. The problem now is that we are at a moment in which we really have to radically rethink the model. It’s not just that it’s genuinely hard to think about what that model might be—that’s a real intellectual challenge with lots of constraints—but nothing in Germany’s political or intellectual culture has predisposed its leaders to actually dealing with that, because everything learned over the last 70 years is precisely not to rethink the model. There are versions of that challenge in other European countries as well.
The way you frame it in the book for Europe as a whole: is there a distinction between architects and artisans? What do you mean by that distinction? How can it help us think through this moment?
Leonard: The backdrop in my mind is that we’re going through a period of what I call “unorder,” which is different from disorder. If you have disorder, there’s broad agreement on what order looks like. Order basically has two components: a balance of power that can uphold certain relationships, and a series of rules that people are willing to be bound by—a common framework for discussing things.
What I think we’re in now is a different state, not where people are breaking the rules, but where the rules have become quite irrelevant to a lot of the big actors in the world. If you were sitting in the Pentagon before the war against Iran, the idea of legality or its absence was just not part of the calculus in the way that it was during the Iraq War. When it came to the Iranian response, it was similarly absent. They were as happy attacking countries that were attacking them, like Israel, as countries that had nothing to do with the war at all, like Oman and Qatar—simply because those countries were within range of their missiles and drones. There is a sense that we have basically overtaken the rules around which a lot of our international politics was centered.
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When it comes to thinking about the future, you have two tendencies—and I think this is the biggest dividing line. The architects are basically people who start to imagine how the world should be organized from first principles. They develop blueprints and grand plans which can then be anchored in institutions, laws, and norms. The model for that is the creation of the post-war world: the Bretton Woods system, Dean Acheson’s memoir, Present at the Creation—which is a very architectural way of formulating things.
Mounk: It’s even more theological than architectural, isn’t it? “Creation” is nearly biblical.
Leonard: It is biblical, but I think the way they thought about it was quite architectural. You have a set of institutions and structures, and they all make sense—all created from scratch.
Mounk: Part of that was a kind of assumption of permanence, right? If you build a building, you know it might come down eventually, but you’re ideally building for centuries. Especially if you’re doing the blueprint for a new city, you’re really thinking that you’re shaping it for a very long period of time. That certainly was a lot of the idea behind the post-war order: putting in place institutions that should be able to endure for the indefinite future.
Leonard: Absolutely. It was underpinned by a balance of power in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States that controlled the vast amount of global economic and military power. Then, at the end of the Cold War, you have a moment of rebuilding in which Europeans get more involved, and a whole wave of new institutions is built: the World Trade Organization, Kyoto climate measures, the International Criminal Court. It’s the same basic idea—you try to imagine what the perfect world looks like and then build a set of institutions from scratch to govern it.
Another way of thinking about how you conduct yourself in global affairs is what I call the artisan. The artisan doesn’t try to build things from scratch but adapts to what is going on in the world anyway. You don’t start with an ideal blueprint; you try to work out how you can reuse old objects, repair things, reinvent things, try things out—and if they don’t work, you get rid of them. It’s a much more improvisational approach, more like DIY or bricolage than grand planning.
The model for that, I think, is China, which came back to global prominence in a system it didn’t create, and is very happy to use existing institutions to its own ends. It gets involved in the World Trade Organization and the IMF, but doesn’t necessarily use them in the way their original architects intended—it doesn’t buy into the original purpose, but is happy to repurpose them and work out how they can serve China.
At the same time, China tries out new things. It creates arrangements like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation or the BRICS, tries them out, changes the membership, and experiments. It also builds its own arrangements, like the Belt and Road Initiative, and develops relationships with different parts of the world. What it’s not trying to do is create a new global architecture in which it delivers security and global public goods the way the United States did at the end of the Second World War, or the way Europeans imagined reordering the world at the end of the Cold War. It’s much more flexible—trying to work out how China can benefit from where the world is going, rather than modeling a perfect world and coercing people into it.
If you look at American-Chinese policy over the last couple of decades, it’s basically been trying to position itself to deal with the disorder and chaos created by others, to benefit from that rather than create order. They tried to work out how they could benefit from America’s wars in the Middle East. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, they don’t really try to resolve it—they work out how they can have a better relationship with Russia, get cheaper oil and gas, get Russia more dependent on China, while simultaneously talking to the Global South about Western hypocrisy. It’s a very different sort of approach.
You can see it in other areas of policy too. When it comes to Chinese economic policy, the Americans talked about decoupling and de-risking, but actually it was Xi Jinping, with his idea of dual circulation, who really thought about how you develop an autonomous economic system—one where you are not subject to pressure from elsewhere and where you build up other people’s dependence on you. The idea of dual circulation separates the internal economy, called internal circulation, which is meant to be more self-sufficient, from external circulation, which governs your relationships with the rest of the world: how you get access to raw materials and the things you want, but also how you make others more dependent on you. You see that in China’s technology policy as well, with Made in China 2025.
