Leonard Benardo, Senior Vice President at the Open Society Foundations, joins us to discuss OSF’s emergence and evolution, defining values of open societies, and heterodox thinking for turbulent times. *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Leonard Benardo, Senior Vice President at the Open Society Foundations, joins us to discuss OSF’s emergence and evolution, defining values of open societies, and heterodox thinking for turbulent times.
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*The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Peter Slezkine: I'm Peter Slezkine, Director of the U.S.-Russia-China Trialogue project at the Stimson Center. Since the middle of the 20th century, relations among the United States, Russia, and China have had an enormous impact on each country separately and on the world as a whole. The purpose of the Trialogue is to better understand this extraordinarily complex and consequential relationship by directly engaging with experts from all three countries.
In this show, guests from across the political spectrum and from every corner of the globe share their views in their own voice. While the Stimson Center seeks to provide access to a wide variety of perspectives, it does not endorse any particular position. We leave it to the listeners to judge the validity and value of the views expressed by the guests. I hope you enjoy the podcast.
My guest today is Leonard Bernardo, Senior Vice President at the Open Society Foundations. In the last few weeks, we've been building toward a clash between the Trump Administration and George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. What will come of the conflict is still unclear.
In this episode, we mostly avoid present day politics and instead look back to the history of the Open Society Foundations since the early 1990s, especially in Eastern Europe, and reexamine assumptions from that time in light of subsequent events. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Lenny, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:27] Lenny Benardo: Thank you, Peter. It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:29] Peter Slezkine: So, perhaps, you could begin by giving us a brief overview of your biography. Where did you grow up? What did your parents do? Where did you go to school?
[00:01:39] Lenny Benardo: I grew up in New York City, up in the Bronx, and my parents were educators. My father was the chair of the Department of Foreign Languages, New York City Public Schools, and my mother was a high school English teacher in my high school. Not easy for an adolescent. And then I went...
[00:01:58] Peter Slezkine: What grade did she give you?
[00:02:01] Lenny Benardo: No, I didn’t have her as a teacher, thankfully.
[00:02:04] Peter Slezkine: Okay.
[00:02:05] Lenny Benardo: But she taught in my high school. And then, subsequent to high school, I went to university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then did graduate work on ABD. Never finished my Ph.D. because I started working with the Open Society Foundations, back in the mid-'90s in Russia. So, that was my biographical trajectory.
[00:02:26] Peter Slezkine: Were you and are you a big football fan? It's hard to go to Ann Arbor without catching that bug.
[00:02:32] Lenny Benardo: It's true. I think I went to one game, actually. Maybe two, but I definitely remember selling my tickets. Saturday afternoons were quiet times on campus for one to study. So, sadly, maybe even tragically, I was not a football fan.
[00:02:48] Peter Slezkine: So, that's good proof that you set off on your intellectual trajectory quite early.
[00:02:52] Lenny Benardo: Indeed.
[00:02:54] Peter Slezkine: So, in graduate school, did you study Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? What was the area of focus?
[00:03:00] Lenny Benardo: Yeah, I was in political science. I studied history as an undergraduate, went into political science, not fully apprehending that political science is more about science than it is about politics. And I learned that the hard way. But I did go there to study, essentially, New Russian politics. So, I began when everything was crumbling.
[00:03:19] Peter Slezkine: And so, you ended up in Russia in the '90s, quite an interesting, exciting time to be there. Already having landed a job at the Open Society Foundations or you first go on your own to Russia and then end up at OSF?
[00:03:32] Lenny Benardo: Yeah. First, I went on my own. So, I was in Russia for the first time in the summer of '91. I actually left two days before the famous coup. But I was in graduate school. It was not until '95, actually, when I was working on my Ph.D., which was about workers and trade unions under New Russia. And I got a part-time job working at... It was then called the Cultural Initiative, which was the branch office of the New York Soros Foundation in Moscow.
And that was the Wild East. And every day, something was happening. And when I was asked to come back to New York and work for the foundation full-time and thus jettisoned my dissertation, I couldn't have done it more expeditiously.
[00:04:22] Peter Slezkine: And when did that happen? So, you were...
[00:04:25] Lenny Benardo: That was in '95.
[00:04:26] Peter Slezkine: And when you started working for Soros in Russia, did you have a conception of who the man was?
[00:04:35] Lenny Benardo: A little.
[00:04:35] Peter Slezkine: Have you heard of him before?
[00:04:36] Lenny Benardo: Yeah, I had heard of him from. Oddly, I heard of him because... I think it was '93. I was teaching adjuncting as a graduate student, a course on post-Soviet politics at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York system. And the mentor I was given was the father. He was a political theorist, Melvin Richter, his son, Anthony Richter, had set up in '87, '88, '89 many of George Soros’ first foundations in Central Eastern Europe. So, I became acquainted with the Soros name, really, through the father of Anthony Richter, Melvin Richter, but quickly learned what I was getting into.
[00:05:18] Peter Slezkine: And you first heard of him precisely in conjunction with his work in the Communist bloc.
[00:05:23] Lenny Benardo: Correct. Yeah.
