Mark Leonard, Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, joins Worldviews with Peter Slezkine to discuss Europe’s evolving identity, the current state of the transatlantic relationship, prospects for ending the war in Ukraine, and the future of Europe in a changing global order. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes! *The Trialogue Podcast is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.
Mark Leonard, Co-Founder and Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, joins Worldviews with Peter Slezkine to discuss Europe’s evolving identity, the current state of the transatlantic relationship, prospects for ending the war in Ukraine, and the future of Europe in a changing global order.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to stay updated with the latest episodes!
*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.)
[00:00:05] Peter Slezkine: Welcome to Worldviews, an interview series on international affairs, with guests from around the world. I'm your host, Peter Slezkine.
In this show, guests from across the political spectrum and from all over the world 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 Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. In the interview that follows, we discuss Europe's trajectory over the past two decades, the ever-complicated question of European identity, the state of transatlantic relations, and much more. Everyone should also make sure to grab a copy of Mark's new book, Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail.
I hope you enjoy the episode!
Mark, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:04] Mark Leonard: Great to be here.
[00:01:06] Peter Slezkine: So, let's begin with your bare-bones bio. You're half English, half German, and went to school in Brussels. Did I get that right?
[00:01:14] Mark Leonard: That's all correct so far.
[00:01:15] Peter Slezkine: So, a pretty much perfect pre-Brexit European.
[00:01:19] Mark Leonard: Well, hopefully not a bad post-Brexit European as well.
[00:01:23] Peter Slezkine: Well, we'll define what Europe is in a moment. But did you grow up speaking German? Did you acquire any French or Flemish in your time in Belgium?
[00:01:31] Mark Leonard: Yeah. So, my mom is German, and her mother used to live with us at home for the first 10 years of my life, so they would speak a lot of German in the background. But my mother has a very complicated identity because she was a German Jew who was born in hiding in France, so she spoke French as her first language, and then she spoke German when she went to school there when they went back to Germany. And then she married my dad when she was 18, speaks perfect English.
But as a result, she wanted us to have a kind of clearer, more grounded identity, so we only spoke English at home. But I learned French because we moved to Brussels when I was six years old, and that was the kind of language of the playground. And then, I always had German in the background at home and started learning German properly when I was 12. So, my German's not as good as my French, but they're all kind of family languages.
[00:02:26] Peter Slezkine: So, English, French, German are the three dominant languages. Any other European or non-European languages?
[00:02:32] Mark Leonard: Nothing. No living languages, unfortunately.
[00:02:36] Peter Slezkine: Which of the dead ones? Greek, Latin, Sanskrit?
[00:02:39] Mark Leonard: [crosstalk 00:02:39] Latin... We used to have to do Latin at school.
[00:02:43] Peter Slezkine: Well, so let's talk about the European Council on Foreign Relations, which you direct and which you founded in 2007. How did that come to pass? What was the organization intended to do?
[00:02:56] Mark Leonard: What happened was, I have spent a lot of my career working around politics, think tanks, journalism. My first job was working in the British Parliament when the Maastricht Treaty was going through, doing a lot of work on the kind of development of the European Union. And then after university, I went to work very briefly at The Economist and then in a think tank running the European program called Demos.
But I also did a project on rebranding Britain, which started a big debate about Cool Britannia in the UK. And through that I ended up running another think tank anyway, and I did various things like that. And I brought a lot of the thinking that I developed together into a book which was published in 2005 called Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, which was a response to a big debate as…
Now, it looks like a quaint sort of marital tiff between the U.S. and Europe, which came around the Iraq War. But a friend of mine, Bob Kagan, wrote an essay called Paradise and Power, which was basically arguing that Americans came from Mars and Europeans came from Venus. There was a sort of widespread mood that Europeans were slightly weak and pathetic creatures.
And so, I decided to write a book celebrating the creation of the European Union and the way that it had given me and my generation totally different life chances and possibilities from my parents' generation, whose lives had been very much shaped by war and genocide and other kinds of European tragedies.
But that book was a bit of a call to arms at a time when Europeans felt that they had a different idea for how the world should be organized to that which was being championed by the neocons in Washington and by other kind of great powers. And lots of people were sort of asking me what I was going to do about this sort of vision and, through that sort of process, I got to meet and engage with a lot of other people around Europe.
But also, together with my friend Mabel van Oranje, who was then working as advocacy director of the Open Society Foundation, got into a series of discussions which led to the creation of the European Council on Foreign Relations. The idea behind that was to see Europe as a sort of prototype for a global open society, and to help Europeans punch their weight in the world.
And our kind of assessment was that Europeans had a lot of resources, big economy, lots of diplomats, a lot of military spending, but that they were underperforming on the world stage partly because the European Union was a collection of kind of small and medium-sized countries that didn't have very much of a strategic culture, and to the extent that they had one, it was very national, which meant that they kind of looked at the world from a position of kind of weak decision takers rather than countries that could shape decisions.
So, the idea was to create a different kind of think tank that could play a similar role to the role that the Council on Foreign Relations played in moving the U.S. from being a sort of introverted giant to a country that was engaged with the world. So, we created this institution with three pillars.
One which was a think tank, and it started out quite small, but there are now about 150 people who work for that, which was meant to be full of policy entrepreneurs, people who want to really shape the future, but also people who can think big ideas and reframe debates and come up with fresh ways of understanding and imagining what was possible for Europe.
And then, to couple that with a council of leaders from around Europe, so we started with 50 founding members, but there are now over 300, and a lot of them have either been presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, or serving in those functions at the moment, all the people who are public intellectuals, people who are thinking about what Europe can do in the world or activists.
