Niall Ferguson’s and Fareed Zakaria’s Summary Debate: The Liberal International Order is Over?

okay everyone we are going to start hello and welcome vitaille you see my name is Gillian Tett I am with the Financial Times newspaper in New York and it is my great pleasure to welcome you all to the final closing debate of this conference which is looking at the question is the liberal international order over is the liberal international order over I should say the question for this debate is not should the liberal international be order order be over but is the international order over and is an issue of great interest to the Financial Times because as some of you may have seen earlier this year we had an interview with the Russian president where he declared in the pages of the Financial Times that the global liberal international order was or is indeed over now we should define what we mean by the international order and I'm going by definition from Foreign Affairs in June 2011 which says this the liberal international order is quotes open and rule-based international order enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and norms such as multilateralism so is it over or not we have two absolutely fantastic people to debate this topic on my left your right is Neil Ferguson the professor of history who's written many best-selling books I think some of you have actually got them with you right now who has been writing a series of pieces over the last few years on this very topic and he is going to be arguing in favor of the International order being over you essentially a three with the Russian president on stage I think I thought you were going to be unbiased moderate resilience no I'm big normative and on my right your left is to read Zakaria again a prolific writer a great intellect and of course a very famous face on CNN each week where he talks about global international affairs and he is going to be arguing against emotion I should say taking the position that Financial Times has taken and I'm looking forward to a very interesting debate I'm standing here between them I'm neutral I'm going to be moderating and I will be hopefully sparking some interesting conversation now those of you who've not been to a debate before let me say it goes like this in about 30 seconds I'm going to ask you all to vote with the machines that you can see on your seat if you agree with the motion that the global liberal international order his OBE is over not that it should be over but that it is over you press green yes doc if you don't agree with that you think that the liberal international order is still around you vote red so we're gonna do a vote in a minute while you're thinking I'm gonna explain what happens then after that Neil it's going to speak in favor of the motion for five minutes so Reid will vote speak against it Neil will then have a chance to disagree with Fareed Fareed can then have a chance to disagree with Neil I will then ask them both questions and then finally we'll have summary positions and then comes a really interesting fun part which we get to find out where the either of them have changed your minds at all do you think that you are susceptible to being influenced by either of these great warring competing intellects and the best thing of all is that I am standing up and for almost the only time in my life I get to look down on both of them and keep them in their places so let's start with the boat all of you take your devices and vote on the question is the liberal international order over not should it be but is it over if you agree press green if you disagree press red this is called suspense it's also a great test of Ukrainian technology [Music] okay so Neil you have your work cut out 50% of people dis disagree that the global international order is over they think that we are still working according to the international rules based system with multilateralism and the United Nations so you have exactly five minutes to tell us why you think that is wrong well thank you Gillian ladies and gentlemen it gives me no pleasure whatsoever to agree I think for the first time in my life with Vladimir Putin I am NOT here to tell you that it should be over or to say that it's being over is a good thing we're merely being asked is it over now as it happens for read and I have debated this once before we debated it on April the 28th 2017 in Toronto Canada a pretty liberal international and orderly place and he won let's just ask ourselves what's happened since then well has the liberal international order got any better with respect to trade bad news average American tariff rates have gone up since then from 3% to 21% by a factor of seven how about the international order with respect to migration walls are being built all over the world since we debated even the Danes have restored their national frontier and in the poll that was carried out for this conference 80% of Ukrainians disagreed with the proposition that immigrants strengthen our country for Germans that proportion was 66 percent how are the institutions that were supposed to uphold the liberal international order doing well the World Trade Organization is I think it's fair to say paralyzed the Paris climate Accord is working so well that global emissions have risen secondly since we debated for Reid in the case of the asia-pacific region they're actually up five percent only the European Union of all the regions in the world has reduced emissions the International Monetary Fund that guardian of international capital markets has pulled off another of its recurrent triumphs in Argentina the latest country to impose capital controls and default on its external debt we weren't intrude in the private grief of the European Union as the interminable divorce known as brexit continues towards its de Neumann Owen since we debated for Reid I think the INF treaty died and the Iran nuclear deal is pretty much dared to say nothing of what remains of the United Nations and the Budapest memorandum guarantees of Ukrainian sovereignty so it doesn't look to me as if the liberal international order is thriving it's markedly deteriorated for read since you won that debate I suppose and I notice that the timer has died on us Gillian so I'll give myself a minute and then shut up the question you have to ask yourself is whether or not there ever was a liberal international order it's a little bit like what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire and I'm not convinced that when we look back in the history of the last half-century how liberal or international or elderly the order really was in truth the most important institutions that maintained peace and prosperity were none of the institutions that I have referred to the most important institutions were us-led military alliances of which NATO was by far the most important and the good news is that that institution despite the great pessimism