 Gary Good morning. Welcome to the Scottish Parliament. I am Jen Stout. I am a journalist, and I'd like to welcome you all to the 2023 Festival of Politics. This year celebrates the festival's 19th year of provoking inspiring and informing people of all ages, and from every walk of life to engage in three days of spirited debate, I really look forward to this discussion. We've got a really good panel, and hearing everyone's thoughts and views, it's important that everyone is given the opportunity to contribute felly cyf pag nesaf rwy'n meddwl hynny, ac rwy'n meddwl y cwylwyd yn unrhyw gael iawn rhagorol a'r cyfan hynny. Adodd wedi'u wneud yn gorfod i wedi'i gydag i chi gafodd ar hyn o'r ffordd. Fydda'r hoffi'r berthynat yn cyfrannu i'r Gwylwyr yn gyfrannu arnau. Yn ymlaen, iddi gan gweithio'r cyn travelled yn gwestiwn i'r adrodd. Ond, atoddi'r cyfren i'r adrodd ar y ceisio'r adrodd, wedi'u cael ei ddim yncirnyaeth Rwyf i'r adrodd, ac mae'r fath yw'r cyflwyngau ar y channel ysgolwyr sgolwyr. Mae'n fydda i'r fath o'r fath o Professor Tony Hastrup, Professor Peter Jackson ac Dr Mateo Peter. Professor Tony Hastrup yw Professor o Poliadau Llywodraethu ac o'r Unedig ddechrau, a'r ddiweddol a'r ddechrau i ddweud o ddweud o poliadau global, mewn ddechrau'n ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud. Professor Peter Jackson yw'r ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o ddweud o Glasgow. Dr Mateo Peter is a lecturer in international relations at the University of St Andrews where she directs the Centre for Global Law and Governance, and she serves on the Management Committee of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. So, there will be an opportunity, as I said, for members of the audience to put questions and views to the panel throughout the event, but I will start off by asking a few questions to each of our panellists. I'll start with you, Peter. How would you describe the West's influence on international politics today? Do you think we're seeing a decline in that influence? Has that narrative of decline actually been around longer than we might think? Oh, thank you. There are a couple of questions there, a couple of big ones. I'll try and answer them briefly. The answer to the first question, I think, would have to be yes. The West, if we want to think of the West as Western liberal democracies, enjoyed a period of unparallel dominance in global affairs from the end of the Cold War of 1990 until quite recently. But I think quite naturally, there has been an emergence of other civilizations, partly driven by the fact that, say in 1980, 40% of the world's population lived in extreme poverty. Now it's about 8%, and as more populations become more technologically proficient and adopt in an era of increasing globalization, adopt new technologies, there will be, I suppose, inevitably greater participation in global life and culture on an international scale, and I think that's inevitable. What I think is probably very notable is that during the Cold War, for example, the West had a sustained campaign of propaganda, cultural, some people might call it cultural imperialism, but their policy was more about trying to make sure that the advantages of liberal democratic ways of life were broadcast across the world. With the end of the Cold War, that has retreated, and we see, for example, in places like Africa, China achieving a kind of almost a dominant position in the public sphere in shaping public attitudes in propaganda. And at the moment, we see them broadcasting more or less a pro-Russian line over the war in Ukraine, and I think that's strange. Now when declineism is linked to decadence or the kind of moral societal decline, that's a different question, and it's been around a very long time. It goes back in, I suppose, democratic Western culture to the early 1800s and the end of the French Revolution, particularly in France, and it's been a long tradition in France where one way to make political headway is to denounce the state of society and say that it's in decline, that it's falling into decadence and the usual frame of comparison is the Roman Empire, and we've seen this ever since, we see it now, practiced on the left and the right, but at the moment more, I think, on the right. And this tradition of the decline of the West is, after the First World War, especially there was a kind of a surge in publications, probably not surprisingly given the devastation of that war, predicting the decline of the West. And one of the most famous was by a man named Oswald Spangler, who was a German centrist centre, perhaps centre right, but not really, who argued that civilizations rise and fall, and this is a common trope. Twinby Arnold Twinby argued this as well, that every civilization reaches its peak and then falls into decadence and decline and eventually collapses or disintegrates. And Spangler argued that civilizations reach a certain point where they become complacent and comfortable and give way to introspection and self-reflection. And this is the beginning of their decline, and he argued that Western European liberal civilization, around about, this is 1921 he argued this, around about 2000 would reach a period of almost emergency, which he called caesarism, where strong men would emerge and overthrow the constitutions of their states and embark on wars of conquest as a way of, I suppose, alleviating or detracting attention away from the decline of their society and their civilization. Which is in a way quite interesting, I don't agree with it, but we do see some caesarism around about today and I imagine that some adherents of Spangler might argue that this proves that he was right. Did you give an example? Well, you know, some might argue that the war in Iraq was kind of pointless for many people, pointless invasion and overthrow of a country on a spurious pretext marked the beginning of a period where of escalating kind of, of escalating violence and the retreat of some of the international norms against state to state violence, and we're seeing, I think, some of that emanating from the Kremlin today, I would argue, this idea that it's legitimate to expand your frontiers and to launch wars on sovereign states. I think the beginning of that in our era was Iraq, where that norm was transgressed by both Britain and the United States and some of the other allies that went into Iraq with them. I think the idea of international norms, international orders, is quite central to this whole question. And I know, Mateo, you work a lot in conflict management and how that's changing, which is really interesting. We keep coming back to the war in Ukraine, but in relation to other conflicts as well. I mean, in shaping the international order, how is that international order changing and what's the role of the US, for instance, of US hegemony? Yeah, so one of the things that to me I think it's a very central question, the big question that we're dealing with, but also sort of to the role of the US or sort of part of Western powers is how are these powers actually perceived in a lot of these conflicts. And I think for a while there has been this calmness, sort of the normative transformation that we're talking about, sort of the idea of liberal peace-building and a lot of post-conflict societies. It just hasn't delivered in a lot of these contexts, right? And so because of that in a lot of the environments that I work in, I work primarily in sort of the African context, is the US or the West in general and quite often by association or also the United Nations. Because we're part of this project. I'm not often conceived of as the legitimate actor to provide sort of solutions. Part of that has to do just with the credibility of the past projects. Part of this has to do sort of, and I'm thinking of context such as Mali or sort of broader Western Africa where France is essentially seen as an imperial power entering these contexts. So for a while, the West, I'm going to use very big quotation marks on it, was kind of seen as the only option in a lot of these contexts. And