Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. What a pleasure to see you all here this evening.
Welcome to the 2024 Lecture on Human Values at Oxford University, hosted by Linacre College.
The Tanner lectures are now in their 46th year.
They were established by an American scholar, industrialist and philanthropist, Hubert Clark Tanner, and in creating the lectures,
professor Tanner said, I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind.
I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behaviour and human values.
Appointment as a Tanner lecturer is a recognition of exceptional.
Distinguished. Of exceptional the distinguished and important scholarship in the field of human values.
And that description is fully justified in the case of tonight's lecture, professor Jean-Marie grey.
I know he has held many senior positions during his long and distinguished career spanning peacekeeping, international security and defence policy.
He is a graduate of the École Normale Supérieure, and the Institute visited politique and the École Nacional de d'Administration,
and after illustrious postings as a French civil servant and diplomat, uh diplomat, both for France as well as within the UN,
um, he served as a United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations from the year 2000 until the year 2008,
leading those operations at a time of the greatest expansion of peacekeeping in the history of the United Nations.
In 2012, Professor Equiano took on the role of Deputy Joint Special Envoy at the United Nations and the League of Arab States in Syria with Nasser,
Al Qaeda, and Kofi Annan. In 2021,
Professor Reno was appointed as the inaugural Kent Visiting Professor of Conflict
Resolution at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
He's also a senior fellow of the Brookings Institution.
The subject of Professor Gwynn, whose lecture tonight is The Future of War and Peace.
And this is a subject, of course, of outstanding importance.
This, the second decade of the 21st century, has a dismal record, with seemingly permanent wars now in several parts of our world,
particularly Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, and new wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Last year's saw 59 countries involved in war, the highest total since World War two.
Since the 21st century began. War has cost humanity never so much as in this.
This last 21 years. The number of conflicts deaths almost doubled in 2022 compared to the previous year, and war cost in excess of $17 trillion.
War shatters the very foundation of human values, eroding empathy, compassion, and respect for life.
In its wake. It leaves not just physical destruction, but a deep moral and emotional void that challenges the essence of our shared humanity.
I am sure that Professor Robert Tanner would have shared my view that the subject of
tonight's lecture on human values is one of the most important that we could have chosen.
Please join me in welcoming professor Jean-Marie Guion. Who?
Well, thank you for your kind words.
The topic am about to address the future of war and peace is very much linked to my experience as head of Peacekeeping at the United Nations.
That is when I became acutely aware that peaceful societies are fragile flowers that need and that peace needs to be nurtured.
Today, from Ukraine to Palestine, from Myanmar to Sudan.
The world seems to be unravelling. International law.
International humanitarian law. Basic principles of humanity are being torn apart.
I'm not going to address the specificities of any of those conflicts, but I would like to explore the broader,
some of the broader forces that shape war and peace in the coming decades and that shape them today.
There are times when we are not aware that big societal changes are brewing.
Often, it is only in hindsight that we realise the importance of a transformative event.
That is not the case today. There is a widespread perception that we are on the cusp of immense changes,
and as if that were not enough changes that are happening on three interconnected fronts.
The first front is technology and the data revolution that is taking place to understand the importance of the present moment.
We should think of the impact of two past revolutionary moments the invention of the printing press and the industrial revolution.
What is happening today combines aspects of both.
But while the impact of past revolutions unfolded over several centuries,
the pace of the ongoing revolution is faster by orders of magnitude, and we have to think in terms of decades rather than centuries.
This acceleration is all the more important, as the consequences of the consequences of this revolution are filled throughout societies,
the foundations of authority and legitimacy, and, crucially, the very fabric of societies are all being profoundly affected.
And the speed of these transformations matters.
Political institutions are always slow moving constructs, and they are unlikely to adapt at the same pace.
And that gap between a fast changing world and institution that inevitably evolve at a slow pace as strategic implications.
The second front is the geopolitical front.
The technological revolution born in the West is transforming the world,
but it is happening at the very moment when the West is losing the capacity to shape the global narrative.
What happens when the rest of the world no longer acknowledges the pre-eminence of the Western democracies, are seen to be in crisis?
The Third front is the global crisis of politics, a crisis in which globalisation, technology and the demise of ideologies all play a part.
How do individuals who feel deprived of collective agencies regain that agency?
These questions are relevant for the future of war and peace.
Half a century ago, the great Oxford historian Michael Howard wrote a little book, War in European History.
His key insight was that war is always a reflection of the societies that wage it.
From the ninth of the Middle Ages to the mass conscription of the 20th century.
War has been a magnifier through which we can better understand the transformations of society.
Michael Howard wrote his book in the Middle of the Cold War,
when nuclear deterrence both concentrated power in the hands of the heads of state who could push the
button and impacted whole societies as each of us became the potential victim of a nuclear holocaust.
The epilogue of his book, written a quarter of a century after its first edition,
reflected on the intrastate wars that characterised the immediate post-Cold War period.
But it could not anticipate what has happened since. And the new chapter definitely needs to be written.
I don't have the ambition to write that new chapter today,
but only to analyse the possible effects on societies resulting from the transform from the transformative events now occurring.
