Том Флетчер – The Naked Diplomat: Understanding Power and Politics in the Digital Age (страница 3)

I think President Obama is a humble man with much to be arrogant about. We will find out whether President Trump is the opposite. Whether he can learn to restrain his inner Trump. And whether we really are set for a period in which the most powerful nation in the world is led by a blond Berlusconi.3 Ironically, we are left hoping that he is a politician who doesn’t follow through on his election promises.

More importantly, we will learn fast whether society has evolved, has learnt from history how to contain its own inner Trump. Humankind’s story is one of the gradual – albeit with bad years, and sometimes bad decades – evolution of reason over craziness, expertise over instinct, community over tyranny, and honesty over lies. Painstakingly and with great sacrifices, we built political systems to restrain the dangerous individual who believes that only he – and almost always he – has the answers. As a species, our strength is that we know we are a work in progress.

So we need to remind ourselves how to restrain tyrants. Basic dictatorship is not complicated. It tends to follow very similar patterns: an economic crash, blamed by the aspiring tyrant on elites, minorities and his opponents; the promise of greatness, of bread and circuses (or cookouts and reality TV in the modern version); the gradual undermining of institutions; intimidation of the independent media; the reward (not confined to dictatorships, of course) of loyalty over competence; holding enemies close; the building of a personality cult; and the systematic removal of checks and balances.

At each of those moments, the dictator hopes that we stay silent, argue among ourselves, or become distracted. In the period ahead, we are going to find out if the checks and balances created over centuries to constrain our inner Trumps are being simply tested, or tested to destruction. The painful lessons of the twenty-first century stand before the firing squad, wondering if they will hear the first shot.

And what about Brexit – depending on where you stand, either Independence Day, a ‘quiet revolution’, or a suicide note.

The UK’s role in the twenty-first century will not be defined by the EU referendum itself, but how the British respond to it. The period ahead will require a sense of collective purpose that we have not had since the Second World War.

I spent much of 2016 in places that have entered an uncertain time because of the referendum: Dublin, Belfast, Barcelona, Gibraltar, Berlin, London, Cyprus. The decision of the UK people to leave the EU may have been based largely on local factors, but it is the best example of how decisions in one country now affect everyone. Ironically, our localism made the case for internationalism, because it has placed us in the position of needing to work harder on our international partnerships. It is also part of an even greater irony – a worldwide campaign against globalisation.

These are moments of peril for Europe more widely. For the first time since the Second World War, people are leaving the European centre at an alarming rate, and parties that have dominated are not just losing but being wiped out. W. B. Yeats saw it well at a time of similar upheaval in 1919:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.4

That passionate intensity is at the heart of the third symptom of twenty-first-century change, and a theme of much of this book – the polarisation of debate and the consequent rise of extremism.

As later chapters describe, I was ambassador in Beirut when the Syria conflict began, and lived through the four years in which it developed into the worst war of the twenty-first century. Let’s remember that the Assad killing machine has no pause button. Industrial terror is its factory setting, and it survives only through brutality. I will spend much of my life trying to explain how and why we let it happen on our watch. And much of my time now is spent trying to ensure that Syrian children denied education do not pay the price. They deserve better than the choice between a barrel-bombing tyrant, the box-office barbarity of ISIL, and the perils of a Mediterranean raft. They deserve more than the suicide vest or life jacket. The closing chapters of this book argue for a return to our humanitarian responsibilities.

But we cannot understand the wider challenges facing the world without looking at Syria. There is such a strong connection between breakdown in the Middle East and the polarisation of debate in our own societies. And Syria is the grimmest example of what happens when the international order fails – you get carnage, great power conflicts, and a Petri dish for extremism.

And that extremism will continue to have consequences for all of us. I describe in this book how the three cities in which I have spent most of my adult life – Paris, Beirut and Nairobi – have been victims of terror. The sociopaths with smartphones have reawakened our own versions of extremism. It is a vicious cycle in which those who want to radicalise communities in the West and the Middle East feed off each other’s messages.

So, the scaffolding put up around the twentieth century’s global order is fragile. We are still building the driverless car but seem to have achieved a driverless world. An age of austerity has combined with an age of migration and an age of massive technological change. This brings the mix of immigration, insecurity and inequality that fuels nationalism and extremism.

As a result, I believe we will see new battles in the twenty-first century. Not, like the twentieth century, between East and West, North and South, men and women, black and white, or Islam and Christianity.

Instead we will see four new dividing lines.

Firstly, between coexisters (like the caveman in my first chapter) and wall builders. The target of Islamist extremists is often the ‘greyzone’ – places where people interact across communities and races. This places them on the same side as Western extremists, on the wrong side of the twenty-first-century’s key argument: between those who want to live together and those who don’t. Their publicity machine thrives on Donald Trump, burkini bans, and any measure that makes Western claims of openness, tolerance and respect seem a sham. In the battle for modern Islam, we rely heavily on the moderate voices prevailing. Yet too often we undermine their message by not sticking to our deeply held values. There isn’t a twenty-first-century problem to which the answer is another brick in the wall. Post-US election, there is a bigger battle at stake for all of us: to ensure that it is harder for the next Trump to weaponise intolerance in the way he has.

Secondly, we will see a division between libertarians and control freaks. This will pit the prophets of complete freedom against those who argue we need secrets, in our personal lives and as governments. So we have Julian Assange and WikiLeaks at one end of the spectrum and the North Koreans at the other. Most of us will find our position, issue by issue. But there will be surprises too. Former Commander of Joint Special Operations Command Stan McChrystal is right that it is now more dangerous to share too little information than too much. Governments are beginning to recognise that without opening up they cannot establish the trust necessary to govern. Chapter 8 looks in more detail at this balance between security and liberty.

Thirdly, the line will be between those who want to make the problem bigger and those who want to make it smaller. This book argues that technology has created a significant shift in the power balance between global, regional, national, local and individual. All the talk in Britain at the moment is about our relationship as a nation with Europe. Yet these two entities – the superstate and the nation state – are the two that are going to lose power fastest in the twenty-first century. We’ll need better global systems; more powerful local systems; and we’ll want more individual control. That doesn’t leave the nation state or regional organisation with much. We will need to make the case to a more sceptical public that it is sometimes in the national interest to pool sovereignty.

Finally, we will see a growing chasm between ‘on demand’ winners and ‘on demand’ losers. Many of us are going to love the ‘on demand’ economy. We’ll get more of what we want when we need it. But it will take a lot of people to service that. Their time will be on demand so that ours can be our own. Make that gap between winners and losers too wide, and we create peril. Growing inequality is the biggest geopolitical risk today.5 If displaced people had a country, it would be the twenty-first largest in the world.6

We better mind that gap.

So how do we survive the twenty-first century as businesses, individuals and countries?