The End of the International Liberal Order?

thank you very much for that introduction I'm very grateful to former premier Jeong and to the Fairwinds foundation for inviting me back to Taiwan it's been several years since I've been to this country we have a program on Taiwan democracy in my Center we believe that Taiwan is very important for the future of democracy in Asia and in other parts of the world and that's why we actually pay a great deal of attention to what goes on on this island so I'm really very pleased to be able to see some old friends and to catch up I think this is also a very important time in world politics because we seem to be exiting out of one period of global history and moving into another one and that's going to be the topic of my talk today the end of the it's a question it's it's a question of whether we are in fact at the end of a period of a liberal international order which is being threatened by the rise in many parts of the world including in my own country the United States by the rise of populist nationalism so let me begin by talking about what popular what the liberal international order was to begin with that liberal order was a set of rules international rules that were designed to promote the movement of goods investment people and ideas across international borders it had a political and an economic dimension the economic dimension had to do with institutions like the general agreement on tariffs and trade which evolved into the World Trade Organization also regional pacts like the European Union NAFTA the North American Free Trade Association and others that created an interdependent world of globalized business the political dimension of that liberal order had to do the security arrangements between United States primarily and a series of allies around the world the NATO alliance with Europe the us-japan security treaty the treaty with the Republic of Korea and other alliances that underpin in a power sense the open world that the United States was trying to create now it is very important that American power was at the base of both the economic and the political liberal order without American power this world would not have come into being it was deliberately created after 1945 by American policymakers it was in the interests of the United States but I think it was something that could only have been put in place by the United States there's a certain amount of game theory that suggests why this is the case liberal rules international rules are a species of public good they will not be provided automatically by the international system unless there's a hegemonic player like the United States whose own self-interest is seen as being intertwined by the creation of these liberal rules that hegemonic power is willing to accept free-riding by other members of the system that is to say countries that benefit from those rules but don't contribute to their maintenance because it is in the interest of that large dominant country and I think that was the situation of the United States it was in the interest of the u.s. to create this order and it could tolerate free-riding by countries like Japan and Germany throughout the entire period of the Cold War because that was the interest of it served the greater interest of the u.s. that condition is beginning to change now with the relative decline of American power and the rise of a lot of other important players in the international system now the economic rationale for globalization I think is is something that you learn in any basic international trade Theory course and I think that it remains valid that in the aggregate if you have a liberal set of trading rules that reduce tariffs and other barriers to trade and investment in the aggregate everybody will be richer this was borne out by the actual experience of the global economy in the period since the 1970s between 1970 and the financial crisis in the United States and 2008 the output of the global economy quadrupled it increased by 400% it led to the creation of enormous new amounts of wealth around the world but I think the other lesson that you need to draw from trade theory is that the benefits of this economic liberalisation do not accrue to everybody in the society they accrue to the society as a whole but there are winners and there are losers and in particular low-skilled workers in developed countries tended to lose employment even as middle classes rose in places like China and India the usual prescription of liberal economists for this growth of inequality is that the winners from globalization needed to compensate the losers through various kinds of protection schemes worker retraining job and insurance social policies of this sort but by and large those policies were ineffective in stopping the kind of massive job loss that occurred in older manufacturing industries throughout the Western world and particularly in the most liberal countries in Britain and in United States that embrace globalization the most fully we saw a period beginning in the 1980s with the rise of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in which the liberalisation deepened because these two leaders were very vocal and articulate advocates of this liberal order and as a result trade barriers began to come down the state began to shrink in many Western societies but at the same time a lot of the social protections that had been put in place by earlier Social Democratic parties began to erode and the result was I think a large degree of inequality you're probably aware of a lot of the statistics from countries like the United States where the top 10% take home a good 80 percent of national income where the top 1% in fact earn as much in income terms as the bottom 25% and so all of these are results of the deepening of that liberal order over the last two generations and as a result there's been a very large backlash a political backlash against globalization precisely from those older working classes that were not the beneficiaries of it now I'm going to turn to the politics of the United States in the way that that has played out because the United States was one of the promoters of this system and in a certain sense its society have felt the effects of this liberalisation the most fully so as you're probably aware we had a very interesting election in the United States that brought Donald Trump to power last year Donald Trump actually lost the popular vote in the United States by about 2.8 million votes he won the presidential election in the electoral college for a simple reason he lost three important states Pennsylvania Michigan and Wisconsin he lost those three states for a simple reason these were all northern industrial states that had voted very reliably for the Democratic candidate in the last several elections going all the way back to the 1980s Hillary Clinton was so certain that she would win these states that she did not even bother to visit Wisconsin once during the entire election the margin of Trump's victory was only about a hundred ten thousand votes in those three states so in other words if 55,000 votes had switched from Trump to Clinton in Pennsylvania Michigan and Wisconsin then Hillary Clinton would be the President of the