so countries would reach out to these powers to sort of align because they were dealing with essentially serious internal struggles. But now when there are options, they're also kind of in a situation where we either have our own solutions, we're going to band up with sort of coalitions of neighbouring countries in a lot of the conflicts in Western Africa. The Wagner Group is now the security provider. We're not saying that it's delivering, but it is an alternative to it. And it is interesting. So a lot of the time sort of in the media, when we follow the things, you will see the pictures of the Wagner Group entering these spaces. And there's obviously, from our perspective, there's a concern, and probably a lot of people do so. But you have to also think about it. There's a concern about the French involvement in these things. And there, in a lot of spaces, they're kind of like, we're tired of the West just preaching, but not delivering. And so we're open to new solutions in a lot of these conflicts as well, which is kind of a fundamental sort of challenge to the order, which is kind of, for the first 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the order was essentially dictated. It sued at Western powers because it was dictated by the West. And it had kind of this transformative dimension involved in it, sort of around conflict resolution, peace building, sort of state building. We're going to build these states. Just think of Afghanistan project. But when that project doesn't deliver, alternatives emerge. And so that is now kind of the crux, I think, of the challenge that we're seeing with a lot of the states fragmenting even further. Tony, can I ask you within this conversation, what's the role of globalisation? How can we, is that a useful way to look at this? For not useful because it is a fundamental part of the discussion, so you can't really remove it. I think to sort of echo what has been said, it is certainly the case that I think even the discussions around a decline in of itself, I think it should be questioned. There's that assumption. There are certain assumptions inherent in this idea of the decline of the West that is often problematic because actually the majority world is not constitutive of the countries we assume to be the West. And also I think that so far a lot of what we've seen and we see a lot in the discourse around globalisation is a reinforcing of certain narratives that we tell about ourselves that is not consistent with what we actually practice. And so we see it in the delivery of the distribution of wealth globally, for example. And here we can actually see commonalities within countries, between within countries and external to countries. So it might be the case that globally poverty has reduced, but where is the wealth actually? So you see a fundamental gap increasing every day within so-called Western countries, but also between Western countries and global South countries. For example, this morning the World Bank wrote a letter to Uganda saying that because it's recently passed a very draconian anti-human rights, anti-LGBT law, it's going to withdraw all support from the World Bank. Support has not been withdrawn from the United States in Florida, for example. So we are in a state where we do question who has actually gained from globalisation, but even much more so than that. And I think that again goes back to the question of what is the West, what do we mean when we say decline? Who determines the rules of what globalisation is? And I think that becomes then fundamental to sort of the recurrent crisis that we see in both within countries and between them. Let's talk about the war in Ukraine inevitably. I mean, there's a lot of discussion about what the Western response has been and how that response has differed to other parts of the world. But even within the Western response, and it makes the term in the West seem not useful at that point because there's been a lot of variation, say, between Germany and Lithuania, for instance. What does that tell us about this question? Well, I think that the war in Ukraine, one of the most striking aspects of that conflict, was that I think it was launched from the Kremlin. It's hard to know exactly what was in the mind of the Russian leadership and especially Vladimir Putin. But I think it was launched with the expectation that it would be a quick conflict and that the response of the West and in particular NATO would be divided and slow and ineffectual. And of course neither has come true and on the surface it looks as if the war in Ukraine has had a galvanising effect on the North Atlantic Alliance. And that, you know, probably Russia is in a much worse position and is less secure whereas most of the West might be more secure. However, if the war drags on, the worry must be that fissures will begin to appear in NATO and in particular over the question of, you know, we see now a discourse in the United States which predates the Ukraine war that the United States can't be involved in forever wars. And it's not fighting in Ukraine but it's spending a lot of money to keep the war in Ukraine going. And my sense is that if the war drags on then these discourses become stronger and in particular if a certain red headed Republican politician manages to get back in the White House. You could see the whole facade of the West come tumbling down and discussion of Western decline and decadence and potential even dissolution becoming much more prevalent and to the encouragement of some of the actors in the world that are not keen on a global order. To be fair, the rules for which were written by the West, but a global order where great powers can't do whatever they want. I hope that answers your question, Jen. Yeah, to an extent I think. Yeah, maybe come back to it. I think it didn't. No, we'll come back to it. Yeah, I mean the idea of the galvanizing effect being on the surface whereas underneath is quite a lot of discontent is really interesting. I mean there's a lot of frustration in Ukraine that I hear about the lackluster response in ammunition and supporting Ukraine. Do you think that's reasonable? Well, I understand the Ukrainian position entirely. Their view is that they are on the front line fighting for rules based international order sponsored by the West, but that Western nations are have been slow to provide them with the tools with which to fight. In opposition, for example, to the United States support of Great Britain and its allies during the Second World War. On the other hand, the Ukrainians have received many billions of dollars worth of material aid and without any real strings attached at least on the surface. And so I think you can see both sides of this argument, you know. And there are countries like France, for example, who have actually provided quite a lot of military assistance but have kept it quiet because they hope to play a role in the diplomacy of peacemaking if the fighting ever stops. So there is a, I would say that there's a lot of disagreement underneath the surface about the best solution. And because Western societies are open and they allow discontent, you see voices raised, for example, in the US Congress against support for Ukraine. Less so in Great Britain, although the voices are there, they're just not in official circles. And this is something to keep in mind as well. One of the prices for having an open, tolerant society, the sense that we are open and tolerant. There's always limits to society's tolerance. You have to accept that there's going to be this level of dissent and discord underneath the surface. You're talking about countries positioning themselves as the peacemakers. And Mateo, we were talking about the fact that perhaps it's not very well known, but increasingly it's not Switzerland, for instance, that's coming in as the negotiator. Like the Ukrainian peace talks recently have been in Jedda. So the interesting thing, and I think Ukraine which just hits the news much more, and so all the people will follow this, is that in a lot of contemporary