The Strongmen

European Encounters with Sovereign Power

Hans Kribbe

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788213714
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Políticas europeas

Seven decades after the liberation of Europe, the strongmen of global politics are back. With a style and strategy of leadership that is anathema to liberal democratic norms and practices, the strongman challenges the principles of consensus and collaboration, willingly tears up trade agreements, invades territory and seeks to provoke and disrupt the status quo in order to achieve advantage.

In this fascinating study of strongman power, Hans Kribbe draws on a range of political ideas to provide insight into the strongman's seemingly irrational and idiosyncratic behaviour to better understand how he (it is always "he") wields power and to what end.

Although the strongman's behaviour confounds and frustrates his counterparts abroad, Kribbe's analysis offers hope that it can be understood, anticipated and even neutralized. The implication of Kribbe's study is unequivocal: with the world's largest economies, as well as strategic neighbouring states controlled by strongmen, Europe must learn to speak their language if it is to beat them at their own game.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: the allure of strength

We have tended to see European history, from the Renaissance onwards, as the history of progress, and that progress has seemed to be constant … But when we look deeper, how much more complex the pattern seems! And beneath the surface of an ever more sophisticated society what dark passions and inflammable credulities do we find.

Hugh Trevor-Roper¹

THE AGE OF THE ENCOUNTER

Donald Trump leaned back in his chair and demonstratively folded his arms before his chest. Fixing his glaring eyes on hers, he impatiently listened to her pitch. It wasn’t the first time he had heard it, nor would it be the last.

He had rebuffed her petitions on countless occasions and was determined to continue to do so for as long as it would take. Yet this time, in the stately Manoir Richelieu in Charlevoix, Québec, things were different. They had used the summit to gang up on him, the gesticulating Emmanuel Macron, the softly pleading Theresa May, his boyish Canadian host Justin Trudeau and Japan’s Shinzo Abe. Their aides swarmed around him like flies. They had set a diplomatic trap worthy of the great French Cardinal himself. And he had walked right into it.

Worn down by their persistence, Trump bitterly signalled his assent to the summit’s final communiqué. He had heard enough. Slowly he rose from his chair. Then he stopped, reached into his suit pocket, and nonchalantly threw two Starburst candies on the table. “Here, Angela”, he said. “Don’t say I never give you anything.”² He had never placed great stock in the art of losing.

Hustling his way back to the safety of Airforce One, Trump regained his poise. He weighed his options, and decided to rescind his agreement after the fact. “I have instructed our US Reps not to endorse the Communique”, he tweeted, before launching another angry missive calling his host Trudeau “very weak and dishonest”.³ Not so bad for a day’s work.

It was June 2018 and over a year into Trump’s presidency. For the Europeans, the G7 summit was a fiasco. Since his election in November 2016, they had fought to keep Trump inside the global club of democracies, papering over the deep fissure that had opened up across the Atlantic. Tirelessly, they had sought to persuade him of the principles of the liberal, rules-based international order, itself the child of US engineering since the Second World War.

But in Québec those efforts had hit a dead end. What personal capital Merkel, Macron, May and the others still possessed with Trump amounted to the candies he had left scattered on the table. The president of the United States had made it painfully clear he preferred the company of the world’s growing legion of illiberal, virile and authoritarian leaders: Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, Israel’s Netanyahu and the Philippines’ Duterte. America’s old allies he found irksome.

Trump had never made a secret of his desire to smash the rules-based international order that the Europeans treasured so deeply. He angrily sneered at anything that smacked of multilateralism. The European Union, a central cog in that order, became a frequent target of the president’s disdain. US presidents always heartily encouraged Europe’s economic and political integration. They believed a strong and united Europe would help reign in the Soviet Union. But Trump just as heartily encouraged the EU’s dissolution. “The beating heart of the globalist project is in Brussels”, Steve Bannon, chief ideologist of the 2016 Trump campaign, once elaborated his thinking. “If I drive the stake through the vampire, the whole thing will start to dissipate.”⁴

Already before his election, Trump had fallen in with the Brexit crowd. That year, history seemed on his side. In an interview with Michael Gove – the journalist, politician and Brexit campaigner – Trump went on to describe Brexit as a “great thing”.⁵ “You look at the EU and it is Germany, basically a vehicle for Germany”, Trump opined. “That’s why I thought the UK was so smart in getting out … I believe others will leave.” Of the so-called “adults in the room” there was no sign. The president-elect’s coterie of advisors only stoked the argument with Europe. One confidante called on the markets to “short the euro”.⁶ Trump detested supranational organizations, he explained. “From the perspective of the US, it is often better to work bilaterally with the individual countries of the EU. Frankly, this often gives us the upper hand.”⁷