United States the reason that she lost those states was because they are precisely those northern industrial old manufacturing states that had been part of the Democratic Party coalition but it switched over to the Republican Party because of those job losses and so there's a very very direct link between trumps election victory and deindustrialization that was the core of his support during the campaign he appealed to working-class voters with the promise that he was going to restore the manufacturing economy in the United States now I don't happen to believe that he's capable of doing that I think that a lot of those voters are going to be very disappointed in his ability to actually bring their jobs back but that was clearly something that was critical in his in his election success I want to just tell you a little bit about the social background to this because I think many Americans themselves people from my class meaning well-educated people with good professional incomes I think do not adequately represent or they do not adequately understand the degree of social devastation that has occurred in these working-class communities in the United States there is for example a drug epidemic going on in these areas that has to do with heroin and opioid addiction there's an amazing statistic that in the Year 2015 about 650,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in the past decade male life expectancy in the United States has actually dropped this is unprecedented every other developed country has seen increases in life expectancy over that same period but in the United States male life expectancy dropped and it is almost entirely a result of drugs that are being taken by Americans a lot of them white working-class Americans living in small towns living in rural parts of the country that don't have jobs whose families are increasingly broken whose children are growing up in single-parent families and this is the kind of social situation that's led to a great deal of resentment against the elites in the United States people like me you know people that benefit from globalization and from the increase trade and cross-border mobility that takes place and so these were in a sense the core supporters the most passionate supporters of Donald Trump if you look at the brexit vote in favor of Britain leaving the European Union that happened last summer you see a very similar sociological profile in the people that voted to leave they were less urban they were less educated and they tended to be older so again people that were not benefiting and in fact had lost as a result of the globalization that has happened in Britain and in more broadly now I think what's interesting the sociology of the Trump vote and the brexit vote is that this is becoming a common pattern in many other parts of the world so for example you have populist nationalist that are arising in other countries in fact I think that Russia was one of the first where this phenomenon happened where Vladimir Putin who became president in 2000 has campaigned on a nationalist platform he wants to make Russia great again the nature of his support is very similar to that of Donald Trump or brexit that is to say he's not popular among younger better educated urban Russians that live in st. Petersburg or Moscow his support base is really in smaller cities in rural areas among less educated Russians and there is no question that he is very popular there if you go to Hungary this is one of the first countries that came out of communism we thought that this had become a secure liberal democracy but under Viktor Orban the Prime Minister and the Fidesz party that he leads it has been dismantling its democratic institutions the latest effort was to basically undermine the Central European University of University founded by George Soros one of the best universities in Central Europe because he does not like to have liberal critics of his administration and again our bond is not popular in Budapest he's not popular among educated cosmopolitan Hungarians he's very popular in the countryside among less educated more rural voters a final example of this kind of populist nationalism is president air Diwan and Turkey who again is not popular in Istanbul and Ankara and among educated Turks but has a very passionate support base among particularly lower middle class Muslims in the countryside throughout turkey they're going to have a very important referendum in Turkey I believe in the coming week in which there's going to be a vote on whether to expand president air diwan's powers turn the country from a parliamentary to a presidential almost an authoritarian democracy and again it falls into the same pattern in which I would say the Democratic part of these democracies is attacking the rule of law parts so every modern democratic system really is a complex series of institutions that consists of three separate institutions so one of those institutions is the state the state is the institution that generates power and uses it to protect the community against foreign and domestic of enemies it enforces laws provides basic public services so it's the power institution balanced against that you have the rule of law which are rules that constrain power that makes sure that the executive cannot simply do whatever he or she wants in terms of the use of power and finally the democratic part which has to do with a electoral accountability multiparty of free and fair elections and really what's happening in Russia in Hungary in Turkey and now I would say in Britain and in the United States is that populist politicians are using their democratic legitimacy to attack rule of law by dismantling the protections that exist for the Free Press for independent institutions like central banks for any form of opposition so that future elections will not be decided on a level playing field the process in the United States has not gone nearly as far as it's gone in Russia or Turkey or Hungary because I think American institutions are actually quite are quite strong but the instinct I think in terms of trumps view of presidential power is very similar the mentality is similar so if you remember one of the first things he did when he was criticized by the press when he became president was to attack the mainstream press as fake news as being representative of a corrupt elite of making up lies about about him which is exactly the same instinct that Putin and air Dhawan and Orban and these other populist nationalist have displayed now fortunately in the United States I think we have very robust institutions we have a very strong press but still I think has a great deal of legitimacy but the pattern unfortunately I think is still there now I don't want to leave you with the impression that populism is simply a matter of uneducated people who in their ignorance oppose the wise policies of the elites because unfortunately that has not been the case I think that elites in many democratic countries have in fact made a lot of mistakes in the past decade particularly when there have been of two very notable failures the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States in 2008 and the euro crisis that began in 2010 in the eurozone and there's no question