And then, the third pillar was to have, rather than having an office in Brussels, that we would establish offices in the biggest capitals around Europe. So, Berlin, Paris, London, Rome, Madrid, Warsaw, and we also have an office in Sofia. And now we, almost 20 years on, we've even got a little mini office in Washington, D.C., but that's more for us to be able to understand the kind of big changes taking place in the U.S. rather than an attempt to influence Washington from the inside.
[00:07:35] Peter Slezkine: So, I should make sure that Jeremy knows that influence is not part of his mandate. He is allowed only to observe and analyze.
[00:07:44] Mark Leonard: He's there to observe and analyze and try and influence Europeans to get their act together and to make sure that they respond to the real U.S. rather than the one in their fantasies, which I think has been one of the problems for European approaches to America, that there is this sort of false sense of familiarity and a transatlantic community that's done a lot to help Europeans get America wrong at critical points in its history.
[00:08:09] Peter Slezkine: Well, that is an invaluable intervention. So, when the European Council on Foreign Relations was founded, did you seek to define Europe strictly? And has that definition changed over time? Or has it always been more or less fluid?
[00:08:25] Mark Leonard: So, in my book, I kind of have a very normative idea of what the European project is about, which was a different way of thinking about how domestic societies and foreign policy could be organized. But it was very flexible. In fact, there is a chapter about the kind of fuzzy borders of Europe. And that was very much part of the ethos when ECFR was founded. We had a sort of expansive idea about the reach of Europe.
So, at that time, there were big debates about Turkey joining the European Union, and everybody was in favor of allowing Turkey to apply and of kind of pushing that process forward. There was also debate about the European future in Ukraine and in other countries that had just been through colored revolutions at that time and how Europeans needed to sort of engage it.
It was a different world where people thought the borders didn't matter that much. They were being eroded rather than being the kind of crucial focal points both for politics and for geopolitics that they are at our time. So, we didn't spend a lot of time trying to think about what the geographic borders of Europe were. We saw it more as a sort of community of fate and a political community, and maybe with slightly fuzzy edges. But...
[00:09:37] Peter Slezkine: But it's still basically the central element was the European Union, which was expanding, which had candidate states which might become members in the future, but that presumably was the foundation and the central focus.
[00:09:52] Mark Leonard: So, the polis that we were trying to influence was basically the European Union. But from the beginning, we don't have an office in Brussels and we have an office in lots of different countries, so we had quite a fluid idea of Europe, which at that time some of the big foreign policy successes of the EU weren't driven by the EU-25 as it was back in 2007 when we started, but by the E3, Britain, France and Germany.
And you had other little minilateral groupings taking forward different things in different areas. And we saw that as much as the EU-27 and the Brussels community. So, it was quite a sort of pragmatic idea of Europe. But the European Union was the sort of important focal point of it. And it remains that today, but we do a lot of work in the UK and other countries that are not in the EU, in Norway with the Norwegians.
So, we're not a Brussels-based think tank, we're not an EU institution. But we do see the European Union as an important community of fate. And also, the EU has created a lot of instruments which are increasingly important for geopolitics as a result of its big market and the regulations that it's introduced and its ability to negotiate as a peer with other powers on trade, on technology, and in other areas as well.
[00:11:10] Peter Slezkine: Well, I didn't mean that you would focus on the European Union exclusively as an institution at the expense of member states, but that the member states who make up the European Union are the core or perhaps the extent of what you had in mind when you invoked Europe, and then there are those on the periphery or beyond the periphery who were perhaps in the antechamber and might one day join the major club.
But then the picture seems to shift when the expansion ceases, and in some cases, is replaced by contraction. So, how did Brexit change the equation?
[00:11:44] Mark Leonard: Yeah. Look, there are various things which change the equation, right? So, we launched in November 2007, and actually our first report is about Russia. It's called A Power Audit of EU-Russia Relations. So, we are putting Russia on the outside of our... It was an object rather than a subject, right? That from the beginning.
But we did spend a lot of time thinking about how you could actually have an expansive enough idea of Europe to incorporate Russia, Turkey, other powers that weren't necessarily going to join the European Union, but were part of the security space that we're all kind of inhabiting. And anyway, less than a year after we launched, there's the war in Georgia. And so, these sort of issues kind of get raised quite quickly.
So, actually, after about three years of operations, I wrote together with Ivan Krastev and a couple of other colleagues, a report called The Spectre of a Multipolar Europe, which was trying to reanalyze the European space and say, "All right, it's not just about the European Union, but you have three kind of integration projects, a Russian one, a Turkish one, and then an EU-centric one," and that what we should be thinking about is how you can have a coexistence of these different projects and the right kind of competition between them as well because we were worried that it would end up becoming militarized, and we thought it would be much better if you could have different types of competition, which were less militarized. And that was quite a controversial thing to write and to publish within our community at that time because it was a much less unitary idea of what Europe should look like. It was a more plural idea of Europe.
[00:13:20] Peter Slezkine: What about the United States? So, Russia, clearly outside of whatever boundaries a fluid Europe might have. You mentioned that the genesis of the book was in part a reaction to Bob Kagan's distinction between a U.S. that was Mars and a Europe that was Venus. But they're not only sort of separate and contrasting entities, but also part of a single structure to a large extent, that this Europe emerged within a larger American order or underneath the umbrella of American hegemony.
So, did you see Europe as separate from the United States, and the U.S. was an external power that served to bring into relief what was peculiarly European, or was Europe in some sense nestled within this larger transatlantic entity?
[00:14:05] Mark Leonard: I mean, it's an empirical fact that the EU was built under an American security blanket and that the U.S. was one of the champions of European integration. But at the same time, already back when we launched, a lot of what we were talking about was the kind of emancipation of European thinking within the West, right?