In doing so, I will assume here that humanity will manage to avoid catastrophic outcomes like
survival threats due to the acceleration of climate change or nuclear war.
So I will first address the revolution of the internet and data in the data age.
I will then analyse the malaise of the West and what is unprecedented in it.
And third, I would explore beyond the West what in my view, is a more global crisis of politics.
Lastly. While I will not have the audacity to anticipate our future because I believe we have agency and that nothing is preordained.
I will look at various possible futures, each with their own types of war and peace.
Let me first analyse what the internet revolution means for our societies and focus on two
major transformation the reorganisation of societies and the redistribution of power,
both of which contribute to the current democratic crisis.
We are people of flesh and blood, and as I was, space.
Is the physical space. We have neighbours.
Our reason is a physical horizon.
And for centuries, the history, uh, and the history of international politics has been the history of how we structure that physical space.
Gradually, as nomad hunter gatherers were replaced by send entry, farmers and villages and cities began to structure the space.
The delimitation of territory became more important, and the struggle for control of a particular piece of land led to innumerable wars.
That process was spread over millennia.
And for many centuries, the correlation between the.
People and territory was much fuzzier than it is now.
The world of nation states with precise border,
clearly defining the extent of a political authority and determining citizenship is actually quite recent.
But it structures the international system as we know it,
and it has become an essential dimension of our societies that may be about to
change the world of territorially defined communities with which we are familiar.
It's not going to disappear, but it has to face the competition of the virtual space,
which decisively threatens territorial entities and amplifies trends that preceded the internet and were already weakening territorial communities.
Those trends are well known, and I will not dwell on them.
Economic globalisation has created a level of inter interdependence that limits the capacity of nation states,
even the most powerful ones, to shape their own future independently while migrating migrations.
Even though states try to erect barriers to movement of population, making societies less homogeneous and more diverse,
weakening the connections between human communities and the territory where they live.
Nations are less and less bound by a shared past.
In that context, where citizens have reason to question the agency of national politics and where
national identity is based on the shared history are becoming less relevant.
The virtual communities of the internet are becoming formidable competitors of the old territorial communities.
This has far reaching consequences on the way human communities are for the possibility of connecting and meeting,
regardless of proximity, is a remarkable progress.
It allows small groups interested in a small topic to compensate for their smallness with their global reach,
which helps them reach a critical size that would otherwise be unattainable.
It allows for valuable dialogues between people who otherwise would not even know about their respective existences.
That is good for the progress of knowledge,
and also for small groups who keep alive a dialect or an interest that would otherwise die for lack of critical support.
Emotionally, such communities of choice are reassuring.
They provide psychological comfort to people who otherwise might feel very lonely.
Virtual communities are communities in which you meet people who resemble you, who have the same interests and the same passions.
That is a pleasant feeling, and it is innocuous when it brings together people who have an innocuous passion.
But it can also be dangerous, as it avoids the anxiety of the unexpected and the discomfort of disagreement.
It carries the risk of creating a feedback loop in which you are continuously reinforced in your own views, not to say your prejudices.
Another major difference between the communities of the virtual world and the communities that exist in the
traditional three dimensional world is that they can grow without much interaction with other communities,
further increasing the risk of radicalisation. Launching a political party or a movement in the physical space requires organising meetings,
public demonstrations, events where you will be challenged by contractors.
It is a painfully slow process where you caught ridicule when you speak in front of an empty room,
and the few show up to speak may then be discouraged by their lack of success, making further progress even more difficult.
The virtual world works in a different way because it escapes the constraints of space.
Small numbers initially matter much less.
You may be a handful, a handful of militants in your own town, but you commune with another handful of militants a few hundred miles away,
and it is much easier to exclude the voices of those who disagree.
A special kind of intimacy and virtual closeness develops among Like-minded participants.
Which allows for the growth of the groups,
like an underground river that gathers subterranean waters and burst to the surface only once it has reached a certain size.
Virtual communities, like secret societies,
can grow and prosper in the virtual world before bursting out in the open once they have achieved the critical mass.
That is why we keep being surprised by movements that seem to come from nowhere, but have in fact, quietly gathered strength away from the public eye.
Being almost invisible has facilitated their growth because they are marginality which could have hurt.
Recruitment was also invisible until it was not.
That makes societies more brittle, more unpredictable, and less resilient.
Transnational or subnational solidarities can become stronger than a weakening, inherited sense of territorial belonging.
The proximity of emotions begins to matter more than the proximity of geography,
and insulting a virtual adversary is easier than insulting a neighbour.
But before you know it, the brutal harshness of the virtual world contaminates the physical world.
And we have example of that every day.
At the same time as the internet revolutionises the way communities define themselves and interact with each other,
it also redistributes wealth and power.
That second revolution is as important as the first, and maybe comparable in its economic and political impact to the Industrial Revolution.
It is as momentous as the Industrial Revolution,
but it is happening much faster and is already visible in the market value of the five biggest data company Apple,
Microsoft, alphabet, Amazon and meta, which has more than $7 trillion, represent close to one fifth of the American stock market.