Mounk: We’ll go into some more of the details. I want to get to the broader themes and understand the extent to which this is challenging a kind of universalism and so on. But before we get there, there is a kind of bearish case on China as well. You could look at China and say it doesn’t have a lot of friends in the world. The one major power on its borders that it is more or less friendly with is Russia, but the Russian-Chinese relationship has always been complex historically. There have always been moments of cooperation, but also deep moments of tension, and it’s not clear to me that Putin fully trusts Xi Jinping. We will see how long that relationship can endure. The other uneasy alliance that China has with a country on its borders is with North Korea.
I don’t know whether, if you wake Xi Jinping up at 3 a.m., he really thinks that Kim Jong-un is a wonderful, reliable ally. I think that even the government in Beijing has certain concerns about the nature of the regime in Pyongyang. Other than that, China has deep conflicts and skirmishes with just about every country on its borders or on its periphery, from Japan to India and beyond.
In the world, the relative standing of China has recently improved in public opinion, in part because the United States under Donald Trump is so toxically unpopular globally. There is also quite deep skepticism about China, and that is only going to grow as China rises in prominence and becomes more of a global player.
A number of countries in Africa and elsewhere are now quite economically dependent on China, but that is also leading to a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment in those countries, in part because some of the Belt and Road initiatives—which were really meant to portray China as a very friendly investor nation—ended up with terms that were often quite difficult for those countries. As the infrastructure projects aren’t always reaping the benefits that were promised and the repayment terms are coming due, there is a lot of anger about China in those countries.
Even internally, China, along with genuine and big strengths—it is a very impressive place in its development over the last decades—also has quite deep challenges: from the fact that housing is very difficult to afford even for elite university graduates in Shanghai and Beijing, to the fact that there is a vast army of underemployed gig workers who continue to have very poor standards of living and who are often excluded from local welfare states. There is a way of making this kind of Chinese bricolage appear very attractive, but there is also a bear case to be made about it.
Is there a danger that some of the advantages Europe has historically had—being perceived as very principled, rule-bound partners, perhaps a little stodgy, perhaps unable to act very fast, but on whom you can actually rely and with whom you can have long-term partnerships—which helped explain why, despite the colonial history, or in the case of Germany despite its Nazi history, a lot of European countries are actually quite popular around the world—is there a risk that emulating the Chinese bricolage approach might undermine what have historically been Europe’s strengths in the world?
Leonard: On the point about China, that’s absolutely well taken. My purpose here is not to romanticize China. I’ve been going back and forth to China dozens of times over the last 25 years, and you could fill an entire year’s worth of episodes of your podcast with Chinese problems—whether economic problems, social problems, or mistakes in Chinese foreign policy.
My feeling, though, is that people often, when they look at Chinese success, think it has a lot to do with the Chinese regime type—the fact that you have this authoritarian power that can do whatever it wants. People often talk about how the Chinese are like engineers and the Americans are like lawyers, and make those sorts of distinctions.
Mounk: We had an episode of this podcast with the author of a book that argues this a few months ago.
Leonard: Exactly. It’s a very good book. I have a slightly different take on China from Dan Wang, in that I think actually the essence of Chinese success has less to do with regime type and more to do with this experimental mindset. In many ways, Xi Jinping has gone against it. There is a lot that is much more repressive about internal society than it was beforehand. When I first started going to China, you had very lively public debates between intellectuals, which are much less part of the Chinese public sphere now than they were before. But there is still—and some of it has to do with China’s size, but some of it has to do with the way they think about things—a much more improvisational way of governing, where there is a lot of internal competition between different parts of the Chinese system. You have this complicated relationship with different layers of government and the party playing a kind of unusual role. There is actually something very interestingly adaptive about the way they are working.
We sometimes miss that, particularly as Westerners, because their language is often very architectural. There is a big fuss about their five-year plans every now and again, and we think these five-year plans are like Soviet five-year plans—with tractor production targets and very detailed blueprints. Whereas in fact they are much more poetic. It is often a kind of metaphor: the party will set a broad direction and then lots of different things get tried out. There is a lot of waste, and it is not a detailed plan in the way that would be developed by the Pentagon or by a Western civil service or by Soviet planners.