So, also in 2010, I think, we published a report which Jeremy Shapiro, who's now in our Washington office, co-wrote with another colleague, Nick Witney, called Towards a Post-American Europe. So, we were thinking about how to take Europe from a position where it was infantilizing itself and which, and almost kind of vassalizing itself towards being able to take more responsibility for its interests.
And it wasn't necessarily an anti-American thing, it was just based on our view that Europeans and Americans have some stuff in common, but they also have different interests, that it's not really like a viable strategy to expect 300 million Americans to be bankrolling the security of 500 million Europeans indefinitely. And that Europeans would be better able to take care of their interests and to be a good partner to America if they built up the capacity to think independently and to defend themselves.
So, with that, something that we've been pushing for consistently, it's definitely true that you mentioned Brexit, so 2016 was a kind of big shock to ECFR and took us from what we thought of as kind of ECFR 1.0 to what we started talking about as ECFR 2.0. And that was a mix of Brexit and Trump, which I think did bring the European project into a very different space. But the roots of our approach to the U.S., I think, were there from the beginning.
[00:15:55] Peter Slezkine: You mentioned already your book from 2005, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, the sailing hasn't been particularly smooth since then for Europe or I suppose any other region, and you have discussed and described this turbulence in subsequent books, your Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict, published in 2021, and Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics When the Rules Fail, published just months ago.
So, perhaps we could look at that two-decade trajectory with a particular focus on Europe. And I wonder what you think you got right in 2005, the arguments you made then that have held up, what did you get wrong, and what have you had to fundamentally reinterpret? And where might you have been right if only a couple of breaks have gone differently?
[00:16:44] Mark Leonard: Right. Essentially the book, as I say, grew out of a particular moment in Western geopolitical history, which was the conflict over Iraq, and Bob Kagan had written this essay which, I remember reading a review of it which was trying to say empirically, he's wrong. There's some like Martian Europeans and some Americans are kind of nice people, and therefore it's not right.
And I thought this is kind of very trivial way of trying to respond to it, that actually, more interesting thing would be to take his argument seriously, but to kind of make the case for Venus and to explain why what Europe was doing was actually quite miraculous and amazing and worth celebrating in its own right.
It was a kind of love letter, I suppose, to a project that, as I said before, has made my life unimaginably different from that of my parents and their parents. My father was British, he was evacuated when he was eight years old. Didn't see his parents for several years during the Second World War. His father fought in the First World War, and his entire regiment had been killed. He was the only surviving member because he got gassed at the right time and was in hospital when they were all kind of wiped out.
And on my mother's side of the family was far more tragic than that. She was born in hiding, but a lot of people ended up in camps, and there are family members spread out all over the world. That kind of level of dislocation and that existential threat is something which just lives with a family and kind of shapes your whole experience and your identity.
So, the fact that I grew up into a peaceful Europe where the borders were disappearing between France and that people were thinking about doing geopolitics in a totally different way, where instead of building up armies and thinking about a balance of power between countries, they were pooling their sovereignty, interfering in each other's internal affairs, trying to resolve conflicts through the courts and through politics rather than on the battlefield.
And that the map of Europe had been kind of changed in a totally extraordinary way with waves of countries coming out of dictatorship and having an ability both to anchor their political trajectory, but also to catch up economically with the kind of wealthiest countries of Europe. That felt miraculous to me, but was something that was misunderstood both by people outside Europe and then also a lot of people within Europe.
Because a lot of people in Europe saw the goal as building a kind of United States of Europe and just trying to basically turn it into a federal state, whereas I thought this was something much more exciting. It was very novel form of political organization, which was much more a network than a state in the making.
So, I found this lovely quote from Paul Valéry about how we hope vaguely, we dread precisely. That basically, the energy of the EU was essentially escaping from a kind of horrific past. But it wasn't a blueprint, there was no clear sense of where people were going. It was a process of trial and error, of creating de facto solidarity. It was a very improvisational project, very flexible, and I found that really, really inspiring.
[00:19:58] Peter Slezkine: And your faith hasn't been shaken by the economic crisis and the internal contradictions that became clear as a result, and Brexit, and the rearmament drive now, which seems to be pushing in a direction of greater centralized power as opposed to this pure network form of organization? I mean, do you believe that what you were describing then still applies to the form that exists today?
[00:20:26] Mark Leonard: Actually yes, like in the essence of it, absolutely. And by necessity, because the more you enlarge the EU, and the messier it becomes, it would be incredibly brittle if you tried to create a kind of centralized structure with a president and a constitution and stuff like that.
Actually, interestingly, a few months after my book came out, there was an attempt to pass a European Constitution which was rejected in a referendum, and people saw that as a kind of disaster. But actually, I think in a way it reinforces my central idea about what's special and wonderful about the EU. But anyway, I think that we discovered a huge number of kind of blind spots of liberalism and particularly neoliberalism which were entrenched in the EU and almost constitutionalized through some of the attempts at building Europe.
So, the way that the euro was built where you took a lot of important decisions about macroeconomic policy out of the political sphere and constitutionalized them. I'm very, very critical of that, and I think that was a big mistake, and there were lots of policy mistakes which were made. But actually, on a lot of these issues, the trajectory I think has been a positive one because people have been moving towards greater flexibility, they've learnt the lessons from the catastrophe of the euro crisis. Well, a lot of the lessons.
And then, there are other big problems which came out during Brexit, which was, for example, free movement is something which is both enormously empowering for a lot of people who can go and work in different countries and have opportunities which are unimaginable for their forefathers and mothers. But at the same time, you create a lot of stress on societies if you have large movements of population.
And the elites in the UK, for example, have been totally blind to what some of the downsides of that might be and, you know, it's one of the big reasons there was so much opposition to British membership and why there was a majority against it. So, I think there are kind of important lessons like that that have been learnt. But by and large, you know...
[00:22:25] Peter Slezkine: Although not by the British because, ironically, immigration increased after Brexit, didn't it?