What is the source of their wealth? At a superficial level, the giant data companies which harvest data on us all, suspected of owning us,
of dispossessing us, of our identities and secrets which we unwittingly share with them.
Their wealth is us. The giant data companies harvest the data which we unwittingly shared.
Then we are like the industrial workers of the 19th century, who, for lack of collective organisation, were exploited by their capitalist masters.
The new data masters exploit, so to speak, our data.
As the industrial of the 90 of the industrialists of the 19th century extracted the value of their workers to increase their wealth,
set in an imbalance relationship of power. And indeed, as we impatiently tick the boxes authorising that capture.
We are the victims of a somewhat unequal exchange in which privacy is traded for convenience.
We have learned from the Industrial Revolution that the dissemination of a technology that generates
more wealth and power does not guarantee that the new wealth will be equitably distributed.
On the contrary, the 19th century was characterised by concentration of wealth within countries and between countries.
Will the data revolution follow a similar path in the past?
Organised labour helped create a less imbalanced relationship between the owners of capital and the workforce.
The problem we face today is very different.
The imbalance is not primarily between the data companies and their workers, but between on the one and us, the data generators.
And on the other hand, two categories of data collectors corporations.
But also states that collect and manage data.
These two categories of data collectors are equally formidable, but we have greater fear of state control than of corporate control.
Our mindset is shaped by the experience of police states opening letters and snooping on our phone calls, and indeed states and public institutions,
if they are capable, if they are able, uh,
to consolidate the multiple sources of data they directly collect on citizens, from tax records to health information.
In a position of great power, if, in addition, they have the legal authority to access data collected by private actors.
Then their power control becomes truly formidable.
In a world where every action live leaves an indelible trace.
That concentration power has a very different impact in democracies and in authoritarian regimes, in authoritarian regimes.
It increases the capacity of the state not only to repress its people, but also its capacity to shape hearts and minds.
Autocratic regimes not only can control their population more efficiently through digital surveillance, but they can also manipulate them,
eventually moving from repression to a form of preventative mind control that would make repression redundant.
In those regimes. The brave new world of Aldous Huxley would replace the terrifying world of George Orwell.
The potential power that corporations may derive from the management of data is no less threatening.
A growing share of the value of major data corporations lies in their capacity to attract data generators, and then to manage the data they generate.
What they monetise is actually their newfound power, the power to reach and keep an ever growing base of data generators,
the power to sort them, and eventually the power to control and eventually to shape their thoughts and choices.
The response of regulators is to protect the individual whose free choice must be safeguarded.
Requesting the consent of the data generators and strengthening competition policy are, at this stage, the two main tools of Western democracies.
They both have serious limitations. In democracies, the age of data is not, for the moment, ushering and ushering in a new age of libertarian freedom.
It shrinks this shared public space and fractured fractures the polity as ever
more sophisticated algorithms consolidate increasingly homogeneous groups,
where the amplification of one's own opinions replaces the civil confrontation of different ideas.
It also creates an illusion of permanent, direct democracy, as every individual can now be editor of his own news like,
as they say, a post expressive view on a product or an opinion in a way voting at every instant of life.
But it is a democracy where adjudication replaces deliberation.
Lastly, at the very moment when democratic institutions appear, because of that antiquated,
these enormous imbalances of power generate increased demand for some sort of accountability.
That is where the growing gap that I mentioned,
between the pace of technological progress and the pace of political transformation, has devastating consequences for democracies.
In the end, the individual of the 21st century, far from being the powerful agent of his life.
May discover too late that he has been turned into a data point.
He has lost control, and democratic institutions seem incapable of giving it back.
Let me now turn to the geopolitical front.
And describe how the geopolitical shifts that we are observing amplify the impact of the data revolution on democracies.
And let me immediately clarify that the geopolitical shift that we are witnessing is,
in my view, of a much more radical nature than what is usually discussed.
It has become almost a cliché to describe the phase of history that we are entering as a transition from the American century to the Asian century.
And today, the discussion focussed primarily on the evolution of China and the evolving balance of power between China and the West.
That question is indeed legitimate and important, but it misses what is, in my view,
a more radical question than distinguishes our world from the past period.
The West no longer shapes the narrative of the world, and there is no cohesive narrative today to replace it.
The world as we know it has been shaped by a very small number of European countries that 500 years ago embarked on a global conquest.
Their motivations were multiple.
There was greed, the dream of accessing the spices of India, which gave way to the feverish mining of the gold and silver of the Americas,
and then the plantations economy, which grew thanks to the slave trade.
There was also human curiosity, the insatiable appetite to map every corner of our planet, to catalogue every plant, every form of life.
And while some ships transported slaves from Africa to the Americas, exploratory expeditions of Mugabe the cook included naturalists and geometers.
The spirit of individualism generated competition and produced rapacious colonialists eager to enrich themselves,
but also enlightened scientists who invented the idea of means of encyclopaedic knowledge.
What they all shared was a universalist understanding of the world.
They started roaming the oceans at the very moment when the Chinese empire was abandoning its naval ambition,
content with collecting the tributes of its neighbours.
The rivalries between European powers. None had the dominant position comparable to China precluded such retreats.