countries, and that goes back to my earlier comments and the threat that is coming out of it, is that we're kind of seeing decentralisation or the multiplicity that's rather worth that we keep talking about in a lot of the spheres. And so in Ukraine, for example, we're not saying that we're anywhere close to a comprehensive peace agreement or peace deal, but the interesting initiatives and the initiatives that are being entertained by the parties involved are actually not coming from the west, which is a bit of an unusual situation considering how initially, immediately after the end of the Cold War, most of the initiative, the usual mediator might have been Norway or Switzerland or some Finnish institute coming into a space, working with the parties, sort of designing a peace process. Right now the only successful ceasefire, it was a grain deal, sort of the only partial grain deal deal in Ukraine has been broken by Turkey. Turkey with the help of the UN, because the UN needs to be at the table for the legitimacy broader legitimacy, but when that deal broke down in 2022, it was the Turkey's shadow diplomacy that actually saw it. So that deal is now broken, but it kind of shows that the initiatives that are coming into even a conflict that is as heated and as important for Europe, for the broader west, are coming from China, from India, from Brazil. There was just a massive African delegation travelling between Kiev and Russia headed by the South African president. And these were the countries that initially we were in the west unhappy with because they didn't condemn Russia. They don't hope going into the thing, but they're now emerging as sort of parties that can kind of slow the debate, pause the debate a tiny bit and actually create a bit of a space in them. And Dan was the space that was previously occupied by the so-called impartial actors which tended to come from the west. Right? And so it's an interesting dynamic in this. And so obviously we're seeing much more of that in Ukraine in the news, but what we were just chatting before is this is a trend that is happening for example now in Sudan, in Sudan's conflict. 20 years ago, 15 years ago, at the height of the Darfur crisis, the proposal was tabled by the so-called Troy Council that was UK, United States and Norway at the time and they were leading the negotiations alongside the regional partners. And now this is being led by Saudi Arabia. Right? So the talks are hosted by Saudi Arabia with the alliance of the US. Or if you think about the Iran-Saudi Arabia thawing of relations, that was not an agreement procured. United States can't act as a security guarantor in that context. China is now acting as a security guarantor. I think this is where we're seeing a rebalancing. But it's also a rebalancing that we can't just kind of with one sort of white sweep say, this is the kind of the west. I think it's a diversification in a lot of senses because the norms themselves might not be changing as much as we think. No, they are. OK. Yeah, a move to multi polarity as we've said. Tony, not just the Ukraine war, having huge repercussions but also these big challenges we've had like COVID and climate change. What do you think the repercussions of these have been in the international order as well? I think actually those are two cases where you really see how power plays out in the international system and again speaks to this idea of what exactly is the west and what is the west contributing to our 21st century. So if you look at when COVID happened, there was a massive rush to produce a vaccine and I think I can say for all of us that we're quite pleased about that. But one of the questions that came up was, well, you know, we were able to find a vaccine in a year and a half and yet we still haven't found one for say malaria, for example. All those diseases that does affect a lot more people, but mostly people who are not in the so-called west. But all well and good, now COVID's happened, we have a vaccine so we know that it's actually possible. And those who've sort of discovered vaccines, it's now time to share. Well, there wasn't a lot of sharing going on. You had situations where vaccines were produced in non-western countries, in India, in Russia, in China, in South Africa. Whether produced in South Africa, they were exported to the west before they were given to South Africans where they were produced in China or Russia. They weren't accepted as valid vaccines. So that, you know, really highlights some of the divisions and some of this sort of critique of this so-called west. So in a way, I think things like COVID challenge or sort of the responses to COVID challenge this idea of decline in a typical colloquial sense. That actually forces us to rethink what is so fantastic about the incline of the so-called west, particularly in the aftermath of the Cold War. Similarly with climate change, the most impacted around climate emergency are people in the global south. And we see the material consequences of that. When we think about places like Somalia, Sudan, a lot of the conflict is being driven by the impacts of climate emergencies. And yet, when you have sexual states, John Kerry say things like, well, the United States is categorically not going to pay reparations, even though it has some of the highest emissions, it's not going to pay reparations. It's very clear about that. It's in effect defining the boundaries of what it is that they will do when it comes to climate emergencies. In this country, we are rolling back on some of the promises that we've made about tackling the climate emergency because it just doesn't work for us right now. And yet, we know, and we go to other countries and say, well, you have to do this. These are, you know, these are the conditions to which we're going to give you money. So, of course, alternatives have been sought. Now, I think it's really important that when alternatives have been sought, we can't think of it in a binary fashion, that, you know, it's either the West or a certain rest, China, Russia and the others. And what that means is it means that, you know, Africa is now pro-Russia, which is kind of the narrative that has come along with this one that is in parallel with the decline of the West. But rather, I would suggest that, well, actually, the rest of the world is finally trying to choose for themselves precisely because they have felt the effect of what vaccine apartheid looks like, precisely because they felt the effect of what it means when the climate emergency is not being restricted. You know, even now, you have in the United Kingdom, the United States, they are telling oil-producing countries in the global south that, you know, they really need to curb their reliance on fossil fuels. But what did we do last week? I think it's really important, you know, that when we are asking the question around the decline of the West, we really need to question, you know, what is the quality of that thing that we call the West, even when we can't quite agree on its boundaries? I mean, a lot of the examples you've given there are kind of peeling away to expose some quite rank hypocrisy, which has, you know, been going on for a very long time. Do you think, in a sense, is that sort of the West reaping what they've sown in terms of people moving away, perhaps turning to, as you say, pro-Russia narratives? Yeah, well, I mean, I think, again, I would say it's not necessarily pro-Russia narratives, they just happen to be narratives that perhaps align with what Russia wants in the same way that we've had historically narratives that align with what the West wants. So I think about countries like Chad. For years and years and years, Chad lived under an authoritarian government. Most recently, it's been one of the countries that has also experienced a coup. But this authoritarian government could only exist because France wanted it to exist, right? And who was impacted by the Chadians, not people in Paris? I wouldn't necessarily, I wouldn't see it as ripping back what you saw as in its revenge. I think