[00:22:30] Mark Leonard: Well, we could go into more details on that, but we talk about how my thinking's developed, I've become much more open-eyed about the dark side of interdependence and connectivity and how a lot of the things that I think have a very positive side in terms of creating wealth and opportunity and giving you access to things that you wouldn't otherwise do if you do it in the wrong kind of way, can also damage a large percentage of the population, can make you vulnerable to interference or blackmail from other countries, et cetera.
So, I have become more kind of nuanced in my attitude towards interdependence, but I still feel quite good about that first half of the book, and I think that those lessons are part of the sort of trial and error thing. And I think that's one of the challenges for politics, is just to do better on these things rather than thinking that you're better off by blowing up the whole system.
Where I think I was not in the right place when I wrote that book was that I had this very polemical title about why Europe will run the 21st century, right? And the idea there was this sort of attempt to universalize what I think was an amazing regional experiment which grew out of very particular political circumstances and economic circumstances, and was quite contingent.
You know, as I said, it was a very experimental thing. It wasn't built according to a blueprint. Could have ended up in other ways. Some things worked well, other things had to be abandoned, like the European Defense Community. So, it's a very contingent thing that got created. But I wrote the book as if this was going to become universalized, and I had like four ways that it was going to be universalized, which is the sort of second half of the book, and one way was through enlargement.
And it's definitely true that the EU grew from six to 12 to 15 to 25 to 27 to 28, and then back to 27 again. And that process, I'm skeptical, is going to go very much further. At the time I wrote the book, there was a chapter called Europe at 50, question mark. You know, there was a kind of expansive idea that enlargement could continue and that you could take in a lot of the periphery.
The second way I talked about Europe changing the world and expanding was through what I called the Eurosphere, which is another bunch of countries around the European Union that may not be in it, but that were somehow kind of linked to it through the neighborhood policy and other things like that. And I saw European values and mores and ways of working spreading osmotically to this group of countries in the Eurosphere.
And I was very influenced by the color revolutions and the fact that lots of people in Georgia and Ukraine were kind of going around waving European flags and had kind of European aspirations. And the EU was also trying to develop a set of approaches to these countries in its periphery. We've spoken a lot in the past, and I'm sure will in the future, about Europe's relationship with these countries that many of whose citizens would love to join the European Union, but that have a different set of relationships to Russia and to other players from many, certainly, of the Western European countries.
I think that maybe the complexity of those sorts of relationships were not properly understood by a lot of people, including me back in 2005. And then the third kind of way I saw it expanding...
[00:25:54] Peter Slezkine: And Putin coming to Munich and basically stating it explicitly was not enough to clarify the stakes.
[00:26:02] Mark Leonard: Well, I think that there are a huge number of errors that Europeans have made in managing their relationship with Georgia, with Ukraine, and with other countries, and with Putin, and with Russia, right? You could fill libraries with the strategic and tactical errors that have been made. But I also do think that if Ukraine wants to set a different path for itself. I don't think that it's just up to Putin to decide whether that's a legitimate or an illegitimate thing. I think there are lots of things involved in…
[00:26:31] Peter Slezkine: That's a different discussion, of course, because you can say that you believe an outcome to be desirable or that populations should make their own choices, but these choices have consequences. Sometimes conflict is one of them, and that, of course, does not seem to have been anticipated at this early stage that you were just describing.
[00:26:53] Mark Leonard: So, this is exactly right. Well, it sort of was slightly anticipated. For example, on Georgia, in 2007, I was writing things with other colleagues saying that stuff could go wrong and that Europeans needed to understand that and take responsibility for what was going on and try and kind of deter those sorts of things. And on Ukraine, together with Ivan Krastev [crosstalk 00:27:16]...
[00:27:16] Peter Slezkine: Wait, and deter how? At that stage, what instruments of deterrence did Europe possess?
[00:27:22] Mark Leonard: In Georgia, they’re putting troops on the ground. I mean, that we could literally do that in 2007, right? We sent border missions to Moldova. There was a level of European expansionism, but the difficulty which you had on these things is that Europeans were in denial that their actions were geopolitical and would be seen as geopolitical.
They were treated as if countries should be able to make their democratic choices. And from an EU perspective, we were kind of neutral observers, and it was kind of technocratic questions. And I think that's the kind of biggest sin, is a kind of lack of imagination about how other people are going to be looking. Even if that's true and not just hypocrisy and a lie, it's very naïve to think that's how it's going to be perceived by other players.
And that, it was definitely criminal the way that Europeans didn't really understand how their actions would be seen. And if you are behaving in a way which is obviously geopolitical and political, then you've got to be willing to put the resources in to back it up and to think about what the consequences might be. And I think that was something that Europeans were absolutely not willing to do.
[00:28:35] Peter Slezkine: Well, before we get to the actual sort of practical policies or what instruments Europeans might be able to apply, I think it's interesting to come back perhaps to the question of European identity or the definition of Europe. Because at that earlier moment when Europe felt that it was, perhaps, a universal model, it was expanding, it was a neutral observer, then the question of identity is not so acute.
You don't have to really wonder who you are if the borders are fuzzy and always expanding and potentially the whole globe will be reorganized according to the European model. But once Europe recognizes itself as a geopolitical actor, once its borders become clear and, in some cases, militarized, then there's a much more important distinction between inside and outside, and the question of who belongs to the community of fate, that you invoked earlier, is much more central.
So, how is that community created? Is it just an accident that a certain number of countries ended up in the EU at a certain point and others are outside of it, and that's the community? Is it a particular cultural or historical heritage? How do you define Europe once it becomes a geopolitical actor that must understand itself as a distinct entity operating in a big and complicated world?