A single European empire was never an option.
The horizon of European power had to be the world, and they were in competition to take possession of it.
That competition tells a story of violence and immense brutality, extermination of local populations, slavery, colonialism.
For centuries, the Europeans could hide the dark side of their past and impose their narrative.
The Western world was at the vanguard of progress, and the rest of the world just had to follow.
Europeans could promote the ninth story of the civilising mission of the white man, and the rest of the world did not have enough power to reject it.
That story has died, and the history of the last half millennium is being thoroughly re-evaluated.
Does Europe, oh, its early entry in the industrial age to India through its ingenuity or to its ruthless exploitation of the world?
We used to believe, and most of the world accepted that story, that the inquisitive spirit of the individual was what brought us all so far.
That is no longer accepted, and the rest of the world now has enough self-confidence to promote another story.
The story in which Europe and the Western world owe their success to their crimes, not their ingenuity.
The light that the Western world was supposed to shine is flickering.
That has geopolitical consequences, because it destroys the self-respect and confidence that were an indispensable component,
component, and part of the dynamism of the West. The West was proud, not always for the right reasons of its path.
It is increasingly embarrassed by it.
It used to talk patronisingly about fragile states.
Those states, usually products of decolonisation that had not yet graduated to the stability of mature states,
consolidated by centuries of a shared history.
It commiserated with countries that had inherited artificial borders imposed by their former colonial masters,
and was struggling to bring together people divided by conflicting tribal allegiances.
As for the Europeans,
they proudly asserted that they had enough self-confidence in their in their own subtle national identities to look beyond their borders,
embracing a larger European identity, that identity that did not erase their national identities.
That is no longer always the case. The West is unsure of its own identity and questions its own relationship with the rest of the world.
What does it bring to it? What are the ideas beliefs for which it is willing to fight?
The fact is that the West has increasing difficulties in telling a convincing story.
Of the world, in part because it is not convinced by its own story the West.
The rest of the world senses that malaise and reinforces it.
What a revenge to be in a position to accuse instead of being accused to celebrate one's past, instead of having one's history written by others.
Billions of people who were in the dominated part of the world kind can't avoid an an exhilarating schadenfreude
when they see their former masters falling from their pedestal and no longer in a position to shape the narrative.
The world of the world. That schadenfreude manifests itself in many ways which keeps surprising the West the lukewarm,
the lukewarm condemnation of the Russian aggression in Ukraine,
or of the terrorist attacks against Israel,
which contrasts with the global outcry generated by the devastating Israeli response unleashed against the Palestinians.
That does not mean that the majority of the world is not supportive of naked aggression or of the atrocities of terrorism,
but many are not unhappy that the powerful West is eventually having to face the violence
that for many centuries it could inflict on other without having to suffer the consequences.
This goes much deeper than the familiar and often justified accusation of double standards.
Much of the world is metaphorically singing the ballad that was composed after the to the death of George Floyd in the United States.
Let me breathe. That cry is not going to end any time soon,
because its origins are not in any contemporary event over which the West has any control, but in the memories of the past.
A past that was unfair, as unfair as a resentment that will target the West for years to come.
The rest of the world complains about the demos.
The double standards of the West and the West is equally frustrated by what it sees as the double standards of the rest of the world.
Double standards and contradictions are not new, and in international affairs,
it's not so long ago that the leader of the free world was a friend of Pinochet, another dictators.
What is new is that self-righteousness has changed camp.
The West painfully discovers that it has lost the capacity to shape the story that the world tells itself.
The debate on reparations that is now emerging in the United States with slavery, in Europe, with colonialism, is an illustration of that rebalancing.
The black political leaders who, like the prime minister of Barbados, demand reparations for the centuries of slavery that their ancestors endured.
Believe they are on solid historical ground, as are those who claim that the present degradation of our planet is the ultimate
consequence of the reckless past exploitation of natural resources by rich countries.
A lively historical debate is taking place to determine how much of the present wealth of the developed world is built on the abuse of past centuries.
How much derives from the technological technological revolution that transformed Europe?
That debate is necessary and helpful if it contributes to a better understanding of the past,
and leads the richer countries to show more humility in their relationship with the rest of the world.
But it leads to a political dead end. If it you if it is used as the foundation for a more just order.
Victimhood and guilt cannot be a reliable foundation for a society, let alone for a world order.
The soft power of democracies is thus eroded not only by the data age, but also by the demise of the Western narrative.
But while the so-called Global South may have more self-confidence that the West than a West full of doubts,
no alternative global narrative is really emerging.
The world is connected by processes rather than by vision.
Why is that? Let me now turn to my third point and analyse the crisis that, in my view, is more global than the crisis of the West.
The paradox of our time may be that those who celebrate the demise of the West are more influenced by it then they would care to admit.
The geopolitical stage cannot be understood as a mere shift from the West to the East, or to what now people call the rest.
The rest. Indeed, increasingly challenges Western universalism, but it is largely shaped by it.
The enduring legacy of the Western tradition. The world is the celebration of the individual, and individualism is a marvellous and powerful force.