about it these were elite failures based on mistakes of policy that elites believed in that actually they believed would benefit them but hurt ordinary people in the case of the American financial crisis it was really a failure of deregulation the banks and other powerful interest groups did not want the constraints that were the residual regulatory structures left over from the Great Depression so in the 1980s and 1990s they were dismantled and as a result big banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and so forth could take enormous risks that led directly to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 the other big problem in the United States really has to do with the design of our political system there's a spectrum of institutional types in democratic countries in which the balance between the power institution which is the state and then the checking institutions which are the rule of law and democracy can differ and the balance in the United States has right since the beginning of the American Republic being very much in favor of the institutions of Constraints they doesn't say we have very strong rule of law and we have of course very vigorous democracy what we don't have is a very powerful bureaucratic state although the power of the American state grew tremendously in the course of the 20th century we have a system in the u.s. of checks and balances Americans I think are rightly proud of this system of limitations on executive power however the way that the system has evolved in the last generation has actually led to a tremendous amount of dysfunction in the in American politics it's the combination of that check-and-balance political system with a couple of things that have been happening in American society one of them is the growth of polarization so for much of the twentieth century the two may in American political parties Republicans and the Democrats overlapped very substantially all of the great legislative achievements the New Deal the Great Society the Reagan tax cuts were passed by bipartisan coalition's in Congress that were made up of both Republicans and Democrats beginning in the 1990s that overlap began to disappear and it's completely gone now so the most liberal Republican is now considerably more conservative than the most conservative Democrat people increasingly choose where to live based on their political preferences whether they're red or blue and you have colors in this country as well for your political parties in the United States people choose to marry or they want their children to marry much more according to whether they're Republican or a Democrat than whether the you know the future husband or wife is is you know the same race or the same religion or anything else the partisanship has become very extreme and there's also been a growth of money in politics there's probably been an increase of an order of magnitude in the amount of money that flows into American elections over the past generation so you have this combination of extreme polarization very powerful and well-organized interest groups coinciding with a check-and-balance political system that spreads power out in the system very very broadly and the result is something that in my last book I labeled veto cracy meaning rule by veto the American political system makes it very easy for well-organized minorities to veto action by the entire political system and as a result the decision-making ability of the American system has really ground to a halt so for example Congress has not passed a budget what it calls regular order which is a set of rules that Congress itself developed for passing budgets it hasn't done this in about 20 years we've had several government shutdowns every year there's a big crisis over whether Congress is willing to raise the debt limit basically to pay back its creditors and this is not good practice this is not the way a democratic country is supposed to fulfill its most basic duty which is to pass an annual budget there many other examples this tax reform the United States has a very high corporate tax rate the nominal tax rate is about thirty five percent which makes it one of the highest in the OECD this is offset by a 10,000 page tax code that gives special subsidies and exemptions to various small interests and every tax expert whether Republican or Democrat agrees that they ought to lower the nominal rate of Taxation and get rid of the great mass of all of those subsidies Congress cannot do it because all of the powerful interest groups that negotiated those subsidies in the first place can veto action by the whole so Donald Trump wants to do tax reform he wants to carry out something like this you know effort to lower the corporate tax rate I will bet anybody in this room that is not going to happen because of the way that our political system is organized it's too easy for a powerful interest group to veto action by the whole and I would say by the way your system and Taiwan is beginning to look you know increasingly like the American system this is a it's a problem in quite a number of democracies I think it's true in Japan which requires a high degree of consensus to do anything it's true in Italy it's true in India in a big way and in all of those cases this inability of democratic political systems to make difficult decisions because of these institutional obstacles to decision-making has produced a popular demand for a strongman you know somebody that will cut through all of these obstacles and get get something done and this I think was a background condition for the rise of Donald Trump that Americans are very frustrated that their political system is not producing the kinds of results that they would like to see in any number of areas and therefore they need a leader who says like Donald Trump did at the Republican convention I alone can fix this right now if we turn to Europe I think you see a number of very similar institutional failures now this is not I think universally true of all European democracies I think Germany the Netherlands most of the Scandinavian countries actually have had democratic political systems that have tackled very difficult problems like labor market reform over the past 10 or 20 years and they've done it successfully but the European Union as a institution I think is way too weak and therefore has led to a major crisis of legitimacy for the EU as a whole the first of these big mistakes was the Euro itself the creation of the euro many economists at the time the euro was created said that if you have monetary union without a fiscal union over time this is going to lead to big imbalances and a big crisis and that's exactly what happened in the case of Greece that crisis has been pushed under the rug it has not been solved it has not been solved and it's going to come back you know to to undermine the you know the financial system in Europe over time the second big institutional failure in Europe has to do with the Schengen system the Schengen system is a system of free internal movement where any member of the European Union can move freely to any other member state now the problem with the Schengen system is that you cannot guarantee free internal movement of people if you cannot