[00:29:50] Mark Leonard: That is basically where we're at at the moment. I don't think it's set either. It's an evolving thing. I think there's a lot of contingency. If you go back to the 1980s and you talked about who in Eastern Europe could end up being in the European Union, I think most people would think Yugoslavia was more likely to be in the European Union than Bulgaria, for example, or Romania.
So, I think there is a lot of contingency about it. I don't think there's something inherently more European about Bulgarians than there is about people who used to live in former Yugoslavia. And it's quite contingent that some bits of former Yugoslavia are in and other bits are out.
I don't think there's a kind of iron law which means that some of these countries should be on one side and not on the other. And it's definitely true that people's mental maps have massively evolved. So, if you go back to 2021, I think most European leaders would have put Ukraine in a kind of buffer zone between the EU and Russia, and saw it as a divided country where some people had sympathies towards the West, maybe a majority of people, and other people looked much more towards Russia and to the Soviet heritage of Ukraine.
And obviously, the war has totally changed Ukraine's self-perception, but also the perception of EU leaders and of quite a lot of EU citizens. Doesn't necessarily mean that Ukraine will be in the European Union. Eventually, it might do, but certainly that's not a kind of short-term prospect.
But I think it has changed people's ideas. I think the war, the full-scale invasion, has fundamentally changed the idea, in many countries, of who's in the community of fate and the security community. And I think Ukraine is now much more part of the same security community as the EU, rather than the buffer zone between Russia and the European Union.
So, I think these things do change. They have something to do with external actors, so the full-scale invasion was quite an important motivator, but also the way that the Ukrainians reacted and what they want to do is quite important. And then, obviously, countries that are near Ukraine have got important and absolutely critical views.
Interestingly, most of Ukraine's neighbors very much want Ukraine to be in the same security community as them, but very few of them want it to be in the European Union itself, for economic and other kinds of reasons, so, at least in the next few years. But I think those questions about who's in and who's out have now become absolutely essential and much more central to the European project than they were before, and it's partly to do with the war in Ukraine.
But I think the importance of borders also came out of the Arab Uprisings and the refugee crisis in 2015, which created much bigger debates about the importance of borders and managing borders. But it's also, I think, partly a product of enlargement of the European Union as well, in that a lot of countries from Central and Eastern Europe have got a very different set of attitudes towards diversity, and ethnicity, and race, and maybe more, weirdly, in their reaction to the kind of utopian socialist past that they have.
They're going back to a kind of more 19th-century, early 20th-century idea of what citizenship means, which is maybe a bit more ethno-nationalist, as a result of that. So, I think these are things which are all being contested, and a lot of European politics now is about trying to define these things, like who are we? What are we? What is the meaning of borders? Who should be on the inside? Who should be on the outside? How much of European-ness is a kind of civic or political project, and how much of it is about blood and soil? And these are contentious issues in many European countries at the moment.
[00:33:49] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, the question of identity is central to domestic politics in all the major European countries. I mean, every European country across the board, I suppose. But could you just describe your own mental map at the moment? You don't have to define Europe on one dimension alone, geographically, let's say, but it could be, sort of, as a security arrangement, as a community of fate, as an economic union, as a political project. What kinds of Europe exist as far as you are concerned, and as far as your position as director of a European Council on Foreign Relations requires you to have some sense of your jurisdiction?
[00:34:25] Mark Leonard: So, even though questions of borders have become much more central to the EU and European policy than they were beforehand, we still have a... I think, as you were suggesting, an idea of, kind of, multiple Europes, right? Which makes sense in particular situations and to deal with particular issues.
It's true that there are a sort of core of countries that are involved in many of these Europes. Germany, where I'm sitting at the moment, is in like most of them. And other people come and go depending on what it is you're talking about. And the EU's also building more, kind of, flexible relationships with other powers.
So, like, you know, on some issues it's working very closely with Canada, and with Japan, and with Korea, countries that share particular ideas about how the global economy should be organized, about how we deal with…
[00:35:16] Peter Slezkine: Really quickly on that point, because this is sort of Carney's middle-power speech. But my sense is that that grouping only makes sense because of the American alliance system, which has brought them together. And it seems to me that those connections fall apart if the United States is taken out of the equation.
[00:35:36] Mark Leonard: Well, I think that it's definitely true that the connections come out of that thing, and I think they're quite thin, right? I don't think that the middle powers are a meaningful community that can build anything in the way [crosstalk 00:35:49].
[00:35:49] Peter Slezkine: That Germany, Korea, and Canada are only held together by the fact that they are part of America's alliance system, and if that falls apart, the other solidarities which some might invoke seem very flimsy.
[00:36:02] Mark Leonard: I agree. I don't think they're very thick identities. I think that's one of the big differences between the European Union and other kinds of plurilateral, multilateral arrangements, there's a very thick set of common interests, values, norms, and, you know, there are also lots of divisions and competition between them.
But it's a much thicker and more meaningful community than, like, the G6 is, for example, the G7 minus the U.S. But the G6 does have a purpose. If you've got a kind of rogue America that's going around bullying its allies and putting tariffs on everyone, there's quite a lot of hedging you can do together, and I think those sorts of hedging communities are increasingly being used.
And there are big dilemmas, I use this term, about how the EU went from being a peace project, for the first few decades of its existence, to becoming a war project after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And I don't mean that it's a war project across the board. But what I mean is that the main driver of integration was about responding to the threat from Russia, and then that, sort of, got expanded with Trump's second coming and the China shock. There is a sense that...
[00:37:13] Peter Slezkine: "Trump's second coming" will really appeal to his own sense of messianic purpose. He'll like that phrase.
[00:37:19] Mark Leonard: But basically, I think there is a kind of sense that the EU is now much more of a security community, that does create an existential question for countries like Ukraine and the UK, for example. Like, are they in or out of this security community? And I think this is again something which is still being kind of litigated.