The unshakeable pursuit of truth and the entrepreneurial spirit are rooted in it.
But today, in following the example of the West,
the rest of the world often embraces a caricature of that spirit in the form of neoliberal capitalism.
As Branko Milanovic has written in a brilliant book. Capitalism alone rules the world.
Capitalist can be found in New York, but also in Beijing or Moscow, even if their relationship with the state is not the same.
The relentless pursuit of wealth has become everywhere the dominant force,
but it is a force that actually contributes to the fragmentation of societies as each individual.
Fends for himself, and the collective values of solidarity and equality vanish.
It is a harsh world of winners and losers, where the losers not only have to face the hardship of poverty,
but also the disdain of a society that only respects success.
We were led to believe that our own individual sense of agency was our most precious asset, asset, and the most powerful force in the world.
But for many, that promise proves to be an illusion.
And this and that disenchantment is not compensated by a sense of collective agency.
In the desiccated neoliberal version of individualism.
Western individualism was balanced by Western universalism,
but that universalism is lost and the balance between the celebration of individual
agency and a sense of collective purpose that binds us as human beings has been broken.
Globalisation, technology and the crisis of ideologies converged to create a sense of importance among many individuals.
For many of us, rich and poor, from the South or the North, that loss is very painful.
And we dream of collective entrances, of borders, of a confined space, of a cosy shell in which we can feel at home and control our future.
But the world of imagine communities the internet has created today is a much more unpredictable world than a world driven by collective interests.
That is what makes political communities of the 21st century so brittle.
We are saying that countries have the politics of their geography.
If that was still true.
Geopolitics would be very predictable indeed because oceans and mountains ranges don't move, and interest should therefore always be the same.
But the connected world, but a more connected world in which the virtual and the territorial are intertwined,
spreads and amplifies fleeting emotions that make political communities less stable and more volatile, and sometimes more aggressive.
The crisis of political institutions is most visible in Western democracies, but the crisis of politics is global.
We are all becoming, in a way, fragile states across all continents.
The self-evident of every nation is therefore challenged, and political leaders have to find new ways of shoring up their legitimacy.
Different political systems and different regions of the world have different responses.
But what is remarkable is that nowhere is a big ideological system, the driving force.
The 21st century is, in that respect, very different from the last three quarters of the 20th century,
when ideologies, nationalist, National socialism, communism were the critical mobilising to.
Each system claimed to provide a comprehensive answer to the needs of society.
But today, no one is prepared to venture such a claim.
In our post ideological world, roll nationalism from Russia to the United States, from China to India is, so to speak, the ideology of last resort,
a powerful rallying force with a nostalgic tinge that makes it different from the self-confident nationalism that preceded the First World War.
When Trump first came to speak at the General Assembly of the United Nations, and I listened and I was there to listen to him,
he told the audience, to great applause, that every leader wants to make his or her country great again.
That nostalgic slogan, which underplays the capacity to shape a new future and idealise the past in the case of Modi and India,
redefines the past, has global appeal. The more market forces become the dominant driver,
the more transactional the world gets than the more nationalism based on an idealist past becomes a useful counterweight.
In a world in which human communities are losing their sense of direction and community,
that is what makes anticipation of peace and war so difficult.
The world is more connected than it has ever been and at the same time more fragmented.
There is no shared narrative. The universal reach of capitalism is not the triumph of Western universalism and Western values,
as demonstrated by the backlash of nationalism that makes any world order more difficult to achieve.
International organisation embodying the global world order are in crisis, and the new powers have no universalist claim.
China is actually careful not to present itself as an alternative model of a universalist international order.
On the contrary,
it keeps insisting that each country has to follow its own ways and that the world order has to be based on the sovereignty of nation states,
the so-called international community. But also the political communities that are its component parts are brittle.
They are not sure what they stand for, and they have no universal goal.
Their first priority is now to hold on.
Let me now, as a conclusion, try not to anticipate the future, but rather to describe several possible futures.
I say futures in the plural for two reasons.
First, because as connected as the world may be, several futures can coexist on our planet interacting with each other.
Second, because, as I have said, human beings have agency, and anticipating the future should always be about identifying those tipping points.
Those forks in the road where a choice can make a difference.
Let me start with a future which is already a part of our present world,
in which the dissemination of technology and the brittleness of contemporary societies empowers
a multiplicity of actors not only to sow discord through disinformation and manipulation,
but also to acquire the means to generate massive and lethal disruption through hacking of
major infrastructures or proliferation of weaponry individually produced through 3D printing.
In that scenario, politically motivated terrorist group as well as criminal organisation are everywhere,
threatening the authority of states and creating a general climate of instability and violence.
This is a world in which the fragility of states as building blocks of an international order undermines interstate institutions,
in particularly the one which to which I gave the best years of my life, the United Nations.
This is a world in which the separation between state and non-state actors, between politics and crime,
between combatants and non-combatants, and eventually between war and peace,
is blurred, with devastating consequences for the legal frameworks that we have built to contain the use of force within states and between states.
That world is a product of the trends. I have described technological progress that lowers the bar for many technologies,
empowering individuals of subnational groups with capacities that would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.