that surrounded it at the time of Donald Trump's election is still alive and kicking but for me that's not the liberal international order that for read and others write about more like a conservative national order and it's that order that I think Ukraine should pin its hopes on much more than on the crumbling institutions of the allegedly liberal international order whose demise we are I fear sadly witnessing well thank you Neil and essentially your argument is Professor Fergusson that last time we debated against each other I lost since then everything's got much worse and so now I should win that essentially what you're saying and by the way if I don't quite like the question I'm gonna change it I thought you were going to be an impartial moderator no I'm setting for read up for winner it's rigged people for potentially quite a difficult job because as Neil says on almost every count the pillars of the International order appear to be crumbling so is it over tell us why it's not um thank you so much Julian you are certainly the most distinguished moderator we've we've had I will point out that my task is more difficult actually than you realize because a majority of you agree with the proposition now Julian didn't explain one thing we we win the debate not based on how many of us or how many of you agreed with us but how many we are able to move in the second vote so in other words I now have to get any even larger majority to agree with me which is going to be very difficult so I take that challenge seriously and I'm up against one of the world's best debaters the thing I have going for me is I happen to be right and he's wrong so let me explain why and I say this with some trepidation to a great historian for most of human history there has been war there has been famine there has been disease there has been autocracy and the the truth of the matter is history sort of worked in cycles it moved backwards and forwards in ways that was very difficult to tell that there was much progress and then after 1945 something extraordinary happens you begin to see a market shift particularly along the dimensions that Neil and I study war and peace and the like but also some other things and you begin to see an extraordinary rise in peacefulness stability international cooperation international engagement trade and the like there had been a movement up before World War one but it then of course collapsed but since 1945 you have seen an extraordinary reality in Europe which for 500 years had countries that were killing each other at extraordinary patience remember the the Hundred Years War killed 1/3 of the German population found itself in a situation of peace prosperity stability and ever deepening cooperation something's as simple as taking another country by force taking territory by force after 1945 has declined to the point that the annexation of Crimea stands as almost the only exception to this rule in the last 50 years which is why it has been such a dramatic and drastic move and it which is why Russia faces sanctions from almost the entire Western world as a consequence of it if you look at war if you look at violence within States if you look at almost every definition of human rights you see an extraordinary line that has moved up since 1945 for 75 years and so do you say to yourself how did this happen this this really does seem extraordinary and you can call it what you will but it does seem some kind of global system of rules of norms of values has been operating particularly in the advanced industrial world but increasingly in other parts and so you said yourself it must be that everything was perfect in these institutions like the United Nations worked fantastically in countries like the United States upheld these norms well not exactly there's a new study out for example take something like state sovereignty the country that violated state sovereignty the most since 1945 by far is the United States which has 72 times tried to interfere to change a government in the world from 1945 just in 1990 and then there's an additional 21 cases after 1990 I know it looks like we're in a terrible moment with regard to trade with all this protectionism but I would remind you tariffs in the industrialized world are on an average at 4% right now there were three percent before Trump they've gone up a bit because of Trump unilaterally raising American tariffs so much tariffs in the industrialized world in 1975 presumably the heyday of the liberal international order for 20% if you look at almost any index by which you would ask yourself how much cooperation did we have we had much less in the in the good old days take migration until 1965 the United States had a whites-only migration policy and by the way this is all I bring up the United States because this is the country that supposedly built the global international order the liberal international order and this is the country that was excluding non-white people from its borders invading countries trying to change their regimes and maintaining high tariffs how do you explain this well the second the important point I'm making is simple the liberal international order wasn't ever that great it did mark a big change and the reality is we are still living in that muddled world of a liberal international order which remains pretty robust despite some you're in there right well thank you okay Neal so for reads argue that actually if you take a long-term view much of that order is still in place it was never as perfect as people thought and so it's not quite as imperfect as people worried about now what do you say to that starting now you have five minutes you know there is real history and there's fake history I'm the problem with fake history is it's con easy and history professor it's seductive to tell a story about international institutions producing a more harmonious and more peaceful world after 1945 except that that emits all the multiple conflicts that were fought in what used to be called the third world in Southeast Asia in Central America in southern Africa right the way through until the collapse of the Soviet Union the reality is that for most of the period that Fareed is talking about there was no long peace certainly not in those developing parts of the world and and that really seems to me to give the light of this story of a liberal international order in truth until around 1991 the dominant structures of the global order were those of the Cold War and as Fareed himself acknowledged during the Cold War the United States and let's not forget for Reid the Soviet Union repeatedly violated the sovereignty of other states in pursuit of their new strategic advantage so there was nothing really very liberal about it nor was it terribly international and it certainly wasn't orderly the liberal international order proper only begins I think with the end of the Cold and the transition to essentially a