| : [♪ Μουσική Fuck... Καλησπέρα σας. Σίγουρα είμαι πολύ ενθουσιασμένος που βρίσκουμε εδώ στην όμορφη Πάτρα. για να σας μιλήσω για τη δική μου εκδοχή της αβεβαιότητας, τη γεωπολιτική. Αλλά θα σας επιτρέψω και θα σας ζητήσω την άδειά σας, μάλλον, να μου επιτρέψετε εσείς, να τα πω αγγλικά, γιατί είμαι αρκετόκαιρο στο εξωτερικό και διδάσκω στα αγγλικά, οπότε νομίζω θα μου βγει κάπως καλύτερα. So switching of language now. Now, I'm a political scientist, and we political scientists would like to claim that we can predict the future. Or sometimes others ask us to predict something that has to do with politics. I often meet people who say, often, what's going to happen with Brexit? What's going to happen with Greek-Turkish relations? I have no idea. And if you're here and expect from me to give you some predictions regarding geopolitics, you're in the wrong place. You're listening to the wrong person. But what we should try to do instead as political analysts is to try and understand and make sense the world that we live in. And that's what I would like to do with you today. And think a little bit different regarding global geopolitics. Now, my choice today is very fitting also in this country, because this country has always been seen as the victim of its geography. So geopolitics is like a second nature in the way Greeks tend to think of their country within the world. And on a very personal note, living in Britain, but also spending a lot of time in Greece, I've been living during the last past years the land of Brexit on the one hand, and the land of Grexit on the other hand. And it's amazing that there's one common observation that has pervaded this environment, both in one country and the other. And that has been uncertainty. Uncertainty at the individual, at the mezzo, at the macro level. And indeed, it's not just about these two countries and their relationship to Europe and what has happened during the past few years, but they had also affected the world. And in many ways, the whole world has seen so many crises during the last ten years that uncertainty has become something like the new normal. So let me start from my beginning tonight by talking about 1989. And this is as we kind of exit the second decade of the 21st century, and we're 2019 and finishing the year and going into the new decade, we should not forget that this is the 30th anniversary of 1989, when amazing things happen. So this picture is very important because this is when in the border between Hungary and Austria, the leaders of the two countries, sometime in June 1989, they cut the wire that was dividing the two countries. So many East Europeans could actually move to the West. Or pictures like this, we should always remember, because these are the people in Prague, in Wenceslas Square, that were demonstrating for more democratization, having lived under totalitarian regimes. Most of you probably don't remember because you're too young. And then that kind of picture of the Berlin Wall. And how enthusiastically all these people from East and West Germany, they actually brought down the ultimate, the hardest of borders, dividing a city. Now, I am a child of the Cold War. I was born in the 1960s, and then I was educated in the 1970s and the 1980s. And I remember so clearly how the world was divided between two blocks. The Eastern block, the communist, and the Western block, the capitalist. And there was a paradoxical sense of certainty back then, believe it or not, in that the world was moving very slowly. There were these two superpowers that were dominating everything. And in the words of a very well-known political theorist, Kenneth Waltz, that bipolar system at the time was actually the most stable system that the universe could have. But then there was a major uncertainty, the ultimate uncertainty, that was worrying everyone and was affecting the lives of everybody. And that was the nuclear disaster. There was art image from Nagasaki in Hiroshima in Japan that really showed what kind of disaster could be brought to the universe if there was a crazy leader from the United States or one of the dinosaurs from the Soviet Union just pushed the button intentionally or accidentally. And we had a small taste of this kind of fear when in 1986 there was the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine when one of the nuclear reactors had a small explosion. But the impact of all of this in the European continent was massive. I remember here in Greece actually that people were frantically washing vegetables and fruit and watching the weather forecast in case radiation was going to come due to weather from Ukraine here to Greece. So 1989 brought an end to all of this. It brought the end of history as another well-known political history. Francis Fukuyama, he triumphantly predicted very early on right after 1989 that that was the end of history, the end of ideology, the end of geopolitics. And what did I tell you before? You never trust political analysts that predict something because even if they are very important and well-known, the prediction actually may go wrong. And in reality it was an end of history, an end of geopolitics illusion because it lasted for a short 10 years under the American hegemony and the first blow to this kind of seemingly peaceful and international and cooperative environment took place with 9-11. That was the first shock to the system and to the U.S. hegemony in particular. And then that was followed by a series of global developments by the disastrous invasion in Iraq, the disastrous ending of the Arab Spring, the financial crisis, the Eurozone crisis, the migration crisis, and also the rise of other powers as well that would benefit from this kind of uncertainty and would become quite strong competitors in the international system. So we're talking about Putin and the rise of Russia based on its energy resources but also the military might gradually, the Chinese leader, and China becoming a very powerful country in terms of trade and gradually also technology. And then you look at the Trump. In that picture, in my opinion, these three faces epitomize the total uncertainty in international politics. So there were many scholars that rushed to say that what we are observing is the comeback, the return of geopolitics with a vengeance or the reemergence of a new Cold War between the West and between Russia or the emergence of a new Cold War between the West and the new East, meaning China. So we've got that kind of multipolar world which actually makes it much more uncertain, the world. In Britain in particular, where I live, they're seriously obsessed with these kinds of actors, like what's happening with China and its technological advances or what is Russia doing really in the Middle East or what's going to be the relationship with Trump's United States. I mean, they're so obsessed with it that one really wonders why on earth did they decide to get out of the European Union and have to negotiate trade agreements with all these uncertain powers. But that is the reality of