it's just as we here have alternatives every five years, we choose alternatives. I think there is finally a space that is being caused by different crises like COVID, like climate change, like the financial crisis actually here globally, that is allowing for those alternatives to come more to the four and for people to select those, even if the end point isn't that life would be all of a sudden better. After all, life hasn't necessarily been better all these years anyway. Peter, what do you think? I think I'd push back on some of that, Tony, because the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, which poured billions of dollars in investment into Africa, long predated the COVID pandemic, what, 19 pandemic, and the building up of infrastructure and the advance of loans has come at a price, just like Western, it's less, I suppose, overtly exploitative and extractive as Western colonialism was, but it's still, and there are, I mean, the Chinese, the Chinese are investing in communications infrastructure, which is actually propagating a defence of Russian, a Russian invasion of Ukraine across Africa, it's happening, and the West isn't countering it. I agreed with you when it came to the vaccine hypocrisy, and if not hypocrisy, certainly vaccine apartheid, but the one advantage I suppose is that the most effective vaccines were developed in Western liberal democracies. The Russian vaccine and the Chinese vaccine, I mean, scientifically were proven to be much less effective than any of the major vaccines developed in the West. So I'm not saying three chairs for the West, I'm saying we need a balanced narrative. That the West isn't just this force of corruption and exploitation, and it's been that in the past, certainly, and we're living in a city that was one of the major cities of the British Empire, and there's a long legacy of that as an historian, but I would say that the West has something to offer the world, and I don't know that countries in Africa are going to get a better deal in the long term from the Belt and Road and the Chinese. That's probably what I would argue. Okay, I'm laughing because strangely enough, I was the recipient of both the Sputnik vaccine when I was living in Russia and the Western vaccine, the guinea pig of the two. Yeah, it still doesn't get COVID, so maybe it was fine. Mateo, any thoughts on that? Well, yeah, perhaps to sort of pick up on sort of, I think my argument in this debated debate would not be that necessarily what alternatives are offering, because I will often be accused that I'm all of a sudden a supporter of China and sort of things by exposing the hypocrisy that is coming on from the West, but I think it's not kind of arguing that what is being on offer from alternative sources is necessarily going to lead to better results, but it is an alternative. And if the previous version hasn't delivered, right, countries or communities, it doesn't necessarily have to be countries, we'll reach out for those things as well. One of the things that links to all of these things, environmental issues, COVID and things like that, and that's one of probably the biggest hypocrisies in the West is how we're dealing with refugees that are a result of a lot of these crises, right, of the hypocrisy of the West. Like a lot of the times they're coming from the interventions that were started by the West or at least kind of triggered by the West because of sort of particular policies. Environmental issues that were largely a result of sort of past West policies like we're still by far the biggest polluter, yet now we're preaching, right, but we're not dealing with kind of the consequences of it or the consequences. We're just going to build a very, very quiet wall and stop all the votes, right. And so it is kind of that narrative that, you know, I always say this, people anywhere, they're not stupid, they actually see what's going on and they're able to comprehend complexity in this. It's not that they're, you know, stupid about sort of when a Chinese investment comes in that it's going to come without any conditions, right, or that there's not going to be any payment back in sort of access to the markets or sort of getting other policies in. But they're actually able to choose now. And I think that is what is fundamentally changing and is kind of touching at the core of the identity of the West that we kind of need to deal with is that we actually need to reckon with what we're doing in order to be a better provider of a lot of the things we actually can deliver in a lot of these countries. Mm-hmm. I'm not going to ask you what is the future of the West because it's not helpful. Oh, OK. We'll speak up. Yeah, we will come to audience questions in a minute, so get ready. The future of it, I mean, obviously, as you say, Mattea, those talking about refugees, that's only going to probably increase environmental problems is going to increase. This is all going to be part of what let's think about the next 20 years. And perhaps even further is even the term of the West going to become quickly outdated. Tony, what do you think? Yeah, because I think that it's a false boundary anyway. The things that make up the West was found and built on the backs of the rest of the world. So similarly, if you sort of look at the East, it's not necessarily that useful. But we do use some of these concepts because it's expedient for explanation. So when we talk about the West, I know exactly what you're saying. I think looking to the future, it would be for me, it would be really useful that we start to give, allow agency, the agency of those people who are outside the West. A lot of the debates I hear us having now about when we talk about balance, when we talk about Russia and West in an area that I'm more familiar with, with Africa, is still very reminiscent actually of a lot of the language of the Cold War, despite the fact that we say after the Cold War. And if we sort of think back to the Cold War, the major key threads in that debate was shaped by those two sides, right? So I think it's really in looking to the future, useful to sort of say that, well actually Africans have agency and part of having agencies, having the agency to screw up as well, having the agency to choose. So I would say back to Peter's point, if I use the example of Niger, right, that is the latest coup. In Niger, the Chinese have been somewhat involved, maybe not specifically in Niger, but around that region of Africa. They've invested in infrastructure like trains that are supposed to connect the whole of West Africa, the ECOWAS region. What it is in the ECOWAS region some people might not know actually has freedom of movement. When the EU and other Western countries decided that Niger was a sort of a point of departure for refugees, they intervened there which had an impact on freedom of movement for the region, right? Intervening in how policies are made, intervening in laws within Niger. So this idea that the bad things ended with colonialism and things are a bit better now, I think that it's very useful when we're thinking about a lot of those big questions that we think about the people that actually affect. I think there's a distinction and this is where I think there will be a difference in the future that we will, in order to for change, for positive change to happen, we need to stop focusing so much on the elites that a lot of the language that we have when we're talking about the decline of the West, when we're talking about who has power, when we're talking about what is propaganda focuses very much on the elites. I would agree actually that people are not stupid and if we take that very simple fact for granted, then we will start to question actually those things that we take for granted on the side. I'm not sure we can say people aren't stupid. Well, not anymore stupid than the stupid people we have here, I would say. I just look at and there's an interesting project that combines evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists and one of the things that has long driven