unipolar order when the Washington Consensus could be made available to more and more countries and that was a consensus based on American ideas that free trade should prevail that mattre limits and capital movement should be reduced and migration migration also increased that was the liberal international order it culminated with the admission of China to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and who benefited from that supposedly liberal international order I will tell you China the last communist regime standing after the 1989 revolutions and who else benefited the 1% or to be exact the not point 1 percent of people in the Western economies so it's not surprising under the circumstances that there was a backlash against this liberal international order Fareed was one of those who regularly argued in the 1990s and in the 2000s the China would become more liberal after it was admitted to this wonderful liberal international order this was the biggest wrong call of American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union the reality was that this order benefited China so much that China's gross domestic product actually overtook that of the United States on a purchasing power parity adjusted basis in 2014 and only belatedly maybe too late did the United States wake up and realize I can't doubt what that means does it mean I've new glasses two minutes left it means you got to one and a half minutes left plenty time to win this it meant that a backlash began not only in there in the United States but in a great many other countries and not only in European countries not just in the UK but as far afield as the Philippines and in Brazil because people saw that the liberal international order was a scam a scam which benefited the least liberal of the great powers and a scam that benefited the elites in the developed countries so it doesn't seem to me that you need to agree with Vladimir Putin in voting for this resolution you simply have to agree with reality it is regrettable that this crisis of the liberal international order appears to have benefited him but I don't believe that he is the true winner in fact I'm going to leave you with the possibility that the crisis that is coming to the authoritarian States in the next 10 years will be a satisfying if not more satisfying than the populist crisis that has swept the Western world in the last two to three years so when you vote as you should for me and before this motion you are not voting for Vladimir Putin because he too will fall victim to the backlash against the oligarchs which is a central part of the rejection of the fake liberal international order thank you very much vote the right way next time well I think you've just seen a bit of masterful jujitsu in terms of debating style and trying to twist the question back on itself but first of all I hear from Farid because you have been a rather your network have been accused a lot in the last year of peddling fake news you're now accused by Neil Ferguson of peddling fake history I don't know which which hurts more so you now have five minutes to tell us why Neil is completely wrong so Neil is absolutely right there are there is history over fake history there are facts and there are fake facts and so the question of whether or not there has actually been a decline in in war an interstate violence since 1945 is actually a much research topic the most famous researcher on the subject in the world happens to be in the front row Steven Pinker and so I having not spent the years that steven pinker dear spent who is by the way a faculty kali was a faculty colleague of Neal's compiling the data have the advantage thanks to modern technology of being able to wild Neal was talking simply google the chart that that he is very famously produced you can't see it here but it's very simple and it shows a massive market decline in interstate violence since 1945 so you can have your anecdotes about the third world if you actually count battlefield deaths by the way if you count non battlefield deaths as well the line is very clear it goes down like this there is a reason I suppose on a point of information reason I think me left the department's of history at Harvard and Stanford and went to the Hoover Institution an institution devoted more to opinion shall we say then fact you get 20 seconds back freed no but I have to finish my five minutes right exactly so you now get so now I just have to make how much time do I have left you you have four minutes alright so I want to talk about the central charge that I think Neil Ferguson made about the collapse of the liberal international order which is the rise of China and he is right that lots of people said the China would change as a result of its integration with the West and when and they said it and people now say oh my god they were completely wrong because they promised us that China was going to become a Jeffersonian democracy as a result of all this I can't speak for other people I never said that I did say China would change so let me ask you what youth whether you define this as change when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon went to China in 1973 Mao's China was the leading rogue state in the world it was fermenting arming and funding Lucian's against liberal democracies and bourgeois governments all over the world from Latin America to Africa to India that there was a point at which Mao was spending it was it was fire funding 15,000 mercenaries in Africa alone Pol Pot and Mao used to meet to discuss how best to destroy the global liberal international order that was the China of then completely cut out from the world trading system completely cut out from the world economic system and actively seeking to subvert it China today is the second largest funder of the United Nations in the world it is the largest funder of UN peacekeeping in the world it sends more peacekeepers around the world than the other four permanent members of the Security Council put together it is the second largest funder of most UN agencies in the world and the largest funder of several of them so you said you oh that's fine that's just buying respectability through the United Nations but of course China is actively undermining the world trading system because of its rapacious capitalism because of its mercantilism and anti liberal behavior maybe but I would direct your attention to the period of the early 1990s when people made every claim and I mean every claim that they make about China now about Japan every single claim that was made about China is was made about Japan but now people say Japan is a great app holder of this liberal international order and China is is an important look the truth is China has a large market and countries with large markets often bend the rules to their advantage often not breaking them but really bending them the best exemplar of this of this practice and the