them. What I would like to tell you, though, is that that notion of return of geopolitics or the great power competition is one side of the story. It's a multipolar world, yes, but we need to think of this a little bit differently. We need to take lessons from the past, but not to think in terms of new Cold War between the great powers. And I've got three important assumptions that I would like to look differently. The first one is that the states of the world and the great powers, they're actually not unified actors in themselves. So what we're seeing, we're seeing internal divisions between the countries themselves as international actors. So we look at the United States, for instance, and we see what a deep division and polarization exists between Trumpian protectionism on the one hand and those who want to continue to be liberal leaders of the free world. And then we come to the European Union, which itself is divided between those who would like deeper integration and move forward in making Europe much more connected and related and integrated, and then the others who want to have back to their national capitals some control. And then we think of individual states within Europe, like the UK and France, big democracies, or Hungary and Poland increasingly becoming more illiberal, and we realize that there are deep divisions within these countries as well, between those who are the populists and those who are more mainstream kind of thinking. And we look at the transatlantic partnership, and that also suffers the rows and disagreements between the United States and Europe, between Europe and Turkey. This is not a unified picture, but it's not a problem just with the democratic world, where opposition is allowed and you can have many voices there. We are seeing this in countries which are much more authoritarian, like for instance Russia, China, India, Turkey. More and more these countries also, they have their own internal opposition. We even see that in the one-party state country, which is China, and the opposition that they have from Hong Kong. And that is a legacy of the 1989 revolution, but we cannot have anymore a totalitarian control coming from above, from certain elites, and convincing everybody that that is the way to go. There's much more internal discourse. And then the second outdated assumption, that we need to think differently, is that it's not just about territorial conflicts, balance of power, and zero-sum nature security, in the sense that your victory is my defeat, or my victory is your defeat. Now we've got new threats actually now in the picture. We've got many more challenges. And let me show you some maps in order to understand how the maps change with these new challenges, but also the notion of borders as well. We don't think in terms of national borders exclusively anymore. So let's think of climate change, which is equally threatening to all countries, and national borders seriously do not matter at all. I mean climate change doesn't recognize countries, it goes everywhere. Or we're thinking of the cyber world. I mean that development has completely eliminated borders. They don't have any kind of significance. Either as a threat, cyber security, which is what we're seeing lately increasingly, or as opportunities for communication and dissemination of information. And then we look at the map of migration, the geopolitics of migration. There's another interesting relationship with borders here again, because you're seeing so many leaders trying to actually build walls or hard borders in order to avoid the flow of migrants towards one direction. But migration is like water. And if you block one way, then it will go to another. And then we look at the geopolitics of organized crime, and its various kinds of faces and dimensions. And there you've got another relationship with borders as well, in the sense that the harder the borders, the better and more effectively those who are involved in organized crime can actually function and develop their operations. And in a way, Macron's criticism towards NATO was that the military structure of NATO is not capable of understanding and dealing with these kinds of new threats. And he's right to a degree. And in a way, he also said, which goes even further, that we may have to cooperate with competitors, with the great powers that were actually competing, because we've got some common threats that actually unite us. And that is the notion of co-competition, which is very much used in the business language, and it means that you've got that kind of double game at the same time, and you've got states that can cooperate under certain circumstances and common threats and compete with each other when they see that they've got a comparative advantage. And the third thought and final thought I would like to make regarding how we consider and review geopolitics is that it's not just about national governments, traditional diplomacy, military structures that are the ones that are really moving the world of geopolitics, no. It's actually more about other actors that are coming into the picture. It's like big economic interests, for instance, or important non-governmental organizations, or civil society organizations, or even individuals can make a difference. We've seen that in the world of technology, for instance, or climate change, little greater. And that is another legacy of 1989 revolution. The fact that you've got the power of people that can make a difference and change the way that we understand geopolitics, but also that we address the issues. And as active citizens of the, at least us, that we are privileged to live in free societies, is that we should demand that these kind of issues should be part of the educational curricula. So all these issues like climate change or cyber security, the digital world, these all should be real part of the curriculum in order for kids to be educated from a very, very young age as to what is happening around us. And also as individuals, we should process and verify the information that we get as much as possible. It's very important that we try to see that we're having the true information and not fake news. And the last point, which is very important, is that as members of civil society, we should not allow our democratic principles to be sacrificed in the altar of geopolitical compromise. Because at the end of the day, it's these values that we've got as our own certainty. Our free thinking, our free right to vote, and we should kind of treasure this and protect this in the world of geopolitical uncertainties, which are not just threats, but they are also opportunities for change. And if we are also active in that kind of understanding of issues, then we can maybe turn the geopolitics of fear around us into geopolitics of hope. And I would like to leave you with this picture because it's a celebration, it's the anniversary of the 30th of the fall of Berlin Wall, and that is the message that we should all keep to our hearts. Thank you. Ευχαριστώ πάρα πολύ. Ευχαριστώ πολύ. |