concepts for drivers of change amongst evolutionary anthropologists are inequality and resource scarcity and the psychologists added to this that human beings are not good at long term thinking generally because what we're doing, we're on the verge of climate catastrophe and we're talking about the decline of the West when it's potentially the decline of humanity and it doesn't seem to have the urgency that it merits in our politics. We have a government that seems to be rolling back in the UK on, we have one side of the political debate in the United States which is overtly hostile to climate change solutions. Canada where I come from is an energy economy and talks the talk of climate responsibility but is actually an energy economy and so I'm not sure we can say people aren't stupid because we seem to be sleep walking into catastrophe that we know about but we put our heads down and do nothing as a species. Sorry for that rant, that really has little to do with but... Quite depressing also. We are going to come to questions from the audience. There's a roving mic so please hold your hand up and keep it there until the mic gets to you and try to be succinct, thank you. Yes, women here. Thank you. So kind of actually based on that context of impending climate disaster I am really interested in this question of the West understood as like a cultural and economic hegemony if it's in decline and it is arguably at least in part the reason why we are where we are is that a bad thing? Might there be better alternatives? I guess personally I don't like the language of decline but when I think about for example recent changes in say Brazil, Chile, Colombia where we see the impact of the United States in a recline rather than necessarily in decline we might argue that there are some positives to that things like focusing on climate change as a disaster thinking about the sorts of knowledges that inform policy making we might look at that as a positive but I think importantly what this sort of questions allows us to do is reflect on those things that we take for granted and not necessarily throw out the baby with a bath water but really hold on to those things that we consider to be important so for example I think we can still somewhat agree that representative democracy is a good thing that is something that happens a lot in the space that we call the West should it be promoted in the way that it has been in the past? I think that there are serious questions to ask about that but I wouldn't say we throw away some of those things that we've benefited from so the decline or at least the thing we call the decline might not necessarily be a bad thing but I think we need to give space for some recline as well Is it a bad thing? Depends on what aspects of the West we're talking about but I don't know how many of you have ever heard of the World Value Survey have you ever heard of this? It's a really interesting project that was begun out of the University of Michigan in 1980-81 something like that and it was driven by this idea that once people become more secure they will become less, I suppose, more rational attribute more importance to things like education become more individualistic and less collective-minded because they won't have the kind of permanent effects of insecurity working on them constantly and become in a ways more like the West and the world's population has become overall more wealthy in the past 40 years since that survey was started but what we found is people have become more secular generally across the world even in places like Africa and China and where we can measure this but they haven't become more individualistic and haven't become more attracted to kind of liberal principles and liberal representative democracy in fact support for this mode of organizing society has actually decreased across the world and it's a puzzle that I think political scientists social scientists generally are wrestling with at the moment why has this happened and what does it mean about the alternatives on offer because China has an alternative it's a one-party state that gets things done it's authoritarian but it delivers benefits and it offers itself as a model to the rest of the world that's one alternative I'm too ignorant to go beyond that and if I had to choose I would choose I suppose the liberal model because it's what I know and I like to be able to express myself and say I think that the current government in Westminster is a rolling catastrophe but you know China has built I've just read the incredible statistic China has built I think 22 220,000 or 2.2 million kilometres of railway in the past 10 years and Great Britain has actually its rail track capacity has actually decreased because no one wants people to build a railway which is environmentally I think probably we should travel more by rail than in cars but nobody wants in the UK to have a railway built in their backyard therefore it's really hard to do whereas in China the government just builds the railway that's the state does and that's what happens and so there are pluses and minuses and all these different models but it is very interesting that while humanity as a whole has become more secular and less religious it hasn't become more individualistic and more liberal democratic and I don't have the answer to that but I find it very interesting Briefly Mateo, yeah. Just to very briefly jump in so I think it's interesting how this discussion developed that it's kind of a discussion around US versus China most of the world is that so the alternatives that I think especially on environmental issues that I find interesting I don't research environment but I read the news I sort of follow things that are emerging are actually coming out of multilateral initiatives that don't involve the two countries and I think in those cases so I'm a huge proponent and those are going to be my final remarks actually I'm a huge proponent of multilateral institutions I actually think that the institutions are corrupted they have their own problems they're overcrowding institutions but for a very long time they've been essentially if you think about the UN dictated by one agenda they're kind of caught between the global powers but there is space for sort of smaller powers where most of us end up living and we're currently living in a small power is that's the space where the solutions are actually going to emerge so some of the most interesting and sort of forward-looking alternatives are coming from small island states they band up with other countries middle powers or middle small powers and that kind of pushes initiatives forward will that be entirely transformative? probably not in a short run we might run out of time but I think that is where the space for alternative sits not with the US because US has never been a leader on the environmental agenda and not with China so some of the solutions are going to come from those circles but the transformative space is probably coming from within that's really interesting, thank you next question yes at the back so my question is sort of in two parts first of all we've seen over the last 30-40 years since the end of the Cold War sort of the polarisation of politics more and more over time in the traditional western in inverted commas states so I think that in 1997 when Tony Blair became Prime Minister the differences ideologically between him and John Major were not that vast whereas now it sort of feels like over time the two major parties in the UK and in the US are sort of separating further and further ideologically and it's much harder to get any kind of consensus so first of all do you think that this sort of polarisation is part of the reason for the inverted commas decline of the west and secondly do you think that that consensus-based politics is likely to come back or do you think that this sort of polarisation is here to stay in the long run Tony right, I wouldn't agree with you that there's massive polarisation right at least in the UK in Westminster between say our two main parties if you