businessman in the audience will know this of course is the United States of America credit suisse has put together a report that actually tries to tabulate the number of non-tariff barriers that every major country in the world propagated in 2015 over the last ten years 2005 to 2015 the number one proponent implementer of non-tariff barriers in the world was the United States with 450 number 2 by the way was India number three was Brazil number 4 was Russia China was number 5 at a third the number of the United States right okay your time is up so thank you so you've both said that your clothes your opening arguments and you've rebutted each other and now essentially we have the best fit which is kind of a free-for-all where I get to ask you both questions and you can officially interrupt each other Neil so the question I'd like to ask first so listening to us talk you're both slightly talking past each other because you're talking about different time scales for you the liberal international audio started in 1991 or 2001 for you it started in 1945 neil justify why you have such a short liberal international order because the dominant structures after 1945 were not in fact the United Nations or any of its affiliate institutions the United Nations was paralyzed by the superpower vetoes on the Security Council the dominant institutions of the period from 1945 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union were the military alliances of the superpowers and so we shouldn't kid ourselves as I'm afraid some academics do that the liberal international order was born in 1945 that's not what happened the dominant structures were the Cold War structures the military alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Pact and those were the dominant institutions the superpowers and their proxies and institutions that that essentially shaped the world you know surely one doesn't have to explain that in Ukraine how liberal was your international order between 1945 and 1991 huh I don't know my impression is that it kind of wasn't that liberal all that international and the order that you had was the order of the Soviet boot so it's there isn't an a global little international order until the Soviet Union dissolves the United States has one and then you transition to the order that Farid is idealizing and as I said the results of that order after the 1990s were far from beneficial China the last communist regime standing apart from North Korea was the main beneficiary okay so Fareed are you defending something that's actually indefensible so think about the 1930s the most liberal countries in the world were in Europe Germany being the perfect example France in Germany for three wars between 1850 and 1950 in the last two they dragged the rest of the world in since 1945 the big shift that took place was in the Western world there was the creation of a zone of international order of rules and Economic Cooperation it then spreads slowly attracting more and more countries first in East Asia then after the collapse of the Soviet Union it expanded even further and included a larger and larger gambit of people to deny that is to deny the extraordinary experience of the European Union which has taken countries that for 500 years have warned against each other and have instead managed to build a rules-based peaceful international people still to my mind don't recognize how extraordinary how a historical this is the idea that the French and the Germans the Brits and the Spaniards would not be going to war with one another when they did so routinely for 500 years is an extraordinary achievement and to deny it just because you want to win some debating points Neil really does a disservice to the actual history here and the actual extraordinary achievement of a continent that you were born on and these were ideas of course that were nourished and developed in Scotland they sit is the Scottish enlightenment that transformed Europe and towards this greater sense of economic liberalism of peace and stability among nations and so the one thing that I always so all Scots were proud of was this extraordinary heritage of Adam Smith and any and human regard you're just throwing it all away to win you know the winner view was in Kiev nil are you betraying your heart your homeland so now the liberal international order began in the 1770s one important point that you should not miss is that embedded in farad's teleology of an ever more peaceful world is a fundamental error about the incidence of conflict now Steve pink is a great friend of mine we go way back but he would I think admit that that chart that you showed on your on your phone Fareed is not an uncontroversial chart and indeed a new book has just been published that refutes the claim that there is a clear linear path from conflict to peace which is for Reed central argument actually when you look at the incidence of conflict it doesn't follow a linear path at all if it did how on earth were you explained that the two biggest conflicts in all of history happen in the middle of the 20th century it may be that they'll never be a conflict as large as that again but we can't know because there isn't the linear trend that Fareed claims in reality tomorrow the theory could be destroyed in a day in the event of a nuclear exchange even a limited nuclear war would instantly destroy the claim that we've arrived at perpetual peace as a result of an international order finally it is a little odd for someone who was born in India to make the Eurocentric arguments that you are making furries to insist that what happened in Europe somehow is a substitute or surrogate for what happened in the world but where was the liberal international order in in for example Vietnam where was it in Central America where was the liberal national order in all the rest of the world except for the Western Europe whose story you insist is central to that of humanity but we're not in Western Europe here we're in Ukraine Ukraine which probably relative to all the rest of the world suffered more organised lethal violence in the 20th century than any other country and if you don't believe me I show it in my book war of the world here of all countries surely this is a solemn observation we should not be taken in by fairy stories that the world arrived at perpetual peace thanks to the European Union guard yourself against such false narratives and understand the fragility of our world and understand that the reason why there has been less conflict since 1945 is not the IMF or the United Nations of the World Trade Organization no it has been the fact that the United States achieves military supremacy unassailable military supremacy that no other great power yet dares challenge and the danger of for each liberal international order and this is the last thing I'll say is that it has allowed another great power to acquire the capability for the first time to