Maçães: If pushed to choose, people in Central Europe would choose democracy over science. I understand that

Jan

Bruno, this book readers are about to read, is all about — let’s call it — “new norms”. New norms created by the pandemic, the shift toward the digital and innovative disruption and the world becoming increasingly fragmented. It’s been ten months since the book was published. Now we have spring 2022 and it seems that the world is changing even faster. There was a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is the disruption of supply chains. There is a war in Ukraine. There is Covid still in some parts of the world and China and Hong Kong are closed and resemble the Middle Kingdom again.

The pandemic also showed us how fortune is volatile: at the beginning of the pandemic, Asia was a stellar example how to deal with Covid. Then vaccines arrived and countries like Portugal, the Emirates, and Israel became the best-in-class. Now the world has moved on, but parts of Asia are still under lockdown. Do you think they will ever be able to reopen?

Bruno

They will, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it might take years. Years! Chinese commentators say that the regime made such a critical bet on zero Covid that now the virus needs to remain under control to the very end. Unless the WHO would issue some formal statement saying we’ve all moved beyond the pandemic, they will stay locked down. Furthermore, the Chinese will need to have confirmation that their vaccines — either the current ones or some future Chinese mRNAs — will work against the predominant variant.

Jan

How come? Other large Asian nations, Indonesia, India and Thailand, have already moved on…

Bruno

It’s really the regime in China that’s the crucial factor. Because the Communist Party has such an overarching control over Chinese society that it’s responsible for everything that happens. Good or bad. They just can’t afford to lose. Whereas in other societies you have seen a kind of dynamic where governments have tried to push their responsibility to the individuals.

Jan
China is aspiring to be the leading superpower. We can see it in tech, trade, and geopolitics. But now China is closed, confined behind the Great Wall. Doesn’t this hinder China’s aspirations?

Bruno
It does, but we shouldn’t exaggerate because despite all the problems, the Chinese market is still the largest one globally, and the world is more dependent on China than China is dependent on the world.

Furthermore, from the very beginning, each country picked their own distinctive approach to pandemic management, based on its needs, and also based on its culture. So, we had the American response according to American standards, the European response based on European standards, and we had the Asian, very compliant approach. And the Asian one worked well till Omicron. As to Asian societies, the Chinese one included, their zero Covid approach gave them a moment of confidence. Confidence that their own public is being able to do something difficult collectively.

Jan

How should I understand that?

Bruno

It was kind of a moment of national affirmation. Similar to when the United States gained confidence with the Apollo 11 mission. You know, if a country gets together and achieves a goal that was considered extremely difficult at the beginning, it will massively increase its confidence for the future.

Jan

But now, it doesn’t seem this stickiness to zero Covid is working for China anymore. Asia and India have moved on, but the situation in China seems very difficult.

Bruno

Yes, but they still believe they will be able to get through it. Whether this is right or wrong, that is a different thing. Furthermore, what is the alternative for China? Had China taken the lenient American approach, you would probably have 10 million deaths in China. That would have completely destroyed political and social stability. Frankly, no Asian nation would be able to afford the US or European approach to Covid. It would destroy them.

Jan

Let’s stay with your Apollo 11 metaphor a little bit longer. We can use it as a bridge to another topic of your books: political virtualism. You use it especially in connection with the United States.

Bruno

The relation between virtualism and the United States is quite close, but it’s not exclusive. Many other countries and societies are living in the virtual world and their leaders are selling it to the masses. Also, metaverses, pushed by Mark Zuckerberg and others, are forms of virtual reality disconnected from what’s happening on the ground.

Lots of reviewers of my book have said that the pandemic actually helped to better understand virtual world because what you saw during the pandemic was an attempt at escapism. First, you ignore the pandemic, then you ignore politics, then you ignore nature itself and biology. Everything is becoming a construct, and political virtualism is the highest form of such cultural constructivism.

Jan

But reality won’t go away…

Bruno

No, it won’t. And virtualism in the case of pandemics led almost to a disaster movie. Let’s remember Trump with his press conferences where Covid was being addressed at a level of fantasy and detachment from reality. Similar detachments from reality are happening globally and they are fuelled by populism and escapism.

Jan
You just mentioned virtualism in connection to Donald Trump. However, it has been more than a year without him…

Bruno

Now, the US is living in another fantasy. Let’s not forget, that under Biden, more people died than under Trump and actually the American response to pandemics got even worse. But nobody wants to talk about it; it is covered by the veil of ignorance created by these virtual dreams.