sort of look at where they think they're contributing to policies but of course it's difficult to say because we've had one party in power for 13 years now I think there was an article yesterday in The Guardian by Lesrin Malik where she argued that actually society is not as polarized as we think it is but rather that the political parties exploit some of those differences for whatever purposes it is that they exploit and I mean it's I would say in my own personal experience that's probably the case at the same time I think you know part of what's healthy in a democracy like ours is conflict can be healthy if it's conflict that can transform for a positive gain however what is happening which is being exploited by politicians but also I guess aggravated by the different types of crises that we've gone through right now we're going through a cost of living crisis is that you know you niggle on those tiny things that we disagree on and you make them the big things and I think yes it does contribute to the things that we find are satisfactory about our lives within a democracy but I wouldn't say that those divisions intrinsically at least within the United Kingdom have significantly broadened but perhaps that's why it's time for at least at the UK level thinking about the actual structure of our political system first part of the post is not it just feels weird for the 21st century in a country like ours that's the best way I can put it I think there are ways of getting around those things that are being described as polarization and I think that's where when we have these two parties states where there's one party dominant and there can only be one substantive opposition those divisions feel even bigger than they actually are because now they have to distinguish themselves somehow the only thing I would add to that is probably the role of media and what we actually click on so I think I would agree with Tony and all the research points to this is that societies are actually not as divided when we actually start asking what do you value, what do you think is a fair contribution for somebody to the society what should we do with disabled what should we do with people on sick leave we're actually not as divided but what sells is divisive stories and I think Jen, we can point to your Marvin expert on the media landscape so you should actually come into this as part of the discussion but I think that is kind of the discussion that is important to have and I would stress this with Tony you see us here, we don't agree on things but we can debate them we actually have a conflict between us things on our world views on sort of how we would respond to the things but as long as you can debate them and somebody is going to listen to you for an hour you're now captive audience that is a very different discussion that somebody is trying to sell a newspaper where obviously a scandal or a divisive story is going to get more clicks on it so I'm not an expert on it but it's part of the landscape that creates an image of how divided we are within our societies and also between our societies so I always say this, a story on how China is bad is always going to get more clicks on how a story of how China is contributing to something here so that's a bit of a question of both within and between societies I think when it comes to media the bigger problem is not political polarization but the fact that many people stop believing in facts this is a huge problem for society for democracy, for journalists trying to write stories and have people read them but I will not abuse my position as chair to do this Peter I don't have a lot to add I agree with everything that's been said but still I would say that at some point we have to kind of take a stand and say what do we believe in as a society and liberalism gets a kicking and it deserves it in a lot of ways but that kind of foundation principle of liberalism is each person has inalienable rights and that those rights when it's combined with liberal democracy one of those rights is to participate in the governance of their society and I would stress that throwing this away is or failing to promote it is almost a dereliction of duty if you believe in it and you know the United States is not really the best example of that at the moment and to go back to your question is it that polarisation or for lack of a better word that you see in the United States is this a big factor in the so-called decline of the West or at least it's lack of credibility increasingly I try to allude to this at the beginning but I don't think I did a very good job in that from the outside someone who lives in a society that doesn't value freedom of expression and open debate might look at what's going on in the United States or wherever and say we don't want to live like that and I could understand that in a way but that's one of the prices you pay to live in a society that's open and tolerant you know that the is that you'll have to listen also to intolerant voices and have them be part of the discussion and let people listen and make up their own minds and in the United States I mean it's a fractured society in many ways but and I'm from Canada and so Canadians have this weird relationship to the United States where when we're in Canada at home we're kind of very suspicious and skeptical when we go abroad we tend to find ourselves defending the United States more than that's certainly my experience and a lot of others but it's a very very open society I mean during the Cold War there was an American Communist Party yeah and a fantastic diversity of opinion exists in the United States and that can sometimes lead to things being fractured but it's almost a price worth paying I would argue next question please we've talked to many global events like Saudi Arabia and Iran like Africa investment but however on the position of United Kingdom and Scotland people is that the policy of Washington or the NATO has limited the U.K.'s people in the development of these people so which means the NATO and the United States even maybe cost or lead to the decline of the West thank you I certainly would I'll flip the question of that because what I think I would agree is that a lot of the military expansionism that the West has engaged in is leading to the decline of the West it's contributing to the legitimacy gap that the West has in a lot of the context so we mentioned Iraq we mentioned Afghanistan to an extent but it's also in a lot of the African countries so Tony very nicely mentioned a couple of countries where we don't pay as much attention but as constant security cooperation military trainings are not potentially a full scale invasion of the West that just hasn't delivered for the people and I think the securitisation of a lot of the Western approaches which is accompanied by militarisation is definitely leading to problems to how the West has proceeded outside so I would agree with that huge changes in NATO would you like to add anything? I would agree with that as well I think often when we're talking about NATO and especially expansion East there's this narrative that that in of itself is the cause of the problem which I don't agree with solely on the basis that it might be perceived as a problem by another actor but the newer states of NATO had a right they had the agency to choose to join any international organisation that they wanted to we could argue that the United States took advantage of it or the United Kingdom whatever to then build arsenals and I mean I think militarisation broadly globally has been detrimental and what we see now where you've got more and more conflict where increased militarisation seems almost inevitable it just means that we'll be less and less safe like militarisation does not keep us safe and when you look at the majority of the world we will find that this is the case so even if we think that we need to militarise in the short term investments in alternatives and in alternative peaceable means has to be the priority but I would say that you know the states the