[00:05:23] Peter Slezkine: You didn't know of him as a financier. So, was it called OSF from the very beginning?
[00:05:28] Lenny Benardo: No, it wasn't called OSF formerly until probably the early 2000s. We had been the Open Society Institute. And that name, I think, was established with Aryeh Neier, the first president in '93.
[00:05:45] Peter Slezkine: And Neier had been working at Human Rights Watch before then. He came from Human Rights Watch to Open Society?
[00:05:50] Lenny Benardo: That's right.
[00:05:50] Peter Slezkine: Okay.
[00:05:52] Lenny Benardo: That’s right. Aryeh Neier was one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, and before that was the president of the American Civil Liberties Union. And it was with Aryeh that that name, I think, was first deployed. Before that, the legal name was probably the Soros Foundation, back in the '90s, early '90s, late '80s.
[00:06:11] Peter Slezkine: Interesting. So, Open Society, the term did not become the brand until you said at what point?
[00:06:19] Lenny Benardo: I think, formally, '93, when Aryeh became the first president. And George Soros always wanted its name to be Open Society. He was quite insistent that he didn't want a foundation named after him. He wanted it named after an idea, a concept. And so, eventually got his way, certainly, unlike the Fords, the Carnegies, the Melons, the Rockefellers, and the like.
[00:06:44] Peter Slezkine: Well, so let's investigate that idea. So, Open Society, I imagined, was defined in contrast to a closed society, which ultimately was represented by the Communist bloc. In that early 1990s stage, was there a sense that the foundation's work would be temporary? That these captive nations, having gained their national liberty, would become open? They needed help at the start, but that this was a short-lived mission, and naturally, these societies would be open, would remain open? Or was it supposed to be a long-term, sort of, permanent project?
[00:07:21] Lenny Benardo: Yeah. First, I should say the concept of the Open Society was made most famous, of course, by Karl Popper, in his two-volume Open Society and Its Enemies that he wrote in New Zealand during the war. And George Soros had studied with him at the LSC, 1949, '50. And that really got him thinking about the utility of this concept.
[00:07:42] Peter Slezkine: That's the proper book where Plato is the proto-totalitarian.
[00:07:47] Lenny Benardo: Yeah, exactly.
[00:07:49] Peter Slezkine: Okay.
[00:07:50] Lenny Benardo: But George Soros never intended for the foundation to live forever. It was a project of his that he thought would help contribute to some of the transformative changes going on in Central Eastern Europe in the former Soviet Union in, certainly, the '90s. But things endured. And we began to work outside of that traditional region. We began work in the U.S. We began work in what we now call the Global South in Latin American, Africa, and the like.
And so, at one point, he wanted the entire foundation network, all the national foundations that he had established in different countries, to go belly up in 2010. 2010 was the year it was going to all be over, but we passed that.
[00:08:39] Peter Slezkine: At what point did he set that time horizon?
[00:08:43] Lenny Benardo: Probably, in the early 2000s.
[00:08:45] Peter Slezkine: So, in the midst of the War on Terror, there was a hopeful sense that perhaps by 2010, Open Society's mission would've been fulfilled.
[00:08:55] Lenny Benardo: That's right. But I will say he became exceptionally active philanthropically, politically, and otherwise with respect to the then George W. Bush administration, that, I do think was quite a factor in having him understand that even so-called open societies were deeply riddled with contradictions and problems. And thereby, the foundation's utility would, in effect, still be manifest.
[00:09:23] Peter Slezkine: But so that's a later stage. At some point, there's an understanding that open societies are always a work in progress. Nothing is totally open, there's no open-closed dichotomy, I suppose. But in the 1990s, in the so-called Wild East, was there a sense at the start that this was a moment of transition? Everything had collapsed. There was something that was being born. And you guys were midwifing it. I mean, how would you describe your work in the '90s in the former Soviet Union? Who were you supporting? What were you hoping to accomplish?
[00:09:55] Lenny Benardo: I think that there was a very hopeful period despite the state collapsing in Russia, that new institutions could be formed, in some ways, tabula rasa. Ed Hewitt became quite friendly with George Soros. He was a Soviet economist who felt that one could isolate specific sectors of the New Russian economy as model market sectors and focus on them specifically. That would then be to the benefit of the other sectors of the economy.
We look at that conceit now and wonder how one could have ever imagined that project could have delivered something of use. Because the interconnection from the Soviet period of so many institutions and sectors and the like made such a claim utopia. But that wasn't understood, frankly, at that point, when the, kind of, rise of institutional thinking rather than culture took pride of place. And we were part of that. We felt that the right institutions never were the, kind of, deeply economistic approach of just get the incentives right and things will be fine. It was much more nuanced, I feel, than that. It wasn't just about incentive structures. But it was very focused on institutions rather than culture.
So, if you could set up a rules-abiding constitutional court, you could set up free media institutions, elections in which you can't determine the outcome ex-ante or change in ex-post markets. If these institutions can be coherent and vital, they will determine the course of history. And so, all of the questions around legacy and culture and history were sidelined as determinative of social change. And part of that was a kind of deeply aspirational moment that we were living in. Part of it was naivete. And part of it was just that there were a lot of different actors at that point competing for different elements of the scene in terms of change, that things got very confusing.
