An Interview with Thierry de Montbrial, Founder of the World Policy Conference
As the world still struggles with the aftershocks of a global financial crisis and a global rise of protests, it is ever more apparent that global leaders are struggling to deal with effectively addressing the numerous crises coming from all directions. Thierry de Montbrial argues that this is a systemic problem, brought about by weak systems still struggling to find their footing after the double-whammy of economic and political crises spreading throughout our globalized world. We have witnessed, in essence, a live demonstration of the butterfly effect.
The Diplomatic Courier sat down with Mr. de Montbrial to discuss his views on global governance, the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and his opinions in negotiations with Iran. Thierry de Montbrial is a French economics and international relations specialist, President of the French Institute for International Relations, and the founder of the World Policy Conference.
This is the second of two parts of the interview with Mr. de Montbrial. The first part may be found here.
***
[Diplomatic Courier:] What was your motivation behind founding the World Policy Conference?
[Thierry de Montbrial:] Well, first of all it has to do with my own history. Around 2005, I realized that I had accumulated huge networks of people all around the world, and that was an intellectual and human capital that had not been fully used.
Second, I think I understood at that moment that the most critical problem for the world as a whole was what is called now global governance—that is if we are not able to find a way to organize ourselves collectively, we are heading towards some sort of catastrophe. The reason is almost physical, when you have a system, which is more and more interdependent and more and more linear—linear meaning non-proportionality of causes and effects. The butterfly effect is almost truly going to happen, and the butterfly effect carries the destruction of the system. For instance, if you take the subprime crisis, it started as a very small thing, and in the end it was the whole financial system that was about to collapse. On the political side take the Arab Spring, which starts in the middle of Tunisia with a poor man committing suicide. It ends up with the collapse of several regimes, revolution, and civil war. The question of how to recognize valuable governance for the world is a major one.
My third motivation is the importance of what I would call middle powers. The world is no longer multi-polar, it is not unipolar—the U.S. alone cannot regulate the whole planet. In the foreseeable future, the good news is that in many ways the United States will remain by far the most important country in the world. It is important to the success of regional endeavors to have a strong American link. But it also is very important to have intermediary powers. What is a middle power? It is a regional power that it interested in investing in resources for the sake of the whole system. So giving more space or room to the middle powers is also one of my motivations.
Another one is tolerance. I think that if we want to keep an open world, it is important to respect the diversity of people, even political regimes. Even if we disagree, many of them behave in a relatively moderate way. We are constantly, as Westerners, tempted to go about basing the ‘others’—the Russians, Chinese—about their political regimes. With all that it is absolutely impossible to keep the world open. If we want our own values to prevail this should be done by our own examples and not by lecturing constantly others about what they should do.
The idea is to bring people who come from four segments of society: people from politics and in office; people from business—the business dimension has to be substantially expanded—people from the media; and from the academic world. This combination of the typical targets of think tanks can be productive. The World Policy Conference aims to become more of a club, so that people from five continents can come together to create a kind of friendly atmosphere.
[DC:] You mentioned the 2008 financial crisis and the Arab Spring as being two points in a crisis of global governance. How have you seen things change since those two events? Have they improved, or are we still struggling to address these changes?
[TDM:] On the first issue: the financial crisis. The first meeting of WPC was in October 2008, and it was just a few days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. What has changed, I think, is that the system has structurally improved in terms of economic and financial governance, but certainly not enough. The risk of another systemic crisis in the financial world is still there, because there are so many different philosophies to regulate the financial system. We have not reached a consensus on the rules of the game in the financial system, which I believe is less vulnerable than at the time of the crisis almost seven years ago, but I think it is still vulnerable. We should not believe that the crisis is totally over.
There are many leftovers of the economic crisis, because it led to a massive increase of debt in many countries, including the U.S., and nobody knows exactly how to deal with this. In Europe, the risk is that we will continue with low economic growth and high unemployment in many countries. Overall, the landscape is better, but still unsatisfactory.
On the second issue, it is worse. I don’t see any country where the situation post-Arab Spring is clarified. Even if you take for instance, Tunisia, which is the easiest case because it is small. If there is a place where the situation could be quickly improved, it is Tunisia. There are still some basic unanswered questions, and the political situation remains quite unstable. Libya is still very chaotic, and one fundamental aspect of this is the question of does Libya exists as a nation-state? The answer is probably no. It exists on paper as a state, but not as a nation. So the situation is still very chaotic, and of course interferes with the broader situation in Africa’s Sahel Region.
If we move eastward to Egypt, personally I am one of those who believes that the downfall of Morsi and the new regime is not totally bad news. I understand that even Secretary Kerry said recently that the situation is improving in Egypt even though the U.S. has been very critical of the coup against Morsi. In that sense I think there is some improvement and the majority of the Egyptian people feel better; their situation is sliding very badly, but at the same time nobody wants the return to a Mubarak regime; a military regime. The situation is temporarily stabilized, but it remains to be seen whether Egypt is able to move more into democratic governance. Now of course, the situation in Syria—there is a civil war, and today not only has Assad’s regime not fallen, on the contrary, it seems to have won an edge against the divided enemies. It could continue like that.