secure the outer borders of the Schengen zone as a whole and this the European Union has failed to do it became evident during the Syrian migration crisis when a million Syrians left Syria basically and tried to get into Europe there is no way to keep them out of Greece which was the main entry point and from Greece they went through Eastern Europe to Germany to Sweden to other countries in Northern Europe and the Europeans discovered that all these people were in the EU and they actually had no way of tracking them or knowing even how many of these people were there it produced an enormous right-wing political backlash from Europeans that felt that their countries were being swamped by Muslim immigrants I think that fear was overstated but it was a real one and it was the result of a poorly designed system of border control and again that is an institutional failure that the Europeans had not addressed they had not spent enough money controlling their borders there is going to be an outflow of several tens of millions of people not just from Syria but from sub-saharan Africa into of European Union that I think is politically going to be tremendously destabilizing and so again this is an institutional problem that has not been addressed by the elites the final issue I would point to is the question of identity there are many people who voted either for brexit or for Donald Trump who are not working class who have not lost their jobs in a manufacturing plant over the last generation that are actually well-to-do well-educated and the like and part of the reason they voted the way they did was that they see their communities filling up with people that speak a different language that had very different customs that do not accept in many cases the basic terms of citizenship in their countries and this has produced a big reaction many people myself included are quite comfortable living in a multicultural society I mean look my own family emigrated to the United States from Japan a hundred years ago and so I have a big stake in you know seeing America as a multicultural society but I think it's not surprising or unreasonable that people don't want to lose you know the culture of their countries or they don't want to see it changed and what they feel is an uncontrolled way and so I think a lot of the de-facto shift into multiculturalism has produced a nativist backlash on the part of white Europeans and white Americans saying well look aren't we a minority also in our own country and don't we have rights and why is it that only you know non-white people are privileged by the government and the beneficiaries of various social programs and so forth again this is a complaint that is very much overstated by the people on the right in the United States but it is definitely a factor that is driving this populist road now I want to turn to Asia because Asia is not I think part of this trend that I just described towards populist nationalism Asia is suffering from many of the same economic dislocations as Europe and the United States in terms of manufacturing job loss even China today I think has maxed out in terms of manufacturing employment and has been losing because their wages are increasing they've been losing employment to lower labor cost areas like Vietnam or Bangladesh and so there's been major crises and a lot of older heavy industries in this part of the world last year that you know the South Korean shipbuilding industry suffered a huge set of bankruptcies and setbacks here in Taiwan I suspect you're all familiar with that so the economic conditions for this kind of backlash exist in this part of the world as well but I don't think that you've seen the same kind of rise of this right-wing anti-immigrant nationalistic populism here that you do in Europe or in the United States the populism exists but it's mostly been mobilized by traditional left-wing parties if you look at Europe there's a difference between Northern Europe and southern Europe so in southern Europe in Greece in Spain and Italy you still have traditional left-wing parties and displaced workers continue to vote for those left-wing parties in northern Europe you get right-wing anti-immigrant anti-european Union populist parties where the right mobilizes and captures the support of these left's well-to-do workers Asia as a whole is more like southern Europe than its like northern Europe so in Korea you're probably going to see the election of a new president from the minjoo party which is the left-wing party here in taiwan the populist party is really the DPP and so forth in China you actually have a kind of populism under Xi Jinping he has been undertaking a massive anti-corruption campaign which is aimed at the existing elites in the Communist Party he's very popular among ordinary Chinese who don't like all of these corrupt officials and she has been able to capitalize on that resentment of those party elites but again this is not the same thing as Donald Trump because it's not a grassroots movement and it's not really something that comes from the bottom upwards it's really something that's driven by the elites and is being used by the elites to bolster their own position I think something similar has been going on in Asia there's plenty of nationalism in Asia in fact one of the most disturbing things is watching Japan Korea and China in the last 10 or 15 years actually teach their young people to be more nationalistic than the previous generation but again this is not a grassroots movement so much is something I think that's been deliberately manipulated by the elites in those countries to bolster their own legitimacy and it's really quite different I think from the sort of uprising of right-wing nationalism but the final and most important difference I think between Asia and Europe or the United States is immigration that there simply hasn't been the same level of immigration in this part of the world as there has been in those other developed regions and there are not as many Muslims quite frankly because I think the challenge to many countries in Europe has been the cultural difference that's represented by specifically Muslim immigrants compared to let's say Hispanic immigrants coming into the United States and where there has been Muslim immigration as in Myanmar you are getting a big native this reaction from the Burmese Buddhist community so that I think explains why Asia is different by the way I don't think that Asians should sit back and be self-satisfied about their reluctance to take immigrants because you may have noticed that almost every country in Asia including your own is suffering from an incredible demographic crisis because of low birth rates one of the big advantages I think that the United States has is because of our high rate of immigration our population is actually still expanding and we are going to get economic growth from population growth you know into I mean it's going to end eventually but it's going to continue for some time whereas this part of the world is facing a kind of unprecedented decline in working population right we can discuss in the question and answer period why that's the case but but I'll leave that for later so when we to conclude when we think about the future