[00:12:18] Peter Slezkine: And your counterparts in Russia subscribed wholly to the same perspective.
[00:12:29] Lenny Benardo: I mean, I think that there were differences in style, and I think there were differences in what could be achieved in what period of time. But I was working specifically on education. Again, I was a graduate student, so I was working both in my Ph.D. and working at the foundation. These were early times for the internet, and so to have a place to hang your hat where there was a fax machine, and good internet service was quite something.
But to take just the example of education, we had a program that was entitled The Transformation of the Humanities. Again, with 30, 35 years of history now behind us, you could look at a title like that and wonder at the extent of its, if you will, megalomaniacal conceptions. How could you transform an entire humanities field by dint of simply new textbooks and critical thinking? Of course, it was far too ambitious. And it led to blowback.
But the commitments on the George Soros and the foundation had in an environment in which civil society, such as it was, was never flat in the way that the totalitarian school might have had it, but it wasn't dense in a way that, of course, it existed in other geographies. It did need this kind of autonomous institutions separate from the state. It did need to be built up, and it did need to be fostered.
And we felt that through efforts, like textbook reform, new critical pedagogical programs, new work, both in schools and in universities, we were going to make headway to allow for that kind of far more variated critical pedagogical practice that we thought as liberals was vital for Russia's transition to what might be called democracy and markets.
[00:14:37] Peter Slezkine: And many of the new liberal elites of the 1990s and Russia were supported by Soros at this time. I mean, it was far-reaching in its impact at that moment in terms of keeping people afloat at a very difficult time.
[00:14:53] Lenny Benardo: Exactly. We also had a separate foundation called the International Science Foundation that essentially gave stipends to scientists so that they would stay in country. They would not join the brain drain to Europe and the U.S. And in fact, it was overwhelmingly successful in ensuring that New Russian science could be maintained.
[00:15:17] Peter Slezkine: What did you make of the 1996 election, where Yeltsin was challenged by the communist Zyuganov? This is, in some sense, the first test of these new institutions, but the old guard was clearly popular. How did you perceive that at the moment? And what was the foundation's approach?
[00:15:36] Lenny Benardo: I would say that there's no relationship to the foundation as such in those ‘96 elections. I can give you a personal point of view, Peter, which is that there was a colossal error in disputing and diminishing the power that Zyuganov and his party continued to have. And certainly, by 1996, the economy in Russia was in such free fall. The poverty had become outside the capitals, but even within it, so pervasive. The state had been so badly battered and so much stolen from it that Zyuganov's popularity was not just by or from the kind of Octo and Nonagenarian set. And ignoring that and playing politics of very much the worst kind to avoid what was seen as a potential regress to some form of authoritarian or Soviet style polity was an extraordinary error. But that wasn't the foundation's error. That was certainly the error of some liberals, for sure, who were quite paranoid about that state of play returning.
[00:16:55] Peter Slezkine: Was there a qualitative difference in the foundation's work in Russia, post-Soviet states, and Eastern European former members of the Warsaw Pact? Were these three different categories? Was it just Russia and everything else? Or was initially the approach the same throughout this entire Eastern Bloc?
[00:17:15] Lenny Benardo: What made George Soros's philanthropy, I think, Peter, very distinct is that he put or invested authority, both financial and intellectual authority, in local boards. So, decisions weren't being made in Chicago or London or Brussels or Washington. Decisions were being made in Da Chan Bay and Amadi and Moscow, and Warsaw, et cetera.
Now, there were always a, kind of, more or less roster of initiatives or programs, if you will, that George Soros was open to underwriting. He wouldn't be interested in starting some kind of organized football league. So, they dealt with, certainly, human rights, rule of law, justice, education, public health, and the like. But it was very much determined by the local boards themselves. And for example, the board of the Russia Foundation was made up of some very prominent and quite credible liberals — people like Daniil Aleksandrovich Granin, very prominent Soviet writer, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a founder of the Moscow Helsinki group.
So, these were prominent people making decisions for the foundation. Overall, I would say there was certainly a similarity. Human rights often took pride of place, as did education, because the round for them, whether we were talking about Slovakia or Kyrgyzstan, was quite weak. And so, there was a lot of room to develop programmatic ideas.
[00:18:53] Peter Slezkine: And human rights were understood how? Through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in other UN documents, or through the lens, mostly, of democracy transition until the 1990s focus on post-Communist institution building?
[00:19:12] Lenny Benardo: You know, human rights, I attribute its understanding in this way, largely, even exclusively to Aryeh Neier, who very much believed that political and civil liberties were foundational and fundamental in the world of human rights. Social, economic, cultural issues, that, of course, became quite prominent in the '70s and '80s.
[00:19:39] Peter Slezkine: Prominent in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in '48 as well, right?
[00:19:43] Lenny Benardo: Exactly. That's true, definitely true. But Aryeh felt that social, economic, cultural rights were not rights, per se, and that they should be part of the political process. There were questions for public policy. You could not tell or direct Massachusetts or Malawi to provide a budget to house everyone. That was a question for political debate, political contestation.