Mounk: There was a very interesting article recently trying to undermine the Western perception of how electric cars became such a dominant industry in China. The simplistic version is that this is top-down industrial policy decided in Beijing—tremendous public subsidies, the precise scale of which is unclear—and that this is simply what created the incredible capacity to build electric cars more effectively, more efficiently, more cheaply, and often at higher quality than American cars and certainly than most European cars. The actual story that the authors of that article seem to be arguing is that there is a lot more local competition and improvisation—that there is a broad direction set by Beijing, but that it is actually the competition between particular cities, which try to attract industry and experiment with local ecosystems and local subsidies, that has created this explosion in electric-car manufacturing capacity. I think that is one concrete instance of this.
Leonard: On your point about Europe: you were saying there’s a danger of losing the things which people value us for. My feeling, actually, is that in a way we’ve slightly lost our way as Europeans, because we have—obviously since the French Revolution and the Enlightenment—these universalist ideas. At the same time, our universalism wasn’t something that was developed as a result of universal consent or discussion with people around the world. We basically came up with a bunch of ideas that were hard-won within our own countries and social systems, and then we universalized them—often because of empire, because of the reach of Western capital—and were able to spread them to different places.
This universalism was often quite unilateral. We then held people up to standards that we had developed ourselves and judged their level of civilization in terms of how far they were able to meet those standards. Some of these standards are very recent. A very interesting example for me is what happened during the World Cup in Qatar, where Qatar was behaving toward gay and lesbian people in exactly the same way that most European countries did until ten or fifteen years ago. All of a sudden we decided it was an evil country, and we were lecturing them and saying people should boycott the World Cup—rather than having the humility to see how rapidly many of these rights and norms have been developed within our own societies, and to consider that there might be political processes in other countries too.
That is part of the challenge with our universalism: it is something we assert. It sometimes maps onto indigenous desires that people have, but in other societies, people might not necessarily go for exactly the same balance of rights and responsibilities that we have developed through our politics. Our ideas might also change—they might not be valid for all time. There are ongoing debates within our own societies, and we are having to coexist with lots of people in countries that have their own desire to decide what their fate is and what the balance between different norms in their societies should be. That is a kind of big shock to the European self-image.
The fact that China faces a backlash in different countries where it is becoming the dominant power is definitely true, and China is much less popular with its neighbors than with places further afield. But part of China’s advantage in the world is that it is entering a world defined by the West, where America and Europe carry a lot of baggage and have often been telling people how to lead their lives and imposing norms. The fact that China is emerging—even if it is not as attractive as the United States or Europe—gives other countries a choice and an alternative. It is that alternative which gives them a kind of sovereignty.
That is also what is very interesting about the Chinese approach. China has realized it would never have as many allies as the United States of America, and so has tried to turn that weakness into a strength by saying: alliances are very old-school, that is Cold War thinking. They want to be in a world where people are not forced to choose between different blocs but can determine their own future. They try to make themselves the champions of sovereignty—which is more convincing if you are not a direct neighbor of China, where China is trying to claim some of your territory, as with the Philippines or Vietnam. But it is an interesting sign of this kind of adaptability they have.
Mounk: I’m torn here, because there are things you’re saying that I agree with and others that I think I disagree with. I certainly think there is a European tendency to want to lecture the world. Part of that tendency comes from the fact that we can’t really do much else in the world. There is a particular form of this in a certain kind of anti-Americanism that has been quite traditional in Europe for a long time—the idea that you Americans are so militaristic, with your guns and cowboy hats, while we are wonderfully pacifistic Europeans. Of course, the condition of possibility of that pacifist Europe was that we very happily subsisted under the American security guarantee and nuclear umbrella and relied on the U.S. Army to create that peace. Now that we suddenly realize we may not be able to rely on a security guarantor in Washington, D.C., we are rightly investing a lot more in the military in Europe and perhaps trying to become a little bit less pacifist.
With all kinds of hypocrisies and injustices in European societies, we should certainly be a little more skeptical about sitting in easy judgment of everywhere else in the world. There is an interesting German dimension to this: Germans are the least patriotic Europeans and among the least patriotic people in the world—or at least that was true until relatively recently. If you ask whether someone is proud to be German, Germans are much less likely to say yes than citizens of most other nations. But if you ask whether the world would be better if everybody lived as people do in Germany, Germans overwhelmingly say yes. The patriotism and chauvinism take a slightly different form.
At the same time, it is important not to go too far. Qatar has a penal code that in principle criminalizes sex outside of marriage, with penalties up to the death penalty—and that includes all homosexual sex, since gay marriage is obviously not recognized in Qatar. That is rarely applied, but there are genuine prison sentences. There is a relatively recent law passed in 2004 criminalizing leading, instigating, or seducing a man to commit sodomy, with up to three years in prison. That is not where Europe was ten years ago—that is closer to where some English laws were, going back to Oscar Wilde, well over a hundred years ago. There is a genuine gap between those two things.