of the liberal international order it's clear that there are really big threats liberalism has been under attack domestically and internationally from many different sources some of them are overtly authoritarian like the Chinese government that never pretended to be particularly liberal and wants to promote its own form of authoritarianism or radomir Putin's version of Russian authoritarianism but the more important threats are coming from within liberal democracies themselves from liberal democracies that are not happy with globalization which are becoming more intolerant are becoming more nationalistic and are threatening to dismantle those very liberal institutions that they created in the period after World War two now I don't want to make a lot of firm predictions I would say now that we're about what is it about 70 days into the Trump presidency I actually am a little bit relieved because he's reversed himself on a lot of the really I think absurd things he said when he was a candidate so he's not going to label China as a currency manipulator he's going to keep down at yelling on as the head of the Federal Reserve he thinks that NATO is actually worth something and not an obsolete institution you know it doesn't look like he's going to launch a trade war with China anytime soon so he may end up being a more conventional politician however that doesn't mean that there's not going to be a great deal of damage done in the process of his evolution as a as a politician and that comes in several in several respects first of all he's triggered responses in other countries so there are a lot of mini Donald Trump's arising in different parts of the world that are using his populist techniques to get votes and you know win political power for themselves in foreign policy I think this is an area of tremendous danger because you have an extremely inexperienced and unknowledgeable president who has put together an administration that is not well staffed the senior people like the defense secretary the Secretary of State the national security adviser are all competent people but they have very little support underneath them and they also express opinions that are at variance with those of the President and so it's very difficult to really understand what actual American policy is I would say that in international affairs credibility is really the coin of the realm for both friends and enemies people have to know that if you say we're not going to let North Korea get a nuclear weapon I think both the North Koreans and everybody else the Japanese and everybody else in the region has got to know whether you mean that seriously or not and whether you're going to take real measures you know to stop them and from this administration it's very very difficult to know what it is they really mean or how they plan to carry out some of the things that they have apparently apparently promised I think in other respects there's a more subtle kind of threat going on in the world I've been arguing for some time that one of the big dividing lines in the world now is less between democracies and authoritarian regimes than it is between modern impersonal countries and ones that are highly corrupt in a certain sense you know the problem with Putin's Russia is not that it's not democratic I have no doubt that if there is an election a free and fair election in Russia tomorrow that Putin would be reelected as president because he does seem to be extremely popular what Russia represents is not a failure of democracy it's really a failure of a modern state because he's running a kleptocracy meaning the regime is a group of insiders who exploit their clinical position for their own self enrichment there's a very amusing film that you can watch on YouTube by Alexei Navalny this anti-corruption campaigner about Prime Minister Medvedev go ahead and Google it on on YouTube that's already gotten like 20 million views it's one of the reasons that there are all these anti-corruption demonstrations by young Russians a couple of weeks ago in 99 Russian cities it's unbelievable it's unbelievable the amount of wealth that has been sucked out of the system by the elites in that system and I think that that is one of the you know the the biggest issues is this decline in the quality of government as a result of just gross political corruption and unfortunately you know that's I think one of the precedents that that our current president in the United States is is setting in terms of his personal wealth and his unwillingness to disengage his personal family interests from that of his position as as a public official the final issue I will leave you with is is the question of technological change in Silicon Valley where I live it's very common to see self-driving cars out on the street and in the United States there are about three and a half million truck drivers and probably a comparable number of taxi and limousine drivers and then there are all the people that depend on those drivers for their livelihoods people that run restaurants and truck stops and gas stations and so forth so we are going to have self-driving cars a much sooner than anyone realizes the technology I'm told by people in that industry is actually already there the main problem is getting the regulator's and consumers to recognize that these are actually safer than human drivers so what's going to happen to the livelihoods of all of those people who drive vehicles for a living once self-driving cars become ubiquitous what are they going to do what other forms of employment are they going to find I think that that technological challenge is the thing that is going to confront every politician in every country as we go forward and unfortunately I have not heard very good solutions being put forward by policy experts on how to solve this problem the usual answer given by economists is retraining you have to educate people push them into higher skill categories and obviously that's something that every country needs to do but there's a limit to how many jobs you can create you cannot take a 55 year old truck driver and retrain them as a computer program or a graphics designer or you know a political commentator or whatever it's it's simply you know I think beyond the capacity of our educational systems and as long as that's the case I think a lot of the economic discontent that's driving this surge of populism is going to be a factor in all of our countries and that I think is kind of the central challenge that we are all going to have to confront if we are going to maintain this liberal international order that I think overall has been of great benefit to all of us so with that I'll stop talking and thank you thank you very much for your attention [Applause] you it's not unprecedented in the 1920s you had both a left wing populism in the form of all of the communist parties that were organizing all over the world in industrialized countries and then you have the right-wing nationalist parties as well the fact that it's there's a precedent for it is not very comforting because of course what happened in the 1920s is that either the left wing or the right wing populist parties came to power in Germany and Italy and Russia and so forth and then started