So, Ukraine's trying to get into everything, and it may or may not succeed in getting into everything. I mean, in Poland they complain actually that Ukraine's got more than most candidate countries have got, and that the goal should be to kick Ukraine out of the Single Market a bit more and to create a little bit more space, rather than necessarily integrating them more across the board.
The UK is going through a bit of a psychodrama at the moment. My own kind of hunch is that the question of British membership of the EU will come up probably even before the next general election in the UK. And you could very well see major parties promising to join the EU at the next election, or to have a referendum on it.
But you know, I think that as Europe becomes more integrated in these different areas, whether it's around supply chains, around energy, around sanctions, around anti-coercion instruments, questions to do with technology and other things like that, it's going to become a much sharper dilemma for countries that are not in it, but which are in Europe.
Given the kind of unwinding of the traditional American alliance system, countries that thought that they could somehow hedge between Europe and America will find that a much harder choice. And from a UK perspective, you can obviously have much more influence over the direction of the European Union than you can over American foreign policy, no matter how much people like your accents and invite you to their cocktail parties and other things.
That access doesn't often translate into influence on big issues which are in the national interest. So, I think the security community is going to be, kind of, rewritten, and I think Ukraine's going to be very much part of that. I think the UK's going to be part of that.
On the economy, Europe is going from a, kind of, liberalizing force towards one which is much more about economic security, and how you deal with this much more fragmented global economy and weaponized global economy.
And then there are questions to do with, like Europe, you know, in terms of borders and migration, with how you can externalize Europe's borders and build, kind of, refugee centers and things like that.
And then there are going to be questions to do with like technology. You know, a lot of what it is to be sovereign now is about which platforms are allowed to operate in your countries, what happens to data. But I suspect the core will be probably the European Union, and you'll have a sort of hub-and-spokes approach to other players outside. And I think that there will still be... Even if Ukraine is on the inside in a lot of these different communities, you are going to have buffer states between the different projects.
And I hope that part of this process is also going to be eventually a rethinking of the European Union's relationship with Russia and with Turkey, which has been tragically neglected, and where you've had a real thinning out of the political and other channels of communication, which I think is really irresponsible and dangerous, actually, for the long-term security of the continent, the quality of contact, whether it's in political terms, in military terms, or in other terms, is just not good enough to guard against accidents, escalations, unnecessary instability in our neighborhood.
And I think the case for having much thicker dialogue is much stronger when there's a war going on than it is in times of peace. But unfortunately, the diplomatic direction of travel has been the opposite to that.
[00:41:12] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, that's interesting, because you were saying that Europe has transformed in some sense from a project of peace to a project of war, that it has understood itself now as a geopolitical actor. And if that were the case, then one would imagine European elites engaging in more traditional forms of diplomacy with adversaries, large neighbors, and so forth, along their extensive periphery.
But as you say, that's not occurring. Because despite the rearmament drive, there seems to still be a basic assumption that principles prevail because they must, and that the liberal order will survive whether Russia attacks it or the United States leaves it, again, because it is valuable enough to deserve to exist.
So, is that too much of a caricature? And also, what are the dangers in Europe becoming a project of war? Everybody seems to take for granted that rearmament is necessary. Do you think that it could harm the European project if taken too far? And do you think that will have to ultimately take place within the transatlantic structures that were built for this purpose?
[00:42:23] Mark Leonard: My sense is that Europe is going through an identity crisis as much as a security crisis at the moment.
And what you described, I think, was very true of Europe a couple of years ago, but I think there has been an evolution. And I agree with some of your critique of the middle-powers idea, but I think where Carney obviously had a point was that we're talking about a rupture rather than a transition in international relations. And I think that is something that Europeans have been very slow to wake up to and to accept, partly because they had so much at stake in the old order, and it's therefore very painful. There's a lot of grief management that's gone on rather than necessarily preparing for a world without that order.
I think that Europeans have done quite a lot internally in some areas. I think the moves towards rearming are much more developed than some of the other elements like the diplomatic strategies which you were talking about. It's very much work in progress. But I do think that the direction of travel is clear, which is towards a Europe that is going to need to get to a situation where it can defend itself without America, at least in conventional terms.
I think even on the nuclear front you're going to see more and more attempts to develop ways of working amongst Europeans, to hedge against American withdrawal. So, I think those are debates which are going to, kind of, develop. So, we're spending quite a lot of our time and energy helping Europeans think more geopolitically about these different things. I do think that there's been a big failure of allowing the breakdown of direct talks with Russia to take place.
The idea that Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner, or JD Vance are going to go and bat for European interests in their discussions with the Russians is, I'd say, a heroic one. And nobody else is going to stand up for European interests if Europeans don't do it themselves. You need to have channels of communication. I think we should...
[00:44:39] Peter Slezkine: But isn't the problem just a fundamental difficulty of deciding what the European interest actually is in this case, in positive terms, and who might be positioned to represent it? So, obviously it's not Kushner, Witkoff, or Vance. But we've already heard names floated around, and beyond the name, you need a position. And it seems like it would be extremely complicated for the Europeans to come together and decide what single message they might want to convey to Russian counterparts.
[00:45:10] Mark Leonard: Europeans have got totally different histories, geographies, and economic relations with Russia, right? And that's been the case for forever. That's why our first report ever was this parallel of EU-Russia relations, where we said that Russia had divided the EU more than anyone since Donald Rumsfeld split it into "New" and "Old Europe." That's what we wrote in 2007.
And interestingly, what's happened since then, since 2007, there actually has been quite a lot of convergence amongst Europeans. So, I think they're less divided now than they were back in 2007. Very few people would have predicted that 20 packages of sanctions would get agreed, and that you'd have Europeans standing behind these different policies.