When that dissemination happens in a context of weaker political communities and stronger virtual communities.
It can lead to widespread intrastate insecurity and also to and transformation of inter-state conflict,
as it offers more opportunities to exploit the weaknesses of the adversary and for states to disguise their actions.
And we have plenty of examples of that at the cost of some technology goes down.
Criminal. Non-state actors are likely to have increased access to disruptive technologies in rich as well as in poor countries,
and the risk of severe disruption will grow as societies become more dependent on digital technologies.
The possibility of catastrophic consequences will increase unless a massive effort is made to improve security of critical infrastructures.
That leads me to a second possible future. That is the eventual outcome of what I've just described.
There's a debate whether technology will lead to more or less concentration of power,
will empower individuals or big organisation, be they stateside or corporations.
The growing chaos that we observe in many non autocratic states makes it increasingly likely that the second hypothesis,
concentration of power, will eventually come to pass.
I've already noted the backlash against the neoliberal individualism that is fuelling a new nationalism.
The demand for order is growing in power.
It is the result of the dissemination of power to malignant actors described above, that increases the risk of catastrophic events,
from bio warfare to massive disruption of critical infrastructure,
but also of the polarised fragmentation of societies that makes our daily life increasingly unbearable and difficult.
The trade off between security and individual freedom will more and more be weighted in favour of security and conformity.
If we fear for our life, we will eventually give more control to the state.
The progression of artificial intelligence and large language model will also put a premium on well-established knowledge.
That will be a progress if crackpot theories are ignored and the dissemination of mainstream thinking is strengthened.
But it may also marginalise original and independent thinking by fear of disruption.
It may lead to what one might call a Chinese scenario, in which states have acquired enough power to nip in the bud any dissent,
suppressing internal conflict and managing debate in a very controlled way.
No country at this stage is close to achieving that,
but one can imagine how more concentration of digital and technological power could lead to internally peaceful in our societies.
Intrastate peace would have been achieved by putting all societies asleep to sleep.
The question then arises whether that kind of intrastate peace could lead to inter-state peace.
That may not be the case because, as controlling states may eventually become over their own citizens,
they are unlikely to be able to eliminate the connectivity that makes them dependent on the actions of other entities which they have no control.
They will have to manage uncertainties that will undermine their control, from economic crises to migration,
and they may react to that risk by weekend, whipping up the flames of nationalism to maintain the cohesion of their societies.
That risk suggests a third possible future,
in which states harness the formidable powers of the digital age to mobilise collective
passions beyond the wildest ambitions of the territory and regimes of the 20th century.
That is, the world which could lead to a massive conflagration of inter-state conflict, and it is the worst scenario that can be imagined.
It aptly described the possibility of the China-US war resulting from a perception of weakness in both countries,
leading to exacerbated and extremely dangerous nationalism.
None of the three scenarios I have described presents an appealing view of our possible futures.
The first evokes a world of chaotic and fragmented violence, in which the consolidation of gated communities looks like the least bad option.
The second promises peace, but it is a peace built on conformity,
which in the end can lead to stagnation and risks sacrificing what has made the
greatness of the human condition an insatiable urge to look beyond the horizon.
The 3rd May have an apocalyptic ending and is just too awful to contemplate.
So is there a fourth scenario, a future that acknowledges the diversity of responses that human beings imagine when they build a human community,
and yet creates a measure of harmonious concord and cooperation that ensures peace?
This is the most important question of our time as we struggle to maintain.
A universalist vision of the world and not succumb to relativism.
The triumphalist Western vision of universalism has been discredited by its arrogant
claim that there is only one end to history the Western liberal democracy.
But as I have illustrated, no positive alternative narrative to replace, it has emerged,
and instead that this credit is used today by all sorts of autocrats to legitimise their own abuses of power.
I would like to think that another great Oxford scholar, Isaiah Berlin, provides part of the answer.
He made the simple but fundamental point that good universal values often clash with each other.
Solidarity is a laudable value, and so are individualism and independence of mind.
Different societies may share universal values, but striking a very different balance between them.
Isaiah Berlin wrote before the earthquake of the ongoing technological revolution,
is his vision implementable in a connected world where virtual communities abolish physical borders while virtual gated communities flourish?
Can universalism be revived when it is understood that the expression of Western
dominance cannot resist the nationalist backlash generated by neo liberal individualism?
Much will depend on how the technological revolution turns out,
and how the governance of the data economy and of artificial intelligence is organised.
Will the next generation of artificial intelligence, going beyond large language model,
trained on different sets of data and capturing multiple but diverse experiences,
help us acquire a better understanding of those legitimate differences and how to manage rather than abolish them.
Will power be further concentrated or disseminated for the benefit of humankind?
My hope is for a world of peaceful dissemination of power, in which we move away from uniformity without succumbing to destructive fragmentation.
Our ambition should be to embrace diversity precisely because it keeps the human quest alive, with no end of history in sight.
Thank you. Well, colleagues, I'm sure there have any questions.
Um. With running. So, uh, perhaps if you want a few questions, you might try to make them as a secret as possible.
So, any questions from the chat? Okay?