a second world war so I think that you know it shows the dangers and there I think I'm actually not that pessimistic because I don't think that we're in a situation where you're likely to get a actual conflict between you know any of these groups what you could get I think is more what happened in the 30s in the economy which is a deterioration of the liberal order and therefore economic protectionism that sets off trade wars and you know declining output on the part of people now down the road that may lead to more extreme political outcomes but you know I don't think we're anywhere close to that so yes there was a precedent and it's not a good one I think you're right that there was populism what I was trying to argue was that this is actually a more familiar kind of left wing populism and that in in Asia most of the populist movements have been left wing which you have not seen you know so the the sunflower movement well I guess it was a national identity movement in in many respects but it was not an intolerant kind of aggressive nationalism of the sort that you see in Europe you know in places like the National Front in France or you know some of these other right-wing parties the left-wing movements you know maintained an important component of liberalism because they actually want to maintain open societies they're not going to attack the media they're not going to try to create authoritarian political structures and in general the reason I don't think it's that devastating is that Taiwan is a pretty good democracy they also you have popular mobilization it's true that it led to the downfall of a government but then you have an election and you get a new government and that's the way a democratic system is supposed to work and so it's not I you know there are many definitions of populism but I think that the the ones that that apply the most to the new movements that we're seeing have to do with a couple of features so one is a pervasive anti elitism you know that blames the entire system I don't think the sunflower movement wanted to destroy Taiwan's democratic system you know they simply wanted to change the administration and the other thing about populist movements is a cult of personality that most of these movements are led by individuals who like Donald Trump say I alone can solve this problem and again that movement didn't really have that kind of leadership so I think it still is you know not I wouldn't put it in the same category as what's been going on in other parts of the world so that's I think a really key question and I think that one of the things that has to happen is the elites themselves have to understand that they have to fix some of the basic problems that they created that are driving the populism so for example in Europe I think they need to solve this question of the external borders which in practical terms means that the Germans have to basically provide the money and the resources to Greece and Italy to help them secure that southern border they're not doing that right now the Germans have really not stepped up to it I actually think the Germans also I have to ease up on their demand for austerity on the part of the Greeks because there's just no way that Greece is ever going to repay the you know the debt that it has in the United States I think that actually we have a lot of illegal immigration so there's a certain you know Donald Trump is right that we don't do very much to enforce our existing laws I think we can enforce them in a different way than he's choosing to do it through employer sanctions but that's something that the American political system has not really stepped up to yet so I think there are many specific policy changes that will correct some of the underlying problems that are driving the populism however as I said at the end of the talk since so many of the job losses are being created by technological advance I don't know that you can fundamentally ease the you know the the threat the economic threat that technology is is posing which is why I think you're going to have this populism problem you know for some time the question of multiculturalism is very complicated I'm actually writing a book on this subject now so maybe you should invite me back to Taiwan and we often talk about this every society has to have a common culture meaning that there have to be these unwritten rules by which people communicate and cooperate and believe in a common legitimacy of their social system but that does not have to be linked to a specific ethnic group or race or religion and so I think the the task for a modern democratic society is to create a common set of rules cultural rules that will permit de facto diversity in their citizens now I actually think that the United States does a pretty good job at this it's pretty good at assimilating people that are not quite European descendants of white Europeans into its society making them feel like they're full Americans and you know making use of their talents and so forth Silicon Valley is a great case of this there are forms of multiculturalism that are very destructive that you know where you really cannot run a society so for example the worry in Europe now is that you've got these extremist Muslim communities that really do not accept the basic cultural tenets of a liberal society particularly with regard to women they don't accept you know female equality and therefore will never really become fully assimilated into the cultural norms of that society and that's a very serious problem where I don't think you can [Music] you know whether you can actually assimilate that kind of population I think is one of the big challenges that Europe is facing right now so you need some degree of cultural uniformity but it has to be one that accommodates the de facto diversity of actual modern countries in cars issue the only solution really that the US government could take other than regulating it and making sure it's safe which is what they're doing now is to try to ban it but they're not going to do that how can you ban self-driving cars and as a result you're really not going to stop the threat to low-skilled jobs that the self-driving car represents even if a politician wanted to ban a self-driving car you know I don't see how they're going to do it because the technology is going to be developed in one place or another if not in the United States then you know in China or Japan or maybe here in Taiwan and it's going to go ahead you know I think regardless so that's what makes the problem a really difficult one because I don't think you can ultimately put the brakes on this kind of technology so the ability to sue the government I think is actually an important part of the rule of law so all we're talking about is how easy is it and for how many conditions and who has the standing to do it in my state of California we have about 40 million residents any one of us can sue any infrastructure project for any reason it's completely crazy it's it's done under an environmental law but you don't have to have an environmental reason in your lawsuit so somebody's building you know a highway overpass that's blocking your view of some nice you know scenery and you can sue the government to stop that