But at the same time, it's been a very reactive agenda, and I do think there's a failure of imagination to think about what kind of endgame. I think everybody knows that this war can't go on forever and ever. Everybody knows that it's quite unlikely that Ukraine recovers all of its sovereign territory.
And everyone knows that it's unlikely that Europeans or anyone else is going to recognize Russia's annexation of bits of Ukrainian territory. So, you're going to have to have some sort of settlement from a European Union perspective, where you have a Ukraine that feels reasonably secure in its borders, and doesn't think that this is just the prelude to a series of forever wars which keep coming back in the future, has defensible borders, is able to arm itself and to defend itself properly, is, kind of, integrated into the European security community in different ways.
But where it doesn't control all of its de jure territory. And then you're going to need to have ways of engaging with the Russians, and reassuring them about certain things, like, probably, that Ukraine won't be in NATO, and various other things. I mean, I think people know about a lot of the things which are going to have to be part of a deal. But it's interesting that the divisions that you're talking about have stopped European countries from playing an active role in resolving something which is much more central to their security than it is to America's security, or anyone's security apart from Russia's and Ukraine's.
But it is an existential issue for at least a third of EU member states to get this right, and to make sure that it's done in a way that is sustainable. So, that shows, I think, how immature Europe is as a geopolitical community, that thinking about these kinds of difficult compromises that you're going to need to make is harder than carrying on funding a very destructive war, which has both got an enormous human cost, but also very large economic and other costs for everyone involved.
[00:47:58] Peter Slezkine: Do you feel a certain amount of anxiety about the so-called "day after" that European consolidation at the moment is largely or exclusively the product of these wartime conditions, and that in a post-war scenario many of the contradictions will resurface, that many complicated questions will have to be answered, and that leaders are a little worried about this common purpose losing force once some kind of difficult and ugly compromise is reached?
[00:48:34] Mark Leonard: I mean, I think that a lot of the driving force of European integration is about dealing with, kind of, a dangerous and complicated world out there. And I think Russia is part of it, but I don't think it's the whole of it, right? So, I think that China will still exist. The U.S. will still be a complicated partner for Europeans.
So, I think there's plenty to keep Europeans together. I think what I was more worried about is, you had this complicated situation where the sort of stuff that I was praising when you asked me what I liked about my book initially, this idea of a cosmopolitan European project that was moving away from ethno-nationalism and coming up with different ways of working together.
A lot of those things are in contradiction with what Europeans have had to do in order to enter a kind of wartime phase. And I think it's a, kind of, necessary thing, and actually all polities have to balance these different things. And my, kind of, solution to the contradictions in my first book was basically moving from a universalist idea of Europe to more of a, kind of, particularist idea of European exceptionalism, right?
That you build this sort of Kantian fortress in a Hobbesian world, and that you make this bigger distinction, as you were saying, between what happens within the EU and what happens outside the EU. And I think what happens within the EU is much more fragile than I thought back in 2005 as well.
So, I think there is a, kind of, big fight to make sure that Marine Le Pen doesn't win in France, that the AfD doesn't come to power in Germany, that Nigel Farage doesn't become the next British prime minister.
[00:50:16] Peter Slezkine: Can you just spell out why that would be a problem for the European project? I mean, because the era of the Euroskeptics, the, sort of, very aggressive Euroskeptics, is over. Meloni won in Italy and became a big-time European and Atlanticist. One could imagine Le Pen undergoing the same transformation.
And how does your vision of Europe as a whole determine your priorities when it comes to the particular politics of the member countries?
[00:50:43] Mark Leonard: I'm speaking in a personal capacity, right? This is not the ECFR official position. Nobody speaks for ECFR anyway. It's like a collection of people who've got their own views, so I'm just speaking for myself, right? But my kind of worldview is that one of the big advances of what's happened in Europe in the last few generations is moving from a situation where people defined identity in quite exclusive ethnic, blood-and-soil sort of terms, towards a much more civic idea of what identity is, and that these are identities that people can join, and that they can be part of national identities.
For example, the work I did on Britishness was very much about trying to define a kind of post-ethnic version of Britishness which people could join, and which was compatible with Britain being a, kind of, European country and having multiple identities.
So, therefore, having a kind of ethno-nationalist party, with some sort of supremacist mission coming to power, I think does run against what I hope would be the philosophy of the polis that I would like to live in. So, even if Euroskepticism, in the sense of like... If Marine Le Pen doesn't want to leave, I don't know what Marine Le Pen is going to do in power anyway.
But I think you're probably right that she already has moderated a lot of her positions in terms of leaving the euro and leaving the European Union, and she probably won't necessarily do all of those sorts of things. But I think that the kind of Europe that emerges if you have people who have a, kind of, racial or ethnic idea of identity is very different from the idea of having a more, kind of, set of civic identities, which see a degree of hybridity and cultural cross-pollination as kind of positive, rather than threatening things.
So, that's why I worry about these sorts of parties, as much as whether or not they like Brussels. It's more about how they define their identities. There are other people in my social sphere, and maybe even my colleagues, who also will worry about their attitudes towards Russia or China or things like that.
But for me, I'm much more worried about the way that they define identity. And then also, a lot of these parties have got quite majoritarian instincts, and that is something which is, kind of, worrying as well for the fabric of the EU, which has been a project that has tried to defend minorities and ensure a degree of pluralism.
And my worry is that if you don't have structures which safeguard a degree of pluralism, then the whole becomes much more fragile and is more likely to break up, right? But I don't think that's a sort of short-term threat. It's not like they'll leave the euro. But I think that they could end up weakening some of the moral and ethical and sort of philosophical foundations of the European project.
And I think these are legitimate political battles. You know, they're ones that one could win. But it's not a given. And what's happening in a lot of different countries in Europe at the moment, is you're having these sorts of debates about who we are and what our identity is, which are being linked up with questions about distribution as well, as these things always are.