newer member states of NATO they were entitled for good or for bad we might not have thought it was a good idea for them that's fine but they have a right to join an international organisation as they were determining their future so I think it's a more nuanced idea of NATO's actual impact that does not of course we know exactly what happened in Libya part of why the west is almost persona non grata as the collective has a lot to do with what happened in Libya because what happened in Libya has had the most significant impact on what is happening in the Sahel today and there's a direct line and anyone in the US State Department Ministry of Defence will tell you that as well so you know this feelings don't just come from anywhere but I think that we need to be able to have nuanced conversations not binary ones around this issue I don't really have a lot to add to that I mean another way to put it would be NATO has had legitimacy when it's been a defensive alliance but when it starts to move into Afghanistan or North Africa it's lost its legitimacy and has I think contributed to the erosion of the international order that we're talking about I think that but I agree that the idea that NATO is responsible for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is nonsensical completely absolute nonsense it seems to still carry a lot of weight with some people and told it frequently it's that kind of realist idea that the world is permanent power balancing and as a great power Russia has the right to control its its sort of frontiers and have a strategic buffer to quote Jeremy Corbyn amongst others between itself and NATO I mean that is a profoundly anti democratic position because maybe the people inhabiting that historic region between Russia and Europe don't want to be a buffer maybe they want to actually make decisions in the way that we're talking about societies in Africa and choose their own political destiny if that's NATO fine I was skeptical about NATO expansion in the 90s and now I have to admit I was wrong I could be wrong now who knows but that's my view there's a lot of people the events of the last year and a half have forced quite a lot of rethinking around these issues around NATO and militarism and so on so Jennifer just made so one of the things that I think it's interesting and so I entirely agree it's not the NATO expansion to it but what I think potentially contributes to a lot of the situation is that a lot of the institutions that were essentially cold war sort of they still exist multilateral organization I'll name too that were intended to be kind of trust building exercises among people countries that don't necessarily agree council of Europe not European Union council of Europe or organization for security cooperation in Europe which is all about promoting common values discussing security cooperation not among the allies not among defensive alliances have just been hollowed out they still exist but neither the west or Russia has been investing a lot in them and so those are the confidence building measures that you can then have if you extend in the lines to the border of essentially somebody that considers you an enemy and so that's kind of the interesting aspect is a lot of these trust building measures have just been kind of wetted out so again a pitch for multilateralism and international organizations start pressuring for support of these institutions not just NATO there was a partnership for peace between Russia and NATO which NATO didn't take seriously at all and the Russians became disillusioned and that was probably for me the moment where Russia's move away from the west became you can trace it to that that moment because it was a joke and the Russians realized it was a joke and excuse me for going back into history but I think it's important that was a moment where relationship between NATO and Russia might have gone in a slightly different direction and it didn't go in the mid 90s another question please yes, there's women here in the yellow jacket I was just wondering where you think the role of the market and global capitalism fits into all this because there are multinational corporations who are making a fortune out of conflict and it's not on their interests to promote democracy so I just wondered it's called the context of all contexts and I think that it's an interesting way to think about it so I'd just like to hear how you factor that into your argument Matthew that's a tough one what did we not handle in this panel I think it's an underlying threat and so I think because of that so I think it was nice because I think it came out from the panel is that we have the shorthands west east or west south we have the shorthands where so we keep talking about states as if China is one state so it is a state but has multiple interests in it and I will say one of the things that and this is basically also like a reflection on sort of a lot of the academic discussions we understand the complexity of our own societies and we kind of go and sort of think about how the market is underpinning how our Tory is this or Labour is this we're supporting what is happening with the media sort of the funding of the media we do understand that from our own society but I think so I'll just put this as a sort of very big comment that does not answer your question in any way because I think it's very complex is I think what we need to do more is understand the complexity of sort of other areas that we tend to just paint of as China or Russia because I think there are kind of multiple interests playing in and we don't tend to understand that in a lot of our analysis and this is a second pitch support area expertise right we have basically supported and I think this goes for media it goes for academia the idea is to have sort of a lot of the generalists people that can speak on any issue but I think a lot of times it's very good to have discussions on sort of area expertise which can tell you a lot more about the political economy that is playing on in a lot of the conflicts Peter, capitalism Oh, yeah I mean I'm afraid I might just be mouthing kind of stating the obvious and mouthing platitudes but I mean it depends what which aspects of the market you're talking about the fact that capital is so mobile now allows for the enrichment of parts of the world that were just almost unreachable you know up until a few decades ago and that is a good thing but the fact that you know big money shapes democratic discourse is a very bad thing and so I'm in general in favor of greater regulation but I'm afraid that that greater regulation might mean that areas of the world that are benefiting from the mobility of capital will no longer benefit in the way that they are now so it's a tricky one and we should all know more about political economy than we do but I especially should know more Tuni, can I ask you what you think of that? No, I mean I personally don't think it's a tricky issue at all I think we should examine the function of capitalism so for the most part what is in capitalism it has been a lot of major parts of the world feel like that's very much been defined by those countries that we call the west for example so it is true that there is now more wealth in a lot of regions of the world that you know we might have considered previously not wealthy although of course that was also a fallacy given that the wealth was there but it was just extracted in a less accountable way so we have some sort of regulation we say that we have some sort of accountability but a lot hasn't changed that much so I said earlier that I think we need to sort of desegregate the conversation between when we talk about elites and when we talk about ordinary people because actually it's among the lives of ordinary people that we sort of see a lot of this crisis if you look at the UK the UK still hasn't moved away being the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world there is a lot of wealth in this country there's a lot of wealth in the land in this arswell nation as well but where