from being built and this is crazy I think and it's something that you could fix all you have to do is change the law of standing about who has the right to launch a lawsuit and restrict it to people that are doing it for an environmental purpose they have to be an established environmental group there has to be a statute of limitations on when you can launch the suit so on and so forth other democratic countries do not have they don't make it as easy to sue as the United States does India is even worse you know India the Supreme Court in India has a backlog of about 60,000 cases that they've not heard in India in general you don't even have to sue I mean the court system is so backlogged that the threat of a suit is usually sufficient to get the other party to negotiate with you and you know make what every concession is necessary to avoid having to go into this awful court system so judicial reform in that sense to make these legal systems more efficient and to reduce the recourse to litigation I think is a you know is something that my country can certainly you know use that's actually a very important topic that I didn't address in my talk but maybe I can say something about it now when the internet started in the 1990s everybody myself included were very optimistic that this would be very good for democracy because information is power and if you give more people access to information it's going to empower them to participate and defend their rights and I think that that part has proven to be true so you're right that many of these social movements have been vastly improved and helped by the existence of social media but I think what we've seen in the last year with the Russian effort to interfere in the American election is a dark side of the internet that the Internet has removed all of the gatekeepers you know fact checkers and editors and people that were responsible for guaranteeing a certain level of quality of information and as a result it's very easy to disseminate false information and so we saw a lot of that going on in the American election where conspiracy theories and just outright false factual information was being passed around and then it would become viral and everybody would see the same you know accusations you know there's this famous case where Hillary Clinton was accused of running a pedophile ring out of a restaurant in you know in Washington and some guy actually took an automatic weapon and went to the restaurant looking for you know for these pedophiles and this sort of thing so we've now got this really big problem of you know so-called fake news and countries like Russia have gotten very good at using this to weaken people's belief in the legitimacy of their own governments and institutions they did it in the United States they're doing it now in France and in Germany and in other European democracies we don't have a solution to this at the moment I think that some countries like Germany can try to regulate this because there's still enough of the social consensus behind the government to do this in the United States that's impossible Donald Trump is one of the biggest creators of fake news and so he has no interest in trying to regulate it so I think that if there's any regulation it's going to have to be on the part of the social media companies like Twitter and Facebook you know to do it you know themselves but whether they're willing to do it is you know another question so I think we it's um it's a difficult policy problem and we've only begun to address it let me start with the second one Taiwan would be very foolish to take seriously an overture like the one that Donald Trump made you know suggesting that you know maybe the one China policy will be discarded I think that this was a pure tactical calculation on his part and essentially he was thinking to himself well maybe I can hold the one China policy hostage in order to get better terms from China in some future negotiation which means that he's ready to discard Taiwan at the first instance if China offers him a better deal so from Taiwan standpoint I think you'd be very foolish to put any trust in you know in him so on the bigger question of what he's going to do it doesn't look like he's going to do much because I think that first of all he surrounded himself with all of these advisers that I think understand pretty well the nature of global supply chains and how difficult it is to really undo NAFTA or WTO rules or any of these things and so I think he's probably you know my guess would be that he will try for a few symbolic victories so in their spec there's some specific areas so for example he's wrong that China is is right now holding down its currency they've been doing the opposite but they did this in the past and they've been dumping steel you know one of his big advisors is the CEO of New Court this mini-mill a steel producer and it's not just Donald Trump I mean almost every European country thinks that the Chinese are dumping steel on the international market so there are specific areas where he could get very tough with China to get a very specific concession that would not involve rewriting the entire trade regime but could actually you know bring some benefits my hope is that that's what he'll end up doing and I think that his you know his advisers are probably going to push him in that direction you well your last comment suggests that actually the nation-state is not going to be the basic unit that social media is going to disintegrate the nation-state into you know smaller groups and to some extent that's happened already so in the United States compared to when I was a child there is much less of a sense of national purpose of common citizenship you know this is partly what I was referring to with the rise of polarization and partisanship that you know if you live in rural Alabama or Louisiana it's like you're in a completely different country from San Francisco or New York or Chicago and the social media actually permits even more specialized you know forms of the community that have a kind of atomizing you know impact on what people hold in common however I still think that nations are going to be very important if only because of language you know that nations are held together as linguistic communities I think that it's very hard to transcend some of those boundaries and really feel a lot in common with people with whom you don't share a common language I think that there's still mass media despite the rise of social media that tends to give people living in the same country as you know a certain common sense of identity and I think because power resides it still it at a national level I don't think that that's going to disappear quite so easily although you are going to have these breakaway movements like Catalonia or Scotland or you know these other regional kinds of groupings with regard to the question of how liberal is our liberal order you know it all depends on compared to what it's much more liberal than the kind of system that existed in the 1930s it's more liberal than the system that existed in the 1970s I mean the barriers to the movement of capital to you know level average level of Carus all of these things have come down you know very very