It was different, Aryeh felt. And the foundations, by and large, felt when it came to fundamental freedoms, around freedom from, say, torture. And so, I would say that most of the human rights work in the first period of the foundation, certainly in Central Eastern Europe, in the form of Soviet Union, was about political and civil rights.
[00:20:31] Peter Slezkine: Was there a moment when that came to seem insufficient? I mean, you say that, in hindsight, the focus on institution, at the expense of history and culture, was, perhaps, misguided. Maybe the same thing could be said about political rights as only a piece of the larger package. So, how long did that paradigm endure in the foundation's work in Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union?
[00:20:57] Lenny Benardo: I think it began to be questioned, certainly, by the 2000s. It was never overturned. It was never jettisoned by any stretch of the imagination, certainly not. But I think there was a recognition that no justice, no peace. You don't know about that. Material questions, questions of economic livelihood, questions of employment, questions of housing began to take such pride of place, not at the expense of human rights, but in addition to it, that I think it did force many of our foundations to begin to grapple with issues that had more of a material foundation to them. They didn't always get a positive and productive hearing because I do believe that, ideologically, we were still wedded to a particular approach that led with fundamental freedoms and civil and political rights. But they certainly began to be discussed and debated and considered much more so in the 2000s.
[00:22:06] Peter Slezkine: At what point did the foundation of Soros have to contend with political claims to national specificity? So, in the 1990s, there is a sense that universal values and truths could be spread, that they aren't necessarily located anywhere and can succeed everywhere. But certainly, in Hungary, Soros was made into, sort of, an alien element who was infiltrating domestic politics. Orbán, obviously, made a big deal of it. And Russia, eventually, you have the law and foreign agents. And there were more and more around the world, the sense that Western institutions don't belong, perhaps, in domestic politics or should be especially designated as being anchored somewhere else.
[00:22:53] Lenny Benardo: To take the Hungary case, just to begin with, because I think it's helpful here, one of the biggest mistakes made was the way in which liberals in Hungary, kind of, closed ranks and assumed a position that they had the scriptural answers to what Hungary's problems were and that we needed to follow that script, that scripture indeed, and that all would be eventually all right. And that those who were not liberals, those who had not had the fortune of being educated for a period of time in the West, those who had not, sort of, signed on to a particular liberal bill of goods were, at best, seen as insignificant to the political process and, at worst, as, sort of, completely unhelpful and, ultimately, deleterious.
And the blowback against liberals that continues in Hungary, continues in Russia, I think it dates from that period when liberals took it upon themselves to dictate to everyone else how societies should run. And what's hard as a card-carrying liberal myself is that particular scripture, that particular playbook, the term of art we use so promiscuously these days, those particular principles are ones that I stood by and stand by four square. But in retrospect, I see the way in which they were deployed, the way in which liberals both comported and acquitted themselves vis-à-vis other members of society to be deeply suspect. And it allowed villainous types, racist types, antisemitic types, like Viktor Orbán, to easily exploit those kinds of tensions and resentments.
[00:25:01] Peter Slezkine: So, there is, I suppose, a way that this is exploited, instrumentally and politically, just the fact that liberalism represented itself is unavoidable in its strictures and scriptures as essential. But there is also a non liberal resurgence of nationalism that occurs in Eastern Europe very strongly from the start. And so, liberalism, as a universal, comes into conflict with that sentiment, perhaps inevitably. So, no matter how a liberal comports himself, perhaps even very cautiously, still, there will be inevitably a tension between the universal institutions and rights that some foundation comes to promulgate and protect and nationalist politicians who want to protect the peculiar inheritance and history of their country. And how you get to foreign agent laws or so being depicted as a cosmopolitan, Jewish infiltrator is another matter, but so at what point did you feel that there was a growing tension between nationalist particular projects and liberal universalism?
[00:26:16] Lenny Benardo: You know, look, 30 years ago, Open Society both seemed, and in fact, in many ways was, on the march. I have a good friend who wrote a book that came out in, I think, ‘03 or ‘04, called Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. There's no irony in that title. Now, we see how, if I may, irony-deficient we all were.
How did we miss this, Peter? How did we miss this total inversion through the ethnonational that has become so significant in the autocratization of the world? Were we simply blind to the kind of recrudescence of history? Were we just being ahistorical?
There are some people, and this is deeply ungenerous, who feel that the last 30 years was just a blip and we're simply, sort of, returning to the mean, the norm, of human history. That's all. Which is about statism, sovereigntism, ethnonationalism, and all of the great talk about global governance, which by the way, Soros was in tune for by many on the right who turned it global government, which was never his intention, but it was about international organizations and international regimes, and international institutions, and multilateral bodies having an element of authority that would take away those kinds of social forces embedded in specific self-conscious cultural communities we call nations. But in so doing, we didn't think about the role that nationalism did and would continue to play, and we didn't account for the way at all that it would be politicized and now that we say in the org, weaponized, which it has been. And there's been a remarkable turnaround in the last 30 years from where open society and global governance and multilateralism seemed to be the world's future to where we're at today.