The thing I actually want to ask you about is how to formulate this critique of universalism in a way that captures both the moral problems with Europe trying to lecture others, and also just the absurdity of Europe lecturing others when it has no power to impose anything—when going around telling India or China how they should do things is going to be ineffective regardless of whether we would want to do it if it could be effective. We really should pull back on that front.
But that doesn’t mean to me that we need to abandon universalism or liberalism as a way of thinking about which societies are just, which treat their citizens in the right ways, and what the model for our own societies should be. How far should we take this critique of universal liberalism? Is this just a matter of not going around thinking we should be architects of the world—ensuring that people in Afghanistan separate their trash in the good universalist ways that Germans in Heidelberg have done for the last 30 years? I sign up to that recognition. Or is it a deeper questioning of political liberalism, or a certain kind of universalist outlook, in terms of helping us understand who we are, how we want to govern our societies, and how to think morally about the world?
Leonard: I think we’re in a very similar place, actually. I’m not questioning the validity of a lot of the freedoms and the ideas and the moral codes that have been developed in European societies. We are both Jews; my family were German Jews.
What happened within Europe and the creation of the freedoms that we have is a kind of miracle, and gives us a set of perspectives in our lives which are unthinkable for our ancestors. I think they’re very fragile, and I think we have to fight for these rights and make sure that we don’t go backwards in a lot of these different dimensions. At the same time, I think we need to move from seeing the world as a kind of unitary system which was going to be melded around European ideals, toward seeing what we’ve managed to do in Europe as quite exceptional and fragile, and put a lot of our energy into preserving that.
There is a huge debate and discussion going on about the future of our politics in different places. We’re much more conscious both of the positive aspects of liberalism and the negative aspects, and that is leading to the rise of the new right in lots of different places. There are very powerful critiques of some of the side effects of liberalism—not least the economic side effects, which you’ve done lots of podcasts on. I think we need to take those discussions very, very seriously.
Increasingly, we’re moving toward a world where power is much more widely spread, where this desire to control one’s destiny is very, very strong everywhere, and where Europeans might have views about how people should lead their lives everywhere in the world. We shouldn’t run away from them and pretend that we’re wrong to be against the death penalty or against stoning people for marital infidelity or whatever other things which offend us as human beings. But we don’t necessarily have the standing in those countries to tell them what to do. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t say these things, but I think we need to conduct ourselves in a way where we have to be clear that we’re going to have to coexist with other ways of organizing societies—that the main people who are going to be fighting for particular rights in different places will be those citizens themselves rather than outsiders telling them how to do things.
A lot of the freedoms that we’ve enjoyed over the last few decades in our own societies are under threat, and we should put a lot of our energy into winning the battles around them. But also, increasingly, I think we do have to be less blind to the problems of liberalism within our own societies. What we’re seeing now is a much greater awareness of the dark side of liberalism and of globalization. Part of the challenge for our kind of politics—if you want to have a politics which isn’t just about building walls and going back to ethno-nationalism—is to find ways of bringing everyone in our societies along with the idea of cooperation, and to find ways of speaking to the losers and others like that. That does mean a different kind of politics.
Mounk: A few points on this. One is that domestically, a lot of the time the problem is not actually with liberalism; it’s with people who claim to be liberal in some kind of way but actually impose their values on the rest of society. There is a set of people who are very influential because they’re hugely overrepresented in the most educated classes and so on, who are actually quite illiberal, who have real disdain for people who are religious in their societies, who have more traditional communities in certain ways, who don’t go to university and move to a big city but who stay rooted in more local communities. There is a lot of looking down on them, and that is not actually a liberal attitude, even if it sometimes masquerades as that.
In terms of our general outlook on the world, I think we agree. To put it more starkly: if I could flip a button and make sure that Afghanistan is ruled more or less the way that France or Germany is, and that women there have a right to go to school and to university and to make their own decisions in life—of course I would. I wouldn’t hesitate one moment. The last 20 to 30 years have demonstrated amply, though, that trying to impose that from outside is incredibly difficult, often counterproductive, and can involve a lot of suffering along the way. That button just doesn’t exist.
People have trouble distinguishing between: either you think we should do it in principle and therefore we should do it in practice, or if you think it’s a bad idea to do it in practice, you should claim that Afghan culture is just as fair to people living there as cultures elsewhere—and that Afghan women have somehow chosen to live in the way they did, even if all indications are that they haven’t. I think we need to be able to live with the discomfort of some amount of impotence. Of course, if we could easily do something without enormous wars and suffering to allow people in Afghanistan to lead self-determined lives, recognize the freedoms of individuals there, and give equal rights to women and so on, we absolutely should. It’s just that that is not the world we live in, and we have to be clear-eyed about that.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Mark discuss whether Europe is living up to its values, what the Trump administration means for the continent, and why the transatlantic relationship is still important. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