All of this is even a little bit ironically funny because these people advocate for liberalism daily. But liberalism warrants the creation of a very ordered, organised society which is something very different from a constructivist disorder full of adventure, myth and excitement.

This is another difference from Asia where many countries, led by China, are giving a very clear vision of what normality is and how to get there.

Jan

If we connect virtualism to the US and radical realism to Asia, where does that leave Europe?

Bruno

I think that Europe can still be nicely connected to the ideas of the Enlightenment — to the famous Enlightenment rationalism. Because we Europeans approach every issue from the perspective that it is a technical problem or a technical opportunity. The whole EU agenda is built on this notion: that every problem can be deconstructed and then dealt with technically, scientifically, bit by bit. Brussels now even believes that this technical rationalism should be exported in the form of European regulations. We saw it for example in the case of the GDPR and now in the case of ESG, the climate change fight, and the Green Deal.

Jan

Science and rationalism constitute a big part of this book. You also wrote extensively about the Green Deal and ESG. What do you think about it?

Bruno

I do believe that carbon neutrality will happen, and the Green Deal will happen. It is not only a Brussels vision or a European vision: it is a global vision. It is the only thing that Washington, Brussels, Beijing, and Asia at large are able to agree on.

The problem is elsewhere. Time is the problem. Currently, the tendency in EU institutions is that transition will happen almost like flipping a switch. And it is not very helpful that Frans Timmermans says there is only one right solution, and this right solution must be fully implemented right now. Because the truth is, there is a different way of doing things in Portugal, Poland, or Sweden. And therefore, there is nothing wrong with having a different pace toward the Green Deal in different parts of Europe. Similarly on another topic, why not have a different LGBTQ policy in Sweden and in Hungary? It seems reasonable to me. If we try — and now I am talking not only about the European Commission — to control everything, we will end up controlling nothing.

Again, I believe the climate change fight is the right one, ESG will happen, and more tech disruption is necessary. Also, I believe in LGBTQ rights. But let’s give people more time to adjust and the freedom to have a different pace.

Jan

But who will lead this disruptive process then? Everybody says that the competition on every topic is between China and the US. It seems that Europe is completely out of the equation.

Bruno

Different countries, different approaches to disruption and innovation. In China, innovation is a social process. To reorganise society towards some greater innovative goal. – We saw it in tech or in hyper-speed railways. In the US it is different. Innovation is always focused on the final product. We saw it in the case of vaccines: they created incentives, spent a lot of money, but the country didn’t show any ability or willingness to organise society to reach certain goals. They run it as private ventures. Elon Musk also built his empire on subsidies, by the way.

In Europe, we are unfortunately stuck in the middle: we neither support private innovation much nor organise society to create or protect “our” innovation.

Jan

How is it possible to align this technical scientific rationalism with the democratic process on one side and entrepreneurialism on the other side?

Bruno

There is a tension between ratio and democracy sometimes, especially in Europe, where things are not as black and white as in the US or China. Sometimes this is a productive conflict, but sometimes not. But when there is debate about the key topics — like climate change or the pandemic — Brussels believes that science should have primacy over incorrect decisions, even democratically voted ones. But this approach has created a disconnection between European elites and electorates. You know, it is a complicated to connect ratio and democracy. Also, scientists are not right in every time.

Jan

A lot of people in Central Europe would surely say now that democracy and freedom of choice should remain the leading values even when the decisions coming out of them would be unscientific…

Bruno

You’ve now said it yourself. It’s not that people in Prague would be antiscientific, but they’ve made a fundamental choice on what is the leading value. And due to historical experience, electorates in many parts of Central Europe are more naturally inclined toward picking democracy over science and ratio. They have seen first-hand what kind of results can be produced by deterministic approaches to society. This historical perspective and the strong belief in freedom of choice also created a conflict between the CEE and Brussels.

Jan

What is your view?

Bruno

I am sympathetic to you guys. I understand. Just read the documents from Brussels! No vision, no message for — let’s say — ordinary people. They are always full of super technical jargon and distillations of economic thinking and public policy. People in Brussels always try to deduct a policy from very sophisticated models, extreme numbers and super long commentaries. I am — by the way — not mocking them. Brussels documents are usually high quality and there’s nothing else in the world like them. But this scientific model of the world is distant from people. And thus, it’s not surprising that you have a conflict in Central Europe, but also in France or Italy. But there is change coming and we will talk about it when discussing the war.