We can't leave out for historical reasons what was known as the accession process of former state socialist countries who were transitioning to become part of the European Union, of which many did in 2004. The so-called acquis communautaire which had a litany of things that had to be checked off, different so-called chapters, something that we backed wholeheartedly. We felt unequivocally that Estonia or Poland or Slovakia or Bulgaria joining the European Union was an unalloyed public good. There's no question about that.
But the blowback from that process, we also did not see coming, where national groups began to question why they were forced to be prostrate in front of Brussels. Why was Brussels making decisions for how I should act, what I can say, whom I should befriend, what I should value? Why was Brussels making this determination and not Sofia or Bratislava?
And that's something that Orbán and others in his wake began to very much exploit. So, I don't want to make the foundation in George Soros central or exclusive to this history. There were many other, clearly, institutional factors that were unfolding, and as I say, some of which we were very much aligned with. But I think the whole EU process played a pretty significant role in both empowering many and at the same time, running afoul of many others.
[00:30:14] Peter Slezkine: Was there a limit to how far that EU would expand? You say that the accession of the Baltic country, so on and so forth, was supposed to be in an allied good, but Europe is a regional construct where it has geographic boundaries that aren't perfectly determined, but not perfectly elastic. So, what was the endgame of EU expansion?
[00:30:36] Lenny Benardo: I don't know. I think that those who were EU devotees felt that it was an always ongoing process. It wasn't going to reach India and China, certainly. But that Georgia's in the mix. Ukraine's in the mix. Armenia's going to be in the mix. Central Asia would be in the mix.
[00:30:55] Peter Slezkine: So, that was the idea. So, you go through the Caucasus to Central Asia and more or less surround Russia. But it wasn't conceived in those geopolitical terms. But Russia would obviously never be a member. And if you go from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus to Central Asia, that becomes a form of containment done differently.
[00:31:18] Lenny Benardo: Yeah. I would say that those with whom we associated ourselves with at the European Commission and in specific member states did not maintain a kind of geopolitical geostrategic frame for EU expansion. I think that there was largely a genuine commitment to liberal values that they felt were enshrined in EU institutions, and that for Kazakhstan to become a liberal democracy, this was the best way for them to go at it.
[00:31:56] Peter Slezkine: So, was there just a total blindness to the significance of Russia in this construct? Because it's not simply about the export of liberal values to the benefit of people's near and far, because otherwise, why not bring Peru or Rwanda into the European Union? There's a sense that it's kind of contiguously expanding. But if you look at the map, the ways in which it was expanding left a large landmass outside, and it was progressing, again, in a very particular way that I suppose was seen and felt acutely in Moscow
Or, like, even North Africa. Obviously, the European Union, that's where immigration comes from. North Africa was part of Rome, and in many ways, historically, one could think of expanding European civilization institutions South, but as we've seen, the vector went the other direction.
[00:32:46] Lenny Benardo: That’s right.
[00:32:46] Peter Slezkine: So, how is that determined?
[00:32:48] Lenny Benardo: It's interesting to compare the EU expansion and NATO expansion. NATO expansion, for obvious reasons, as a particular kind of European security architecture, is designed to protect and defend and deter.
[00:33:07] Peter Slezkine: Although, at times, in the '90s and early 2000s, who NATO was protecting against and who it was deterring was left out. Missiles in Poland were supposedly directed at threats in the Middle East. At least that was what was proclaimed at the time.
[00:33:22] Lenny Benardo: I fully agree. And by the way, Peter, I am certainly not here to defend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as a security body. But I want to compare it to the EU because, knowing then what I do now, I don't think that the kind of managed democracy language, the kind of ideological formulation by Putin and many people around him to, kind of, separate Russia from the so-called liberal democracy that was being thrust at them, I don't think that that necessarily would have happened if Russia would have been provided with the same open arms towards European institutions that, say, Poland or Ukraine or Croatia had. I don't.
And so, I do think we speak very often about what NATO expansion has done to the Russian psychology and to Russian strategy and to Russian war ranks. And we could have that conversation until the cows come home. But I think we speak less about what EU expansion did or did not do to Russian psychology and Russian commitments, and Russia's own way of determining what democracy or liberalism meant.
[00:34:53] Peter Slezkine: Well, so do you think that there was a possibility of a Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok? And if so, when did we veer off course?
[00:35:02] Lenny Benardo: Early.
[00:35:02] Peter Slezkine: Early? But you think there were moments where this was still feasible?
[00:35:09] Lenny Benardo: I don't know if it was ever feasible, but it was certainly an appropriate policy conception that could have been debated to see what long-term possibilities there could have been. What prevented it in some instances was the level of condescension of U.S. foreign policy in the 1990s, when, certainly, the American president who served two terms from '93 to '01, Bill Clinton, spoke about Russia more or less in the fashion that he would speak at that point about a country like Brazil. It had lost great power status. It was on its knees, if not fully knee-capped. And that it was being terribly run by an alcoholic president who was easy to disparage and mock, which was young.
[00:36:04] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, all those observations are more or less objectively true, just not for all time.