In the end, in my opinion, the only source of hope in the Middle East for the time being is the apparent change in Iran. This is why I think that it is important to move towards an agreement with Iran, and perhaps beginning of a process—which will take a long time—for the reintegration of Iran into the national community.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2014 print edition.
a global affairs media network
Recovering from a Crisis of Global Governance
January 30, 2014
An Interview with Thierry de Montbrial, Founder of the World Policy Conference
As the world still struggles with the aftershocks of a global financial crisis and a global rise of protests, it is ever more apparent that global leaders are struggling to deal with effectively addressing the numerous crises coming from all directions. Thierry de Montbrial argues that this is a systemic problem, brought about by weak systems still struggling to find their footing after the double-whammy of economic and political crises spreading throughout our globalized world. We have witnessed, in essence, a live demonstration of the butterfly effect.
The Diplomatic Courier sat down with Mr. de Montbrial to discuss his views on global governance, the aftermath of the Arab Spring, and his opinions in negotiations with Iran. Thierry de Montbrial is a French economics and international relations specialist, President of the French Institute for International Relations, and the founder of the World Policy Conference.
This is the second of two parts of the interview with Mr. de Montbrial. The first part may be found here.
***
[Diplomatic Courier:] What was your motivation behind founding the World Policy Conference?
[Thierry de Montbrial:] Well, first of all it has to do with my own history. Around 2005, I realized that I had accumulated huge networks of people all around the world, and that was an intellectual and human capital that had not been fully used.
Second, I think I understood at that moment that the most critical problem for the world as a whole was what is called now global governance—that is if we are not able to find a way to organize ourselves collectively, we are heading towards some sort of catastrophe. The reason is almost physical, when you have a system, which is more and more interdependent and more and more linear—linear meaning non-proportionality of causes and effects. The butterfly effect is almost truly going to happen, and the butterfly effect carries the destruction of the system. For instance, if you take the subprime crisis, it started as a very small thing, and in the end it was the whole financial system that was about to collapse. On the political side take the Arab Spring, which starts in the middle of Tunisia with a poor man committing suicide. It ends up with the collapse of several regimes, revolution, and civil war. The question of how to recognize valuable governance for the world is a major one.
My third motivation is the importance of what I would call middle powers. The world is no longer multi-polar, it is not unipolar—the U.S. alone cannot regulate the whole planet. In the foreseeable future, the good news is that in many ways the United States will remain by far the most important country in the world. It is important to the success of regional endeavors to have a strong American link. But it also is very important to have intermediary powers. What is a middle power? It is a regional power that it interested in investing in resources for the sake of the whole system. So giving more space or room to the middle powers is also one of my motivations.
Another one is tolerance. I think that if we want to keep an open world, it is important to respect the diversity of people, even political regimes. Even if we disagree, many of them behave in a relatively moderate way. We are constantly, as Westerners, tempted to go about basing the ‘others’—the Russians, Chinese—about their political regimes. With all that it is absolutely impossible to keep the world open. If we want our own values to prevail this should be done by our own examples and not by lecturing constantly others about what they should do.
The idea is to bring people who come from four segments of society: people from politics and in office; people from business—the business dimension has to be substantially expanded—people from the media; and from the academic world. This combination of the typical targets of think tanks can be productive. The World Policy Conference aims to become more of a club, so that people from five continents can come together to create a kind of friendly atmosphere.
[DC:] You mentioned the 2008 financial crisis and the Arab Spring as being two points in a crisis of global governance. How have you seen things change since those two events? Have they improved, or are we still struggling to address these changes?
[TDM:] On the first issue: the financial crisis. The first meeting of WPC was in October 2008, and it was just a few days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. What has changed, I think, is that the system has structurally improved in terms of economic and financial governance, but certainly not enough. The risk of another systemic crisis in the financial world is still there, because there are so many different philosophies to regulate the financial system. We have not reached a consensus on the rules of the game in the financial system, which I believe is less vulnerable than at the time of the crisis almost seven years ago, but I think it is still vulnerable. We should not believe that the crisis is totally over.
There are many leftovers of the economic crisis, because it led to a massive increase of debt in many countries, including the U.S., and nobody knows exactly how to deal with this. In Europe, the risk is that we will continue with low economic growth and high unemployment in many countries. Overall, the landscape is better, but still unsatisfactory.
On the second issue, it is worse. I don’t see any country where the situation post-Arab Spring is clarified. Even if you take for instance, Tunisia, which is the easiest case because it is small. If there is a place where the situation could be quickly improved, it is Tunisia. There are still some basic unanswered questions, and the political situation remains quite unstable. Libya is still very chaotic, and one fundamental aspect of this is the question of does Libya exists as a nation-state? The answer is probably no. It exists on paper as a state, but not as a nation. So the situation is still very chaotic, and of course interferes with the broader situation in Africa’s Sahel Region.
If we move eastward to Egypt, personally I am one of those who believes that the downfall of Morsi and the new regime is not totally bad news. I understand that even Secretary Kerry said recently that the situation is improving in Egypt even though the U.S. has been very critical of the coup against Morsi. In that sense I think there is some improvement and the majority of the Egyptian people feel better; their situation is sliding very badly, but at the same time nobody wants the return to a Mubarak regime; a military regime. The situation is temporarily stabilized, but it remains to be seen whether Egypt is able to move more into democratic governance. Now of course, the situation in Syria—there is a civil war, and today not only has Assad’s regime not fallen, on the contrary, it seems to have won an edge against the divided enemies. It could continue like that.
In the end, in my opinion, the only source of hope in the Middle East for the time being is the apparent change in Iran. This is why I think that it is important to move towards an agreement with Iran, and perhaps beginning of a process—which will take a long time—for the reintegration of Iran into the national community.
This article was originally published in the Diplomatic Courier's January/February 2014 print edition.