Please. This was a brilliant and stimulating lecture.
Reminds me a bit of, um, Morgan Thatcher's politics of all nations in the later chapters where he talks about the disintegration and,
uh, the force of nationalism. But what I wanted to ask you is you you in the beginning, took both climate change and nuclear war off the table.
An interesting choice. I'd like to hear you expand on that, and I, I, um, I would argue that the trends that you highlighted.
And I want to hear your reaction to this, uh, uh, you know, for instance, uh, technological progress, nationalism and so on.
The disintegration of the West dominance. As are actually exacerbated by war, driven by war.
That war is the independent variable here.
And um, indeed the as the United States tries to maintain it to Germany, it's not given up.
It spends itself. And drives the rest of the world to spend itself into, uh.
Uh, what Jervis called the spiral. Hmm. So those are just provocations that I hope you'll take.
Um. Now, I think I think you're right.
And if we want to be very concrete, for instance,
the governance of artificial intelligence and and the competition between China and the United States, they may clash with each other.
Because I would think that for the United States to begin to limit the power of its, uh,
technological giants, there's a concern that it might weaken its hand when it looks at, at China.
And so negotiating a comprehensive framework between the two powers is very difficult,
because the two powers think that they can gain the upper hand in those two, uh, technologies.
And so that that's where the combination of the internet, the data revolution and the geopolitical, uh, competition makes it very difficult.
And you could say the same for, uh, for climate change, which at the same time creates should create a sense of urgency.
But again, uh, is, uh, there is a sense of, uh, zero sum game that if I begin to limit my strength,
for instance, the United States has now a net exporter of energy.
Uh, although Biden has done a number of things to which go in the right direction.
But there are limits to that, because, again, there is a shadow of the geopolitical competition between, uh, behind that, I think.
Uh, so I'm curious about. So sometimes there's like a tension between, uh, a narrative of ourselves being accurate and it being sort of fake.
Good for us to, to rally around, uh, like in, uh, in the book Sapiens by you.
Well, Noah Harari, he argues that what enabled us all to cooperate is that we can share these ideas.
And if we can't, then everything falls apart. But I'm just curious about what do you like?
If we develop a narrative of the West that's accurate but has its but actually we can't we can't rally around that anymore.
Should the should we then just give up on having accurate narratives and then just find a simple narrative that we can all,
all cooperate, even if it's historically inaccurate? No, I don't think so.
I don't think we can afford the big lie today. I think some will try, but I don't think that works because a number of things speak for themselves.
And, uh, uh, I think when, uh, for instance, President Biden, with good intentions,
uh, uh, tried to bring to this summit of democracies against autocracies,
uh, this didn't really work first, because exhibit A of the crisis of democracies is the United States itself.
Uh, and so that creates a measure of scepticism on, uh, on the whole concept.
And then because you want to rally the maximum number of people and so you exclude some, you include some who might not be included.
And so it it detracts from the real focus, which should be on how ourselves we stand together, not on the basis of lies, but on recognition,
on the basis of recognising that there are some values that we care about and and those values,
they vary, as I said, from one country to the other, from one continent to the other.
When I, I live in the United States, but I'm a frequent, um, but I'm a European and sort of shuttled between the two continent.
And it's clear that as close as the United States and Europe are the balance between, let's say,
collective values, the welfare state is not the same in Europe, in the United States.
And I am not saying that one is superior to the other, although I think a little bit.
But, uh, but, uh, I think it's it's fair to accept that there are different responses in.
But what we have to do is think through what are the values that we really care for.
Uh, and I think that's what sadly, at the moment, it's mostly the extreme right that, uh, occupies the terrain of values.
Uh, uh, because and the values but values which are sort of mythical, the values as if nationalism was in itself a value.
But, uh, it, it owes its success precisely to giving people a sense of identity and belonging.
And I think to counter that, you really need to, to, to be on the terrain of values.
Is that is that narrow nationalism, xenophobia?
Is it is it us or is it not?
And if we if we just equivocate on that, uh, I don't think we will win today.
Was a. The quandaries were in, uh, clear.
And I think it's a story of narrative and behind story of narrative is power.
The the I was a discussion with. I've been quoted the PM of crossover two weeks ago and he was asked about the decline of the West,
and he was enthusiastic about the opportunity it provides.
Um, his argument was Russia wants to beat the West, China wants to become the West.
And for Kosovo, this is a marketplace. This opens up a space where finally we get to negotiate and we get to buy.
We get to engage. And his point actually aligning with yours was we agree with the values of the West.
We just want the freedom to compete openly in the market.
So in your narrative, where does this put the smaller countries and non-Western countries?
Is this a moment of liberation for them, of freedom from the shackles, or is it a moment of chaos?
Well, I think, I mean, I when I think, for instance, of United Nations and how to build coalitions to, to salvage the idea of multilateralism,
I think it very much depends on small and medium sized countries,
actually more the medium sized countries that have some weight because they have an interest in a predictable order.
They don't want a world where just raw power rules supreme.
And so in that sense, I think a number of countries, uh, have an interest in safeguarding an international legal order.