[00:36:09] Lenny Benardo: Yeah. I think what's always tricky in the world of causality, as you know as well as I, is, when you say, “Well, therefore, humiliation created X, therefore expansion produced Y,” but these are historical background conditions that can't be ignored when we look at the longue durée of the relationships between and among the EU, Russia, and the U.S.
[00:36:36] Peter Slezkine: What is the state of open society as a concept now? In your own thinking in the foundation's work, does an open society exist anywhere? Should it be anchored to discrete national projects? Or is something like the EU still a model for a transnational liberal project? What's the direction now?
[00:37:04] Lenny Benardo: So, let me give you a personal, not an institutional response, at first, and then I could move into an institutional response. In my anecdote, I've become much more modest in how I think about social change. And remember, that arc from a, sort of, young, part-time Soros Foundation employee working on his dissertation, focused on a project called The Transformation of the Humanities, from what I've seen over the last three decades and what I see as feasible and appropriate under current political circumstances, and maybe all historical circumstances, is that I think modesty and an anti-hubristic formulation of one's principles and practices is fundamentally central and necessary to getting anything achieved in a very complicated world. So, I will not be mistaken for your card-carrying revolutionary, I promise you. But that's because of experience.
I think where the Open Society must and shall continue to hold value is to raise critical thinking, critical approaches, changing one's mind, and being open to being persuaded otherwise. And so, through my work today at the foundation, I think, I want to, in a small, modest fashion, contribute to that particular ethos, which for me is fundamentally central to the open society idea.
[00:38:42] Peter Slezkine: So, your work now, part of it, is to run, curate, edit the Ideas Letter, and I'm sure there's much more that fits within the framework. It's a fantastic series of essays and interviews, as you say, exploring new ideas, new approaches, questioning received wisdom.
So, we've gone from the 1990s, where there was a sense that there were a set of institutions, which are more or less the solution to the social problem. Now, you've progressed from institutions to ideas. How long until we get back to institutions or some policy prescriptions? At what point does your investigation of new ideas produce practical actionable results? Is there a sense that we are moving from one period to another, and once we've sat around thinking about the problem, we are going to act on it? Or is that hubristically leave that behind entirely and focus on the complicated problems in their various issues.
[00:39:47] Lenny Benardo: Look, I have a 14-member team at the Open Society Foundations, which has 600 people now globally. So, I'm a small piece of the larger operation that continues to work on aspects of fundamental institutional transformation at a more modest level, where rights and justice and equity are central to its work and the rest of the world.
So, I like to think of the foundation in many ways. If I could use the D-word for a second, Peter, dialectic light. That is to say, the side of the house that most people are familiar with that works on advocacy and policy and social justice and collective action, and social transformation and social change,and all of that kind of stuff in the world of rights and justice and equity, that they continue to do their work prodigiously and focus on what you were just pointing to, questions of impact, questions of metrics, how we measure this stuff, questions of rigor.
My side of the house, which is still very integrated with the other side of the house but functions in a way dialectically, is not about impact measurement, rigor and metrics, but it's about meaning and understanding. And there's no normative judgment, one way or another. I think these are both necessary for foundation to flourish. But I'm trying to understand. I'm not interested in whether, you know, a particular outcome zigs or zags, but I'm interested in why it did, not forcing it one way or another.
And so, therefore, my work is not just about supporting progressives such as they are, but it's also supporting people from across the ideological spectrum. To understand, in one instance, post-liberals. We do live in a particular intellectual moment globally where after liberalism is a real thing. Whether liberalism has a kind of an epistemological form or as an institutional constant has been thrown into question. Whether the post-liberals have an answer to that, that's being debated now, certainly. But it is absolutely fundamental, and we get back to the point where liberals ruled once upon a time in Hungary and Russia and didn't allow others to effectively deliberate with them about what the future state of play might look like. I think it's the time when liberals have to confront post-liberals and actually debate and discuss and deliberate different ways of understanding how society and the political structure unfolds.
And I think it's actually quite an exciting time. I think what's challenging is that this moment, this historical moment, is so deeply dystopia. Even in the dogged days of, sort of, Brezhnevite Soviet ideology, there was still an aspirational push. It was still what's over the horizon. Now, at best, liberals just want to win the next election. “If we win in 2026, we'll turn the tide back. So, let's focus all of our energies on ‘26.”
And just speaking about the left and progressive generally, they once had a very forward vision. That's been torn asunder. Maybe it's going to come raging back Zohran Mamdani, I don't know. I hope so. But I think that our job — no, my job — at the foundation is to allow for that kind of conversation to happen, where we bring together social forces and particular ideological conceptions that are at odds and that need to be hammered out and debated. I hesitate to use the public square because it's such an overused metaphor, but you get my drift.
[00:43:52] Peter Slezkine: Yeah, whether Mamdani is liberal or something else is a question. Certainly not classical pappy liberalism, it would seem. So, how far can this intellectual investigation go within the framework of the foundation? You said that Soros wanted his philanthropy to be tied to an idea, not just his name. If it's the foreign foundation or Carnegie, theoretically, it's infinitely malleable over the years. But the Open Society has a particular view of the world that it is pushing toward, and now that...