It was the sort of high-octane power talk, brutally direct, that left Europe paralysed. Trump’s America, like Putin’s Russia, was going to be the wolf that picked off the sheep. “We love the countries of the European Union”, Trump expanded on his thinking later. “But the European Union, of course, was set up to take advantage of the United States. And you know what, we can’t let that happen.”⁸

Devastatingly, Trump saw no greater reason to confide in German chancellor Angela Merkel, the éminence grise of Europe’s liberal order, than in Russia’s Putin, who openly resents its existence. “Well, I start off trusting both – but let’s see how long that lasts. It may not last long at all.”⁹ In the future, Trump made clear, America’s backing would have to be earned. It would have to be pitched for like a piece of squalid, transactional business, by Merkel as much as by Putin. The deeper historical and moral bonds with Europe, so carefully nurtured by US presidents since the end of the Second World War, Trump implacably refused to acknowledge. It was all done nonchalantly, in a way that only a strongman could. And as leader of the world’s greatest economic and military power, he was the strongest of them all.

Trump’s ascent to power blew apart the hypothesis that had underpinned Western political experience for 70 years: the idea that the world was on a journey to become just like us. Our liberal philosophy of freedom, law and order, we believed, would gradually spread across the globe. All nations would eventually embrace our politics, lifestyle and values. It was an article of deep progressive faith that gave us purpose and filled us with pride. There were parts of the world that were still resistant to our democratic ways. There had been Islamic insurgencies and terrorism. But communism had gone from Europe. China had begun to embrace economic freedom, surely a crucial first step to political liberalism.

The “arc of history”, as Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama adapted Reverend King’s phrase, was bent towards liberal democracy, justice and enlightenment. The pull of Western institutions, superior in every regard, was an irresistible magnetic force to the still oppressed masses of the world. Sooner or later they would rise up and sweep alternative models of government before them. With that, the fate of dictators and authoritarian strongmen, who for so long had provided law and order on the planet, and who still did so in certain underdeveloped parts, would be sealed. Emperors and emirs, kings and khans, shahs and sultans, they were all political relics from the past, destined for history’s trash heap. One by one they would fall and vanish forever. It was only a matter of time. And strategic patience.

Buoyed by the downfall of the Soviet Union in 1991, this progressivist philosophy of history was long indubitable in Western circles of influence, and most cogently expressed in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man, a fiendishly clever book, although maligned in intellectual circles. More importantly, the freedom doctrine was never only, or even predominantly, an academic theory. Much more, it was a social and political reality, a collective state of mind, a type of consciousness that pervaded and shaped the discourse of politics for generations. It was what Fukuyama’s hero the philosopher Hegel generally referred to as Geist.

Not unlike de fide doctrine within the Catholic faith, it was a state of mind that could be questioned only at the price of apostasy and excommunication. Its compelling force cut right across the party-political spectrum, from left to right. Certified by a never-ending stream of learned books, think tank reports and editorial comment in the media – and canonized in popular fiction, cinema and television series – confidence in the West’s philosophy of order became absolute. Foreign policy was aimed at spreading democracy and human rights to every corner of the planet, precipitating the birth of a liberal world. Europe developed its own brand of the doctrine, plotting its journey towards the integration of the continent. A new “functionalist” discourse would supplant nineteenth-century power politics. So began a new form of international order, one forged by bureaucrats and jurists facilitating economic collaboration, first in industrial sectors such as coal, steel, nuclear power and agriculture, later in the trade of other goods, and eventually in all areas of law and public policy.

Europe’s new order was rules based, a community held together by shared standards, legal frameworks and the broader philosophy of liberalism. It allowed for a common market without borders governed by supranational institutions that ensured its regulations applied equally to all. The will-to-power of sovereign states was subjugated to higher reason and law.¹⁰ Interstate conflict was turned into technical dispute, which could be resolved by judges and experts sighting evidence, facts and data. Churchill’s United States of Europe was not to be, but the separateness of states was becoming less stark. Supply and distribution chains criss-crossed multiple borders. Citizens moved freely around the continent. They fell in love with and married foreigners. A slow, almost imperceptible thinning of national identities began.