threaten American military primacy and that is the tragedy of the fairy story of the liberal international order that it has served Communist China equipped it transformed it not in the way that free describes do you really think that the most important change in China since 1972 is that China pays for a lot of UN peacekeepers do you really think that the reality is the biggest change since 1972 is that China is now a superpower with the capacity to impose technological surveillance on its entire population to wage cyber warfare on all other powers including the United States and no doubt Ukraine and to acquire the military capability to challenge us primacy in the Asia Pacific that the big transformation and it's thanks to the fairy tale of the liberal international order that it's happened so Fareed are you actually upholding a Chinese fairy tale so Neil said at one point this is the last thing I will say and I can confidently declare that that will not prove to be true so that was there's another fake fact what is extraordinary in listening to Neil Ferguson who is as most of you know generally regarded as a neo imperialist market you know libertarian supporter of Margaret Thatcher he has now come out against a Western centric view of human history against the global capitalist order that he claims has has been rapacious towards 99% of the Western world claims that I tended to think radical Marxist used to make but not Neil Ferguson but it tells you how far he will go to to try to win this debate so let me tell you what it looked like the liberal international order looked like to tour to an Indian growing up in one of the poorest countries in the world we looked out at the world and we saw a world that we lived in which was one without markets without rules without a sense of international association we were shielded behind high tariff barriers nationalist rhetoric and the the belief that any kind of participation in that world was somehow giving in to a Western capitalist bloc and we noticed that we rather like the world that the Western capitalist seemed to be building it seemed to be one of greater and greater prosperity greater cooperation a greater observance of human rights and we desperately wanted to be part of that world and then when in 1992-93 the Indian government ran out of money finally it began reforms that allowed India to join that world and we jumped in enthusiastically and as a result of it not just China Neil but hundreds of millions of Indians have moved out of poverty and 450 million Chinese have moved from living on one dollar a day to living on two or three or four dollars a day this is the prospect that is frightening Neil Ferguson so greatly the fact the Chinese peasants rather than starving can now feed their children and make sure that they don't die I think that the reality is that that liberal international order is responsible for more the upliftment of more human beings in the last 75 years then an end then in almost the entire preceding thousands of years of recorded history you have an extraordinary transformation of ordinary people's lives as a result of it this game largely from the fact that these countries were able to participate it would have happened nomads whether whether or not we had adjusted trade rules one way or the other would not have affected the rise of China or the rise of India once these countries decided to participate in this order and I think we have to ask ourselves fundamentally do we believe in capitalism do we believe in markets do we believe in freedom and we believe in those things and the Chinese do well at it are we really going to say that we would have been better off with the China with a billion peasants living on a dollar a day with their children starving then that these people should be allowed to flourish and to live your lives in which of course being different from us and living in different places and having different geostrategic interests they will call they will require a certain amount of management and require a greater degree of cooperation I for one would rather live in a world in which we do not have to prosper by ensuring that the rest of the world is in misery right well I'd like to pick up for one thing because to read what you say about the scale of transformation in the last decade or two obviously have deep meaning for the audience sitting here in Ukraine as someone who did their PhD in Tajikistan in the days of the Soviet Union and has seen friends of mine go from a world where there was absolutely no contact with the outside world and very little chance of ever travelling to a world where suddenly information moves at lightning speed people travel there's a sense of being part of a global system it has been extraordinary but the question I then have from that is what about the Internet what is that done to the global international liberal order because irrespective of whether you have free movement of goods or people you have a lot of information and ideas of going around the world in spite of censorship in spite of government controls how does that play into your vision of whether we have or whether we are indeed seeing the end of the international order can I just ask a point of order what do we have closing statements you do have closing statements not your last chance no your I mean I'm still trying to get my head around Narendra Modi as a liberal internationalist Fareed is that how you see India's leader the the tragedy about democracy Neil as sometimes people vote for people you wouldn't vote for I I have come to recognize that that is the best solution your Prime Minister in Britain on the other hand has decided to simply disobey the laws of Parliament I don't know whether Modi is worse than Boris Johnson but they are both products of a democracy and I reluctantly accept that they both governed their countries the question of why Narendra Modi and Boris Johnson and Donald from Angie herb Olson ro and so on are in power is really a question that that you've raised Gillian because it's a little bit like the liberal international order the internet was supposed to be awesome everybody was going to be able to speak truth on to power we would all have our own blogs and there would be transparency the authoritarian regimes would fold and if the Chinese tried to regulate the Internet as Bill Clinton famously said they would be trying to nail jello to a wall fast-forward to 2019 and it hasn't worked out that way at all because the internet far from brick bringing liberal values into power has undermined them at every turn by encouraging not only fake news but extreme views to dominate even in open societies indeed allowing a kind of weaponization of social media to decide the outcomes of Elections so I want to suggest to you that the only law of history that really operates here is not some law that liberal international values give you perpetual peace that's been