[00:44:29] Lenny Benardo: It's a political project.
[00:44:30] Peter Slezkine: Exactly. So, now that the world has been unsettled, that political project is not so self-evident or has run into limits that it may not be trying to overcome. So, how malleable is the actual objective in the notion of Open Society? You said confront the post-liberals. Is this just an understanding that liberalism has run into some kind of limits, that, in order to get to the goal, which has remained unchanged, liberals need to take the alternatives more seriously, be more modest, but then more carefully navigate the route to the location that they had in mind at the beginning? Or is there a true, kind of, disputation and a rethinking of what the basic political project might be?
[00:45:20] Lenny Benardo: Time will tell, Peter. Time will tell. I think that the fact that George Soros has allowed his foundation to have both an advocacy policy and social transformational arm and an intellectual ideational arm is proof positive that he remains, turned 95 on August 12th, committed to both ideas and policy change being central to reaching, at some point, more open society-type commitments.
I think that, over these last few years, we've gone through a pretty dramatic transformation. We had almost 1,700 staff. As I say, we're down to somewhere around 600. We've closed a lot of offices, yet we're spending the same amount of money. The budget remains constant. So, it's a recognition that we can continue to operate effectively, though, by a sort of different organizational frame.
But I think that, when I use the word, “confront,” perhaps contend with because confront has a little bit more of a ballistic connotation to it, I mean, contend with, understand, be open to ideas that don't jibe directly or are in sync with liberal or open society norms, and understanding why that's the case. I've spent a lot of my budget. You mentioned The Ideas Letter, and thank you for that. That's a small piece of our work. It comes out fortnightly. Your podcast viewers should subscribe for free, ideasletter.org. But that's really a way in which to showcase the, kind of, intellectual commitments of the ideas workshop, which is that team of 14 people that work on these variety of things, what we do day to day. And for example, China is an important part of that. I think that the debate around China in the U.S., less so in Europe, but in Europe, too, has been abysmal. And the kind of impulse to achieve a Cold War redux frame for purposes of familiarity and comfort, I think, is deeply suspect.
[00:47:45] Peter Slezkine: So, what is the right approach to China? Because there seem to be lessons that can be learned from the naive approach, both to China, but primarily to the post-Soviet space, in this rush to a Cold War redux, as you say, probably won't produce the best results. So, is there a way to contend with China now short of Cold War?
[00:48:07] Lenny Benardo: Look, any diplomat worth his or her weight would tell you that one can't confront solely. One has to compete, one has to coordinate, one has to collaborate, and one has to confront. One can never, especially as a human rights organization, which we are at our core, ignore some of the truly malevolent trappings of aspects of the Chinese condition, whether in Xinjiang or in Hong Kong. But at the same time, to make that as, perhaps some human rights organizations will, the only lens through which a country, a civilization, some might say, with a history so profound, so deep, so variated and so complex as China's can make that the only perspectives through which you're going to understand the Chinese condition is a deeply impoverished one. In my book, it's a necessary one, but it's an impoverished one.
And so, through my work, I'm trying to fund those thinking and writing and debating and understanding many aspects of China's political economy, questions around, obviously, new technology and generative AI, and a wrap the question, certainly climate — wind, solar — where China is either doing things powerfully, whether China is doing things in a fashion that needs to be replicated elsewhere, but fundamentally needs to be discussed and understood. And I think the Cold War frame, thinking only in geostrategic terms, focusing only on the problematic of Taiwan limits our field of vision on a complex set of issues in which no country can any longer, perhaps, North Korea aside, remain autarchic.
The integral links of the world economy aren't ones that simply span borders, right? Climate, pandemic, inequality, these are not retained within national borders. And I think the United States, especially, but other countries as well in the North, need to get hit to that. Brazil certainly has. South Africa certainly has. Indonesia certainly has. I'd like to see the U.S. and the EU get hit to that as well.
[00:50:43] Peter Slezkine: Well, so let's end on a discussion of the U.S. and the EU. What is the future of the west of the transatlantic relationship? It was, in some respect, the unexamined core or the model for open society, originally. Now, its future is fraught. Openness is under question. And the very coherence of this transatlantic West is uncertain. So, what do you make of the West, whether the West?
[00:51:18] Lenny Benardo: I won't say that we're in a period, as some have dubbed it, somewhat cheekily, as The Enlightenment. But we're certainly venturing into those murky waters. So, to think that, somehow, in the next 1,000 days, the transatlantic relationship is going to be repaired and that we return to some sun of yesteryear is illusory.
I'm not convinced frankly that the EU as a project, which, of course, was an economic project, at its core, Sam Moyn, who was on your show perhaps a bit too — I'm not sure what the verb is — veritably said that the whole liberal project was just about international trade. I think there's probably more than that, but I don't know if the open society aspects, the human rights aspects, the social aspects of the EU experience are going to necessarily be powered into the future.
I do think that we, probably, despite all the talk of post-neoliberalism and industrial relations, we may be, in fact, holding on to aspects of that neoliberal condition. And that's the relationship that we might have with Europe into the future. I'd like to see more of Europe's regulatory regime put on offer in the U.S., especially when it comes to things like AI. But I can't imagine, at least in the near term, that's going to be on offer.