I think when you are the United States or China, you may have you may believe I think it's an illusion,
actually, but you may believe that you can do without, uh, those, uh, rules, that framework.
Uh, but when you, uh, midsize, uh, you feel it's that rules protect you.
Uh, and so I think one of the, of the failures of, uh, diplomacy,
of Western diplomacy to the is that it's it is not capable of building those kinds of coalitions because it's too much.
Again, the rhetoric of democracy rather than the more humble notion that we are we are struggling to maintain an order based on rules and laws.
We are not sure of our own. We are not we. We are open to criticism.
We are not saying we have, uh, the response,
but you can build common ground with all the countries that see that a world without rules is a world where the big fish eats the smaller fish.
And there you have a majority of countries in the United Nations who don't like that world.
Because they are small fish. Please.
Thank you so much. I would like to. Oh, I hear myself. Sorry.
I'd like to come back to the United Nations.
Uh, and maybe if you could tell us a little bit more, how do you see the reforms and the possibilities of the reforms,
even though you said they are slow in terms of change?
I was wondering, how do you see the prospects of that change and the role that.
Sorry. Um, Western countries, for instance, have in changing the very structures that, uh, led them to be powerful in the system.
Well, reform of the United Nations covers many, many things.
Uh, if it's a reform of the charter,
I don't know if you have read the book of Stephen Schlesinger on the negotiation of the, uh, uh, charter in San Francisco.
If you read that book, you see how in a world which was, uh, there were there were not 193 states, there were about, uh, little more than 40, I think.
Uh, uh, I'm looking at some those was agree with the experts.
Uh, 51. Okay. Uh, so it was a much smaller world, and it was a world.
It was a unipolar world by itself, because the United States had a monopoly on nuclear weapons.
It was half the world GDP with the destruction of Europe and not countries not having emerged yet.
And it was a creditor of the world. So if there was ever a unipolar moment, that was it.
And when you look at the history of the negotiation, you see that it was not actually so easy.
Uh, you had to convince Latin American countries you to them and, uh, it was it was very tricky.
So I think today, in the context of geopolitical rivalry, uh,
a reform of the charter and point of the Security Council is, uh, pie in the sky, to be to be blunt.
Uh, it's not going to happen. Uh, but that doesn't mean that reform is impossible,
because there are lots of things that the United Nations can do better within the confines of the charter.
It requires. It requires creativity.
Uh, and it requires occupying spaces that are not, uh, already, uh, completely locked.
So by by states.
So I think, for instance, the whole question that I have discussed of the digital age, this is a space where it's going to be very difficult.
But, uh, I was, uh, the other day, I was having a conversation with, uh, uh, with, uh, who and another one with the, uh, uh,
with, uh, thing when the, uh, the undersecretary for for technology and the United Nations is doing a lot of good things.
Uh, they're, uh, not, uh, very, very visible.
And that's probably why some progress is possible. Precisely because it does not become, uh, high stake, uh, politics.
So I think if you choose the areas you focus on wisely, there is certainly room for improvement.
And I think also reforms that are really not very sexy, but management, uh, uh, of the United Nations,
the human resource, which is managed in a terrible way in the United Nations, which is not managed,
actually, uh, this does not require, uh, this requires being astute, understanding, uh, how to handle,
um, and competing interests of member states, but it's, it's something that could be improved.
So. So I don't I think there is real space for moving things forward.
I think that I would say three things building coalitions of countries that have an interest in the United Nations and they exist, uh,
picking your areas wisely and being, uh, humble in the way you manage it,
but also courageous, uh, because if you if you don't take any risk, nothing happens.
And I think that's the that's the curse of all big organisations is that they are risk averse.
Uh, that's the nature of the beast. Uh, and you need, uh, to move an organisation forward.
You need you need to to impress a sense of courage and initiative from the top, uh, to the bottom.
That's that's essential when you want to to effect change.
I mean, I had the privilege with Sam and a few others, uh, to work and, uh, Kofi Annan and I think that was his greatest strength.
That was, you know, empowering people, giving them a sense that if they took risk, not reckless risk, but if they.
Initiative, they would be rewarded, uh, for it.
That was their role in the organisation. And I think that's fundamental.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think we should bring questions to an end.
You deserve a dinner on that fantastic lecture.
Uh, so thank you for that. And thank you also, uh,
for fulfilling all of our expectations in terms of both the quality and insight
you brought to this and also the centrality of the importance of human values,
uh, which you highlighted in your lecture and in a call to arms for those of us who perhaps until the extreme right to actually begin to identify,
uh, the, uh, key values that should be built to structure in society.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, um, I want to say just a very brief thank you to Rhodes House for hosting this evening.
Uh, this wonderful venue. Uh, they provided for the lecture this evening.
Um, in case, uh, an important part of the success.
So big. Thank you to them. And also a big thank you to my colleague who has been responsible for all of the coordination of this evening's event.
So thank you again for doing that. And those of you who are joining us for dinner.
Uh, we're aiming to sit down in about another 15 to 20 minutes.
We'll be heading speedily down South Road.
Uh, I hope the rains as they sit, but I hope you will join me in thanking once for.
Thank you very much.