Now when I am thinking about it, the fundamental conflict is actually not between science and democracy. It’s between science and politics: internally it takes the form of a conflict between science and democracy, and externally it takes the form of a conflict between science and geopolitics.

Our debate now reminds me of Leo Strauss, who I think is still popular in the Czech Republic. His whole life's work is about the conflict between politics and knowledge, and he would not be surprised by what’s happening all. He — by the way — always thought that societies cannot be ruled by science.

Jan

The internal conflict we discussed fully; I think. How about the external one?

Bruno

Many people in the old EU used to believe that Europe was a rational continent, peaceful and organised.

Jan

Then in 2014, the first brutal awakening in the form of Crimea came…

Bruno

…and then a large migration wave in 2015.

Unfortunately, a part of the EU elites, led by Angela Merkel, pushed this awakening lesson out of their heads and created a virtualism of sorts as well. Their dream was about a bad irrational external world that can be controlled and kept outside, either by EU regulations or by trade and diplomacy. We thus built a European version of the Great Wall. But it was partially hypocrisy.

When mentioning walls, funny thing is that a few years back, EU politicians were travelling to Budapest to tell Hungarians their wall was a barbaric exercise. Later, even Brussels started constructing walls. But still no wake-up.

So, in the end, the brutality of spring 2022 and the large war in Europe were needed to truly awake us.

Jan

You’ve been in Ukraine literally just before the war. Back then, nobody believed it would happen. We talked about it when we called each other when you were in Kyiv, just two days before the war.

Bruno

I think many people thought there might be some kind of military intervention. Missiles sent, or air attacks. But very few believed there would be a large-scale war. Me included. There’s now a lot of discussion about why Putin did what he did. A lot of it must be due to the poor intelligence that he had been receiving over the years from his generals. There were many people who were telling him that the Ukrainian system had been corrupted, compromised, and infiltrated and that it will fall immediately. Also, many billions had been directed for that purpose, but they obviously ended up elsewhere. Now — as I understand it — we see that Putin is correcting course and trying to get ahead of things. But the whole war was a big mistake. And he knows it.

Jan

What will happen next?

Bruno

It seems to me that we’re heading towards a frozen conflict. It is, after all, a Russian tradition to create such conflicts. The problem here is that it is a frozen conflict on a very large scale — on the scale of a whole country, not limited to a specific enclave or a disputed region. That’s the difference. And there are some doubts that a frozen conflict at this scale could be sustained.

Jan

Just like political virtualism and the Covid pandemic, we can say that also Putin’s war is a sort of a black swan. Nobody believed it would happen...

Bruno

This is a reconfiguration of Eurasian politics on a grand scale. The Ukraine war could well turn out to be the moment Russia stops being a superpower. And that is always a dangerous process. Some people have compared it to what happened to Britain after the Suez Crisis. It stopped being a superpower and transformation was imposed from outside. Something similar could be happening here. Now the question is, will Russia accept this outcome? Putin probably not, but someone that could come after Putin. Or will Russia not accept it? That remains to be seen.

Jan

What will be the implication for the western part of this Eurasian supercontinent, the EU?

Bruno

I’ve been very sceptical and even rather cynical about announcements of a geopolitical turn in Europe in the past. I never saw such a turn. Only words. Now it is different. Very different. In fact, even though we could see some timidity and some anxiety at the level of national states, there is decisiveness in Brussels. The language of the European Commission is adequate for the crisis, and it is very bold. You see, for example, Ursula von der Leyen said that Russia must lose, and Ukraine must win. We don’t see the same kind of language coming from Paris or Berlin.

Jan

And it is not only Brussels who is more vocal. The Czech Republic, Poland, the Baltics – all of them are very active. Czech and Polish politicians were the very first to go to Kyiv. Not the Germans, not the French, but the Czechs and the Poles.

Bruno

That was an incredible moment. Now, everyone is going there, but this first trip will make it to history books. Because the war was still just some miles away from the centre of Kyiv then. Real heroism.

There are two ways to interpret this CEE awakening. You could say it’s the affirmation of nation states and a particular kind of nationalism that still exists in Central and Eastern Europe. But I don’t see it that way. I see it as something much more compatible with the affirmation of the European Union. Because what’s happening is a rebalancing of power away from the French-German axis. A much more distributed power structure. And that’s good for the European Union, I think because we’re going to get a stronger European system if power is more distributed. And potentially, in the future, even some common structures of defence and foreign policy can come out of the loss of credibility in the German and French foreign policy.