dramatically in that period and for a thirty-year period world trade was growing at a substantially faster rate than global GDP indicating the cross-border you know transactions were increasing you know a you know a very rapid rate all of that's slowed now and so now I actually think that the the rate of the growth growth of trade is at equal to or even below you know GDP growth so we've obviously come to an end of that period so but things are without question more liberal than they were 30 40 years ago ever since Donald came President of the United States a lot of people that were worried about gridlock and divided government are all of a sudden really in favor of checks and balances because they want to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't do anything damaging and I think that that's you know so that's obviously a real worry and I think I'm glad that we've got checks and balances but it really is a matter of degree and we can actually eliminate a number of checks so let me give you a very concrete example which is the filibuster for most of the twenty it only took a bare majority in Congress to get a bill passed for the last 15 years or so the filibuster has come into play for routine legislation meaning you had to have 60 votes in the Senate to get anything passed meaning that a 40% minority was sufficient to veto any measure and as a result when Obama was president there's something like 60 federal judges and another 60 ambassadors that were being held up in the Senate because they could not get confirmed I don't think that's a good situation they actually exercise the so-called nuclear option because the Democrats wanted to block Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court as payback to the Republicans I think that was a terrible idea and the Republicans then voted to get rid of the filibuster I'm in favor of that you know I think that Donald Trump ought to be he was elected legitimately he ought to be able to appoint with you know consent of the Senate a Supreme Court justice you know of his of his choosing just like Obama should have been allowed to do the same thing and so I think that you can reduce some of these unnecessary checks while maintaining you know the biggest and most one's free media independent court system you can have an independent court system that does not allow 40 million residents of California to sue the government I mean that's just you know there's there's something in between those extremes that I think would lead to better outcomes for our political system I don't put a lot behind a lot of these conspiracy theories that this was all staged as an excuse to attack Syria I think that you know Assad has got a pretty bad track record and I think it's very likely that he's responsible for that I think the you know Trump's response yeah there was a political element in it because he wanted to show he's not Obama and he did that you know pretty effectively whether it was in the end going to be an effective policy I have my doubts but I really don't think that you had to invent you know this attack simply as an excuse to attack Syria well it's it's neither a threat nor an advantage I it but it's a reality that every generation has a fundamental set of experiences that then shape the way that they look at reality you know for the rest of their lives and I think that that's that can be good and it can be bad in China today the generation that grew up under the Cultural Revolution I think we're so they were so you know tormented by that experience that they were the ones that then facilitated the opening up of China under dung shopping and the whole kind of set of liberalizing reforms because they didn't want to have to live through the Cultural Revolution again they didn't want to see a single leader get that much power now what's happening I think in China is you have a whole generation that's grown up after the Cultural Revolution they didn't experience that and in a certain sense because they weren't taught by their parents generation about the realities of the Cultural Revolution they can even feel nostalgic for the days when there was more equality and you didn't have all these rich you know people corruption you know so on and so forth and that's a case where actually I think generational change has had a kind of negative effect because the younger generation are more susceptible to you know a strongman leader you know doing the things that Mao Zedong did whereas their parents generation were kind of immunized from that because of their personal experiences sometimes it can be the opposite sometimes people will hold on to old beliefs that are really not very functional and but you have to literally wait for them to die off before you can get real social change so I think it works in both ways but it's absolutely the case that generational change is important when I was writing my book on bio I'm one of the few people that actually is not in favor of life extension I actually think that there's a good reason why you know in human evolution you have generational turnover because you wouldn't have social adaptation if you didn't have generational turnover so I'm all in favor of you know well I won't go there okay yeah so so let me clarify what I said the problem is not not just the political system because we had pretty much the same checks and balances in this political system since the beginning of the United States for the last 250 years the problem is when you combine our political system with extreme polarization and very well-organized interest groups which is something new for most of the 20th century neither of those conditions existed so when you take polarization interest groups and a system a very extensive checks and balances that's when you get political dysfunction now the problem is that in terms of polarization I have no idea what you do about that you know that's driven by the media driven by technology it's driven by the autonomous development of ideas I have no idea why the Republican Party has been taken over by these key party fanatics I don't know what to do about it you can't do anything about it in terms of public policy so that part of it you can't fix what you can fix or things like getting rid of the filibuster that's not going to solve our problem but it will make things a little bit easier at the margin but I don't pretend that that's going to be a solution to the larger problem of dysfunction in the American system that is going to have to await a kind of social transformation where Americans begin agreeing with each other you know to a greater extent than they do now so Donald Trump prides himself as a deal maker so I think that that's why people think that he may be willing to contemplate that kind of a trade I think however that that's where the American system is going to prevent him from doing it because Taiwan has a lot of support in the US Congress and I think members of his own party are going to be the first people to object to some kind of a deal at Taiwan's expense so I actually I wouldn't worry about that

Channel: Stanford CDDRL

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Id: scAzukYHJjY

Length: 77min 47sec (4667 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017