[00:52:53] Peter Slezkine: Well, the likely outcome is that the U.S. forces the EU to roll back regulations in those areas specifically.
[00:53:00] Lenny Benardo: That's exactly right. So, the future, frankly, is kind of bleak right now, but you know, hope dies last.
[00:53:09] Peter Slezkine: So, you think there is a possibility for the European Union as it exists to revitalize itself, because it is, in some ways, the epitome of the 1990s Open Society project that would transcend borders and geopolitics.
[00:53:27] Lenny Benardo: No, I didn't say that, Peter. I would not place my Vegas monies on the EU revitalizing itself. I don't see any indications right now that's going to be the case. I see it, frankly, continuing to fray and attenuate. And once the Ukraine war ends, however it ends, as armistice, stalemate, as defeat, those countries like Italy, that spoke in the language of EU solidarity because of Ukraine, I don't think we'll see that as necessary anymore.
And I think the fight over Ukraine, the fight over, maybe, Moldova, who has elections next Sunday, becoming part of the European Union, instead of revitalizing and rejuvenating the union will, unfortunately, create more fissures and fractures and debilitate it even more than it is now.
[00:54:28] Peter Slezkine: Not to end on that note, perhaps, give me one minute on the American Empire, since we tackled the European side of it. It was the fact that the United States was called an empire exclusively by left-wing critics. Now, more and more people on the right are referring to the U.S. as an empire as an objective fact. And some want to discard empire in order to refocus on the nation. Others just want to manage the empire's resources more prudently. Do you think that is the proper frame through which to understand the United States today? And in what ways will the American Empire reconfigure, going forward? And what path do you find most suitable?
[00:55:16] Lenny Benardo: If you take a social science approach to the question of empire and actually conceptually define it, of course, the U.S. has been an imperial nation. But I also think that the term has been used and abused and connotes things ideologically that sometimes diminishes its value in public conversation.
But I think the reality is that the United States is badly, badly weather-beaten. In terms of any relative indicators, the U.S. is far weaker than it once was. Militarily, no. Maybe in some aspects of soft cultural power, not so much. But in so many other dimensions, the U.S. has lost profound credibility in the world because of double standards, because of hypocrisy, and because of what happened, certainly, coming out of 9/11 and complicity now over the last few years in the genocide in Gaza.
So, I'm not bullish on America returning to the fold, the sort of statements made by the Biden administration when it came to power in January ‘21, “America's back.” The sentiment might be fine. The U.S. is not going to detach itself from the rest of the world and focus on, as the Trump administration certainly does in earnest, sort of, nativist America-first type policies. But I think the U.S. is going to be increasingly ignored in terms of how the globe is being recast, unless it gets its shit together. And I don't see that happening.
[00:57:00] Peter Slezkine: Although ironically, no matter how much the rest of the world points to the fact that the U.S. is declining, focus has never been more exclusively directed at Washington. It seems like everybody's best efforts are directed toward Trump, towards pulling him one way or pushing him the other. So, even a decline in the United States is still the pivot of the universe.
[00:57:23] Lenny Benardo: Perhaps, Peter, but, you know, I'll take the example of Brazil, and that thesis doesn't hold water. Yes, it's true Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, came to Washington to try to, as many others did, cut a deal on tariffs. And I think that was an instinctual move for the purposes of, certainly, countries that are beset by deep inequalities that will only be exacerbated by these tariffs.
So, in that sense, the U.S. maintains levels of power, certainly, in the rest of the world. But it's hard for me to imagine, once this incredibly kind of shambolic moment begins to, I hope, dissipate, that the U.S. is going to come out with its face clean and with its partners with outstretched arms. I think it's going to take a generation to get things back on track.
[00:58:16] Peter Slezkine: Well, you mentioned Moyn, and we finished our interview with him by asking what part of the world he would bet on as the future of liberalism, given his dire predictions for Europe and the West. And he bet on Brazil. So, I'd ask the same question of you. Where should we look for the Open Society in the future?
[00:58:41] Lenny Benardo: I stand four square with the professor of history at Yale University. I would put Brazil very much in the first instance.
Look, we don't know if Lula, who looks like he's going to be running again next year against some Bolsonarista candidate, will win. He's turning 80. Looks good right now. It looks like the, sort of, successor, Boric from Chile, will be José Antonio Kast on the far right. Similarly, in Colombia, where there are elections next year, the left is not going to be in power.
So, I have a lot of hope in Latin America. I think what Claudia Sheinbaum is doing in Mexico is very impressive, not to mention 80% or 75% approval.
So, elections do matter. And I think Latin America will once again have their so-called pink tide upended in part by elections. But in terms of the ideas out there and the commitments out there and the progressive policies out there, I placed my bets on Latin America.
[00:59:39] Peter Slezkine: Very interesting. Well, thank you so much for joining me.
[00:59:42] Lenny Benardo: Thank you.
[00:59:46] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to the Trialogue Podcast. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don’t miss out on any episode. The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.