[00:53:58] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, the identity question is an interesting one. We've dwelt on it quite a bit, but it seems like it's no longer a question of tribalism versus universalism, but different levels of identity, and that an exclusively racialist or nationalist identity would obviously preclude the construction of a very coherent European identity.
But that second question still needs to be answered, in its own right. But I've got two final questions. One, you said that Europe should learn to defend itself absent America. Now all the discussion is about NATO 3.0, but the burden-shifting framework assumes that the burden is the same. Do you believe that, at some point in the stage of Europe increasing its autonomy, decreasing its dependence on the United States, the United States might think, "Oh, shit, this is no longer about just shifting burdens, but losing an asset, or losing our ability to control outcomes. Now we are going to actively or in some other fashion oppose this trajectory in Europe"?
[00:54:59] Mark Leonard: Yeah. Well, that's basically what American policymakers have done in a, kind of, soft and friendly way for like my entire lifetime, right? Is to try and stop that quest for autonomy in different ways, and to increase the dependence of Europeans on the U.S. And they've had willing subjects on the European side, because most European countries didn't want to spend a vast amount of their GDP on defense.
So, you know, that was the kind of Faustian bargain which you had after the Cold War. But I think it's running out of juice, because it's both more expensive to the U.S. than it used to be. There are many more demands on the American purse than there were beforehand.
America's relative power and weight and ability to do stuff in the world is sort of shrinking. There are more and more trade-offs when it comes to materiel, to political attention, and other things. And it's just not a particularly important space, so I think the role of Europe in the American strategic imaginaire is going to carry on shrinking over time.
And at the same time, from a European perspective, the status quo is really not working as well anymore. It was, kind of, working all right when you didn't have like wars taking place in the continent, and where countries didn't fear that they might be occupied. But at the moment there's a lot of instability in Europe, and there's even more fear about future instability, and that is leading countries to take on very expensive burdens.
And like, Germany's a very powerful example of that, as a country that was absolutely delighted not to have to spend 3% of its GDP on defense for most of the last few decades, and now it's doing this. I fear that Europeans might overshoot a bit, because I don't think Russia is a threat of the same scale as the Soviet Union. But you know, I think that there is a long way to go before they do, kind of, overshoot. And I think they need to focus much more on building up their capabilities than on pacifying Donald Trump with arbitrary spending figures which they're meeting.
But yeah, I mean, it's definitely true that once you have capabilities, you look at the world in a different way. And it is not impossible that Europeans become less herbivorous and create a lot of chaos in their neighborhood. There are also questions about what kind of a power Ukraine might be after a settlement.
[00:57:27] Peter Slezkine: Final theoretical question, what do you believe to be the essential elements of international politics today? The nation, the state, the individual, empire, civilization? And which of these categories do you think is most useful when considering the future of Europe?
[00:57:47] Mark Leonard: I think obviously individuals are always going to be, kind of, important, and in some ways more important and empowered, partly because a lot of them have enormous resources. People like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and other people are able to do a lot of stuff with wider implications outside of their countries.
But I still think that the main unit of international relations is going to be the nation-state. I think that "empire" is maybe quite useful in the sense that they have kind of messy and porous borders. And I think that we are going to see a lot more fragmentation and a much more complicated and plural world than the one that was around during the Cold War and in the post-Cold War era.
And if you have a modern idea of empire, which can include things like the European Union, but also other kinds of gatherings which are maybe built some around regions, maybe some around particular technologies. I suspect the city-state will be less important than we thought it was going to be in the '90s and the early years of this century. And "civilization," it's very striking how much civilizational discourse there is. And I think that reflects the fact that we're coming to the end of a kind of era where Western universalism held a lot of purchase on the world, and we're seeing much greater fragmentation.
So, people are looking for models which came before the West, which is, like, why you're getting all this civilizational thinking. To my mind, the civilizational thinking often masks the crises of the different civilizations rather than something which is particularly unified. And I think all of the big civilizations are going through a kind of massive crisis.
In Islam, they've been having a kind of crisis of religiosity. In Russia, there's a kind of crisis of imperialism. In China, there is a, sort of, big crisis around growth, what happens when you no longer have this level of economic growth? In America, there's a kind of massive crisis of democracy, and what it means to think of yourself as a kind of democratic country.
In the European Union, there's a sort of crisis of soft power which we've been kind of talking about earlier. So, I think we'll definitely see more civilizational discourse, but I'm not sure whether these civilizations are going to be kind of unitary players. I think when they have nations behind them, as in the case of Iran, or China, or Russia, or Turkey, those states are going to be really important players. And I think that they're increasingly going to want to set their own paths and channel their own ideas about what happens. And they'll probably express themselves in civilizational terms.
But I don't know if that makes them a "civilization-state," or whether it just means that they're a big nation-state which is rejecting, kind of, Western intellectual and cultural and political hegemony. I think that's definitely going to happen. We're going to see a much more multipolar, plural world when it comes to the level of ideas, norms, cultures, operating systems, a lot more complexity.
[01:00:57] Peter Slezkine: Yeah. Well, just as Iran or Turkey, sort of, lay claim to civilizations that extend beyond their borders, now the United States as an empire of sorts is laying claim to all of Western civilization. So, we will see if Europe manages to create an area of its own, outside of a reimagined American hegemony.
But let's end on the note of all civilizations declining equally. We didn't get to China and the EU, which you know more than anyone about, but it's good to have something to discuss next time around. So, thanks so much.
[01:01:29] Mark Leonard: Thank you very much.
[01:01:34] Peter Slezkine: Thanks for listening to World Views. Make sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss out on any episodes. World Views is hosted by the Stimson Center and produced by University FM.