a fantasy of liberals since the Enlightenment now the only law that really operates here is the law of unintended consequences you think you're going to lead democracy bring democracy to China by bringing it in to the international trading system and all you do is create the most powerful totalitarian regime in history and you think you're going to bring about democracy in the Middle East and everywhere else by giving people smart phones in the internet and you end up with Trump and you end up with Boris and so that's the irony of history Fareed that you're missing the grand designs that you had back in the 1990s that I remember reading admiringly in your books have turned to dust because far from a global international order you've ended up with Chinese preeminence at least in a half of the world and an Internet that empowers the most in liberal forces in so many democracies I don't think you can get out of that contradiction in your position hurry it I did write a book about democracy in the 1990s in which I predicted the rise of something I called a liberal democracy and I talk precisely about the phenomenon we are we are discussing here which is the rise of populist leaders who come to power and then undermine the rule of law undermine the protections of minority rights and undermine in some sense democracy democracy itself I think you would remember it Neal because you reviewed it for the New York Times glowing Lane finally were you were you lying then are you lying now or are you simply a gentleman does not really use another gentleman of lying to read I urge you to take that back I take it back well it's a pity you haven't both brought your ball ready to throw at each other baby let me just make a point about the internet because I hear this all the time the Internet is now turns out to be the great vehicle of George Orwell's 1984 so I ask you all very simply you've heard all this and I'm gonna ask you very simply would you take the internet away from yourselves would you be willing to live without email without text without the ability to Google at will for every fact every piece of information every article everything you know this extraordinary access that we all have gotten so used to that you have all the world's information available to you anywhere anytime that communication is essentially free transparent to no matter whom you know anywhere anytime this is an absolute revolution that we now regard as sort of like breathing air you know try try living without it and yes there are some nasty people on Twitter and there are some people who put fake facebook pages on oh dear but I am not willing to give up the entire digital revolution I'm not willing to give up the extraordinary explosion of knowledge that has taken place as a consequence of that because you have a bunch of people in Macedonia Montenegro or wherever it is being paid by you know some Russian bureaucrats to go and you know and and do some damage I have a very simple answer to people who who moan and groan about that get off Twitter yourself I mean most of these people you know engage in the nastiest back-and-forth on Twitter and then you know get surprised that somebody hurts their feelings well I mean you were engaged in it just get out of it just do you use it as you wish and so if you are not willing to give it up yourself Neil Ferguson don't advocate don't tell us that it's terrible for the world it's great for you ordinary people benefit even more because it reduces it does actually reduce barriers to entry in almost every field it makes people able and this is one of the disruptions that has taken place it allows ordinary people to do things that previously credentialed people like us were able to do great it's an enormous democratizing force but it's messy democracy is messy people make bad choices we have to be able to live with that and that is yes part of the liberal international order that you will elect people every now and then who tend to be a liberal Neal are you about to read something from your phone well I'm going to read something from a book actually because I'm one of those happen to be your book actually it's four reads let me quote from something you wrote in 1997 four read by dealing with China the United States can encourage it to play by civilized international rules ie stop selling weapons to rogue regimes and moderate its regional ambitions by increasingly integrating it into the world economy China will over time become a more liberal state and then fast forward to your book the post American world as Chinese standards of living rise political reform is becoming an increasingly urgent issue the regime will almost certainly face significant challenges over the next 15 years even if this does not mean that China will turn into a western-style liberal democracy overnight it is much more likely to evolve first into a mixed regime much like many Western countries in the 19th century which combines popular participation with some elements of hierarchy and elite control so I think it's fair to say Fareed that your prognostications on the future of China have not quite worked out as you had expected because we certainly see no sign whatsoever at this point of China moving in those directions quite the opposite hence our debate and I'll say one more thing China lately even further away from political liberalisation as anybody know who who goes regularly to Beijing Xi Jinping as tightened his grip on power has dispensed with term limits is shutting down what remains of free speech and Chinese campuses and we're all supposed to celebrate the number of UN peacekeepers that China sends around the world do me a bloody favor mate okay you have ten seconds to reply and then you Beth had your closing statements if you want to apply or you can save it up I stand by what I said China in in the inland in 1970s was actively trying to undermine regimes all over the world it is not for two wars since 1988 by the way in that period the United States has fought about ten in fact China has engaged in less military intervention since 1975 than all are the UN permanent mer Security Council members it does in fact uphold fund and and obey the liberal international order it has become liberal on many dimensions and as I said it is not going to become a western-style democracy tomorrow so it's a mixture of verdict and I stand by it okay I'm looking down on you both and I am going to stick to the rules of the game because that's part of respecting the international order and I'm gonna give Neal three minutes three minutes to tell us all why we should agree with you that the liberal global international order is over you don't need to agree with me you need to agree with Fareed Zakaria writing in December 1996 and I quote many of the rules regimes that international institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944 like the IMF need overhauling others like the World