Jan

What is happening in Paris and Berlin?

Bruno

In Germany, there is a real crisis. Germany made some fundamental choices over the last two decades, in energy, economy and trade, and they are being proven wrong. And these choices are deeply embedded in the shape of the German economy and German politics. After all, the shape of German economy was organised around the idea of access to cheap energy from Russia and to vast markets in China. And if these two don’t continue, then what you need is something that used to be called structural reforms. If your economy no longer fits the time, then you need something called structural reforms.

But the problem is that Germany has always recommended structural reforms to others, particularly in Southern Europe, but it is extremely reluctant to implement these reforms at home.

Also German, and French foreign policies are in crisis. What will replace them is not going to be the Polish or the Czech foreign policy: it will eventually be something like the European foreign policy. And if Czechs and Poles will be smart, they will do their best to contribute to it and shape it. Your people should be more European, not less; there is power to grab.

Jan

What would you recommend to the Czech prime minister and the Swedish one who is going to lead the EU in the upcoming 12 months?

Bruno

They should fight for the EU to become a geopolitical union. I think that fits very well with the time, but it also fits very well with some political priorities in your countries. So, the argument could be let’s focus on geopolitics! There is a real crisis and a real threat to our way of life and our values. Let’s fight that, and let’s not focus so much on socio-economic and cultural issues. They don’t need to be harmonised so much. We have already talked about that before.

Jan

The United States is another actor that has not been making good bets for at least a year. Afghanistan, now Ukraine. They didn’t believe it would happen. Now they are helping massively, but is the US staying in Europe, or have we, as Europeans, learned our lesson, and do we now need to protect ourselves?

Bruno

You need to protect yourselves.

This is all part of a transformation of American power from a hegemonic power to something different. The US is still a very powerful country, but it’s no longer able to decide on its own what will happen. It has an influence on what happens, but it’s no longer a global jurisdiction deciding on the rules of the game. This will obviously cause some chaos and instability as it opens a lot of room for other powers, too.

I do believe that American allies can still rely on American support, but they now know that they will be the first line of defence and offence and that the United States will, in fact, be leading from behind. That turned out to be a very prophetic sentence by Barrack Obama because it best described America’s actions.

Jan

What will this look like in practice?

Bruno

If a country is willing to take the first steps and to run the highest risks defending geopolitical goals that are aligned with the US, it can count on US support. That’s what happened in Ukraine. But had Ukraine not stepped in, the US would not have stepped in either. So, countries must realise that the US won’t be catching hot potatoes first. They must be there first. The US will not be running the biggest risks. So, what’s happening in Ukraine is a transformation of American power. Not a collapse, but a redesign.

Jan

So basically, we are getting to the old-fashioned: “God will help those who will help themselves first.”

Bruno

That’s right. I think that’s the lesson that people in Australia, Taiwan, the Philippines, Central Europe, and in many other places should take out from this.

Jan

So, are we coming back to the era of the 17th–18th century post-Westphalian system? Much more transactional, less predictable.

Bruno

Yes, I believe so. These days I am thinking about global politics as a computer system which is being constantly programmed and reprogrammed. We no longer live in the natural world — this is one of the main ideas of this book. We live in an artificial, technological world, which is subject to programming. Just as money has become programmable, geopolitics is becoming programmable. And the confrontation is about who sets the rules. Who owns the codes. The rules are no longer established, they are no longer set. And we are entering a period where there will be a confrontation to set the new rules.

Again, we no longer live in the natural world, and therefore, natural forces no longer set limits to human power. And everything is open. Even the war in Ukraine, in the end, is about the global system. It’s about who sets the rules. And Russia decided to make a move, decided to make a very risky move to change the global system. Most likely, because the Kremlin was convinced that Russia had access to the control panels of the global coding system. They believed that who controls energy controls the world. And this turned out to be mistaken. And therefore, part of Western vulnerability to Russian dominance in energy is being exposed. What failed was probably the regime. The regime didn’t have the levels of organisation and accountability that could direct the funds available to the modernisation of the army. The modernisation of the army turned out to be even fraud to a great extent.

But nothing shows that the story will be the same when it comes to China. I very much suspect it will be different. And I wouldn’t take it lightly.