Europe’s new concept of international order would radiate outwards to parts of the world still mired in conflict and war. With a religious zeal, the EU promoted its multilateralism in areas such as trade, financial markets regulation and climate change. The annus mirabilis of 1989 and the fall of communism ushered in years of remarkable self-confidence, as Europe’s rules-based order sped eastwards across Eurasia. “The era of confrontation and division of Europe has ended”, the Paris Charter for a New Europe declared in 1990. A raft of former Eastern-bloc countries joined the EU in 2004. Dutifully, the Union’s governmental philosophy was taught in academic institutes across the continent, most notably at the Collège in Bruges, the prep-school for EU officialdom. Eventually, world order would just be European order writ large.

For a good 20 years, while there were occasional setbacks, an alternate future remained unimaginable. But then, following a succession of crises, faith in the freedom doctrine began to ebb away. Following the banking crisis of 2008, people turned against the borderless world in which sovereignty appeared to have vaporized. They rebelled against global and EU institutions in far-flung foreign capitals, favouring recipes that promised to restore the power of the state and its territorial borders, as well as the political men and women who prescribed those recipes. The euro crisis of 2010–12 stirred additional anger among voters. Creditor nations in Europe’s north felt on the hook for southern profligacy. Southern Europeans, in turn, concluded their freedoms had been sold out to bureaucrats and bankers in Brussels and Frankfurt. In 2015, a stream of refugees and migrants from Africa and the Middle East, on the run from war and poverty, left EU politicians scrambling for a response. In Germany, after her failed grand gesture to take in Syrian refugees, Merkel only barely survived elections in 2017. By contrast, Europe’s own strongman, the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, flourished by advocating “illiberal democracy”.

As it struggled to grapple with the crises it faced, the EU began to look like an ineffectual construct, its global standing further undercut by the 2016 Brexit referendum. Europe’s model of order was contracting, while authoritarian political models felt emboldened. From Moscow to Manila and from Beijing to Brasilia, strongmen rulers seemed in the ascendency. Not only did they succeed in holding on to or claiming power; for the first time in a long time they were able to make normative claims for the illiberal politics they offered. The wind of history once again seemed to fill their sails. Liberalism was the assured future once, but the future now looked wide open.¹¹

Western hopes for the spread of liberal democracy were still high in 2011, when Arab potentates faced a tide of popular uprisings. Sweet and seductive, the scent of revolution was hard to resist. But as things turned out, the Arab Spring paved the way not for freedom and the rule of law, but for civil war, chaos and rabid sectarianism, leading for calls for strongmen like Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to restore peace and order.

Russia’s integration into the Western-led order had once seemed inevitable. But its brazen incursion into Ukraine in 2014 conclusively ended those hopes. While reviled in the West, elsewhere in the world Putin became an iconic figure, the trailblazer of strongman politics. The term “Putinization” has become shorthand to describe trends in countries as diverse as Poland, Hungary, Turkey, the Balkans, Mexico, China, India, Israel and the United States itself. “Saudi Arabia is Putinizing, not Modernizing”, one commentator declared following the rise of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.¹² Xi Jinping’s brand of politics is “Putinism with Chinese characteristics”, another posited.¹³

Recep Erdogan, too, steered his country not closer to, but further away from Europe and its vision of order. When EU–Turkey accession talks finally began in 2005, Europe was in no hurry. It suffered from enlargement fatigue. But it still assumed the prospect of membership would help Turkey modernize and become more liberal. In reality, Erdogan set Turkey on a path similar to Russia’s, towards a destiny of the nation’s own making, an amalgamation of the secular Kemalist Republic and Ottoman ambitions. Erdogan’s aim was not for Turkey to be submerged in Europe’s rule-governed order of citizens, consumers and stakeholders; it was to become a sovereign agent itself, the leading power in the region it once dominated.

Further afield, China’s rise entailed the economic decline of Europe and the United States in relative terms. But as its economy modernized, it was long assumed, so would its politics and values. Gradually China would open up and submit to the same rules and standards. Xi Jinping, however, hailed the superiority of Confucianist hierarchy and self-sacrifice over Western individualism. He began touting China’s governance model around the world as more effective than Western-style democracy, investing billions in foreign infrastructure to back his rhetoric with action. He spoke warmly about multilateralism, but as the restorer of China’s lost greatness he envisaged a very different kind of globalization, one that meant to displace the Western model.¹⁴

Far from being swept aside by the passing of time, it became clear that the new strongmen were bending history’s arc in novel directions. Before the annus horribilis of 2016, the idea of the inexorable advance of liberal modernity still made some sense. But when the United States, the West’s fulcrum, vanished into the vortex of strongman politics with Trump’s election, the very idea of the West began to lose its moorings. Eur...