Bank may well need to be scrapped so for his position on the liberal international order has undergone something of an evolution since those distant days and evolution that I find fascinating but not as fascinating as the evolution of his thinking on China you know I used to think for that you work for CNN but it seems you must have signed a contract with CCTVs since I last saw you because more or less everything that you have said this evening has sounded like the Chinese Foreign Ministry drafted it for you and I have to say that makes me feel uneasy and I would have thought that it would make most Indians feel uneasy and it should certainly make most Ukrainians feel uneasy ladies and gentlemen the reality of our time which conferences like this I find tend to ignore is that the second Cold War has already begun it is not just a trade war it is not just a tech war over 5g networks it is not just an arguments about the South China Sea the United States and China have embarked on a second cold war that is already being waged in cyberspace and perhaps also in space itself kidding yourself that that is not the case is a common European mistake in a reality Europe is likely to be one of the battlefields in this new cold war and if China has not already come to the Ukraine offering a one belt one road agreement then I would think the president Solinsky will get the visit fairly soon from a Beijing delegation because that is the way that China now plays yes there are a few UN peacekeepers that China pays for but I would say that the budget for un peacekeeping is dwarfed by the budget for overseas expansion in the guise of one belt one Road in this new Cold War you must be realists and not naive idealists and recognize that the liberal international order is what brought China to this point that it can bid for global supremacy and it may even win okay for read you have three minutes to tell us why professor Fergusson is completely wrong since he quotes me all the time he can't be completely wrong let me give you the simplest example of the working of the liberal international order when the Soviet Union collapsed Poland and Ukraine had the same per-capita GDP Poland was able to join the liberal international order it was welcomed into it it was welcomed into the European Union it was welcomed into NATO and it was able to find its place in the world in in that global liberal international order Ukraine was not for a variety of reasons today Poland's per capita GDP is five times that of Ukraine that is the liberal international order and Ukrainians understand it because as I said like Indians they have been deprived for so long the opportunity to participate in it and so with flaws and all they understand the opportunity here yes I did want to reform the liberal international order I still do and I think there is a great challenge in reforming an order to accommodate a rising great power this has happened throughout history it is an enormous challenge but finding a way to allow China to exist within this order without tearing it apart is important and I bring up the issue of China's support of the UN only to demonstrate that it is not actively seeking to destroy that order rather to become powerful within it there is a country trying to seek trying to destroy that international order and that is Russia Russia is the country that is most opposed to this list liberal international order most opposes Ukraine's participation in that liberal international order most seeks to undermine that liberal international order everywhere if you look at the candidates that the Russians support in European elections they very positions on all kinds of issues you know markets and such they have one position on the European Union they are all opposed they have one position on Ukraine they do not want Ukraine to be part of the European Union they have one position on NATO they do not want Ukraine to be part of NATO that is the principal threat to the liberal international order Julian pointed out that this proposition has already been voted on by one person Vladimir Putin your choice really is whether you want to vote with Putin or with me and the reason I bring this up is it's important to think to yourself Tony Blair may at this point do you want to vote with your fears or do you want to vote with your hopes do you know people have been claiming that the liberal international order is being destroyed for decades they've been claiming this thing is going to collapse but if you vote with your hopes if you vote with the confidence that it can be sustained you will help sustain it and make sure Ukraine is part of that future well everyone you've heard the arguments you've heard the speeches you've heard them rebut each other you've heard them or you've heard professor Ferguson quote from each other's books now you had the chance to have your say this is a moment we've been waiting for when you get your vote and believe me it's a lot more fun than the Eurovision Song Contest so can you all go back to finding your little devices as I said if you agree with Neil that a liberal international order is over you've vote green duck if you agree that it's an if you think it's not and you agree with Reid you vote me red and I'm sure these suspense is killing us all it's certainly killing them to work out who is actually one we're doing dealing with tutoring and Alexia [Music] [Music] and by the way I remember that technically speaking the winner is the one who moves the votes more well I have to say that Neal has won on two levels both in terms of the accent number of people who agree with him but also in a number of people who have moved to his side and I have to confess I voted strategically I first voted yes and then voted no to help it didn't work that's called election interference but what I'd like to say more seriously though it's been a very thought-provoking discussion I think I've learned a lot it's being quite a challenge to keep these two towering male intellects under control I'm glad I'm taller than them at the moment but there's actually a very key point I want to end on which is this if you do believe in the values of a global international liberal order having an open debate having space to disagree to disagree with each other having a moment to vote and express your views is actually an incredibly powerful important privilege and for that reason among any others I say thank you to both of you and thank you to all of you for having it happen and lastly lastly I'm also instructed to say by the way as you go away you can work out who you want to congratulate who you actually agree with whose book you want to buy next I'm sure they keen to talk about their books that we now apparently have a short break and then do please come back after having had a short break because there's going to be a special guest for the closing part of the today's events mr. pincher thank you everyone

Channel: Victor Pinchuk Foundation

Views: 37,467

Rating: 4.7484279 out of 5

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Id: UtC-eT9YWZg

Length: 60min 52sec (3652 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/justinvicari]

He said that China was the last communist regime extant in the world, after the 1989 revolutions, and that it benefits from the liberal world order more than suffers from it. Ditto the one percent. References specifically to the u.s. were kind of absent.

Ferguson has always loved delivering bad news to the left, although he claims not to be biased here, and even the man who was arguing for liberal world order, Fareed Zakaria, was speaking badly of the liberal world order. And the moderator made a point of behaving unprofessionally.

So, they do have a lot of evidence of things falling apart, mainly the Iran nuclear agreement. It's a grim picture Ferguson paints, warning that if NATO ever falls the whole thing's going to go.

[u/justinvicari]

No I don't think we should reduce trade with any of our trading partners. I don't know that much about how nations wage economic wars, I know it happens. From what I have heard China's economy is stronger than ours because they raise wages, they keep wages high. Forty percent of Chinese millennials own their own homes. They keep money flowing throughout the society.

[u/Flexit4Brexit]

Submission statement:

Fareed Zakaria and Niall Ferguson debate, “The liberal international order is over.”

[u/justinvicari]

I disagree with Ferguson when he asserts a widespread backlash against oligarchy. I don't see that at all, much less see that coming to save the day. Occupy Wall Street imploded long ago and no one is perpetuating it.

At least the liberal order made a pretense of human rights. And if we are replacing the old order with an axis of fascist powers, then Lord help us.