does that wealth actually reside who determines what our main products would be it's not ordinary people so there's a problem with distribution and yes the capitalist system that currently exists prefers it to be like that and this is my view and actually there's a lot of evidence for this that a lot of feminist political economists have done a lot of work for example that the women's budget group both in the UK but also in Scotland have done actually reflects why we should rethink the current practices of capitalism so the world is so interdependent that I personally don't think 192 countries can see actually we've had it with capitalism we're going to turn our backs on it and in any case the people who have capital are quite powerful but I think it is worth having a conversation about we know that it's not working for the majority of people we do need to think about how it can work for the majority of people but often we don't really have a lot of alternatives from elites and when I talk about elites I'm talking about politicians I'm talking about for the most part mainstream international relations, political science academia but I'm also talking about an even third sector a lot of civil society organizations charity they don't really think about the alternatives and so when you look at organizations for example like Oxfam where we've seen in recent years because they've gone through crisis of their own they're trying to rethink the ways in which even Oxfam does business and this is a charity that has been concerned with poverty for years and years and years we through their work, through the work of even smaller charities in our cities we can tell that there might be alternatives I mean what I would like to see is the ways in which some of those alternatives can be scaled up and for me I think part of the problem is that we're always seeking to reform something that is clearly broken rather than actually seeking alternatives even if we know that we cannot achieve that alternative in 18 months so I think it's a process but we have to be willing to go through that process and I think it starts from us because it is certainly the case we know this historically that those who have power would not want to give it up Thank you I have a few more questions tell me if I'm missing anyone who's had their hand up a long time but yes sorry they do it in front right in front of me I want to go back to the of the discussion about if people are stupid or not I thought that was an interesting point of departure is it the people aren't stupid or is it the fact that democracy doesn't work so when we are voting we are voting for something we don't know about which is very possible that's mentioned Brexit but maybe what we are voting for we don't really know what's going on and on a larger scale taking this now on a much larger scale we are talking about different countries is it the fact that the countries or the smaller countries are looking to the larger blocks to improve or for the betterment or is it the fact that the larger blocks are going in there but then exploitation has always has been there's nothing about democracy going on there that is my point basically and in fact all the discussions come on since then there's very much touch on that what you've just spoken about now do you like to I mean you'd have heard from what I said earlier I don't like to think anybody is stupid at all because I think it's always relative right so the people that don't buy into what it is that we believe we think they're stupid and therefore they voted for the wrong things I think you know at a sort of basic human level I think what happens is people either think well the bad things can't happen to me or those I care about so I'll do that or this is what I know is the thing that has worked for me for a long time so I will go with that as well and I mean again this is one of the beauties of democracy in and of itself but of course we cannot discount again the role of the media as we've said earlier on in sort of pushing certain narratives increasingly now we talk about sort of sadly the distinctions between truth because they seem to be multiple ones and actual facts and the role that fact is playing less and less of a role in the narratives that we tell about the different truths but we also know that recently I would say artificial intelligence also has a role so thinking about the role of capitalism as well more and more companies expanding they're going to make money off of it as an impact on our societies on our communities so I don't think people are stupid they might be stupid of things that I want them to not be but I don't think people are interested in stupid I think that people do make choices that they think work for them and their families and actually as we have more and more crises the default would be to not even be able to make those rational choices so we wouldn't even be able to stupidity or not but actually do things out of desperation and I think that's what we should really be concerned about and we don't want to move sort of close and close to that edge of desperation which is what I sort of see happening globally both within our society and externally so if I look at using the Niger as an example I did not think so soon after that we would have another coup coups have never worked well in any part of the Sahel or West Africa there are people alive in that country who know this but from the point of desperation it made sense you and I might sort of think having a military dictator I grew up in a military dictatorship I think is very stupid amongst other things but when you're moved to the point of desperation this seems like it actually makes sense and actually it does to some people and I think we can't discount that Do we know what we're voting for? When I understand people are stupid I think that was just to make a point about climate change but I think we are programmed too often to act in a short sighted way and things that make us uncomfortable we often try and filter them out I catch myself often reading something about the possibility that Antarctica will no longer cease to function as the world's kind of refrigerator and then I want to just go on TV and watch a sitcom instead because it makes me really uncomfortable and I think that's what's going on we don't want to be uncomfortable all the time but if we thought about the climate we would be uncomfortable all the time because of what we're doing to it as a species and that's what I wanted to say we are programmed not to think too often we are not programmed not to think long term as societies and that's a problem I want to take one last question quickly if I can yes gentlemen here we mentioned the war in Ukraine earlier and whatever people's views on Western intervention Western aid giving and also approached refugees there appeared to be a clear difference on how a lot of Western nations responded to Ukraine to conflicts in other parts of the world both in terms of giving aid and resources and accepting refugees do you think that sort of being seen by all the other nations around the world had an impact on how the West was viewed because of almost the double standard there it's a very simple answer but I also do think that what we do need to reflect enough just been looking at some of the surveys not from here but from Ireland so Ireland was one of the countries that proportionately actually received quite a lot of refugees and they were known to be sort of very welcoming they integrated and actually provided them quite a lot of support and we're not saying that it was perfect and the social attitudes are turning they want them to go home so I think there is kind of a structural racism to it but I do also think is that even on the Ukrainian refugees there is kind of the same is starting to apply as well but yeah the answer is just plain simple yes I agree but I think sort of you know the nuance and distinction between the sort of structural racism of the government that says there is no structural racism and folks who might feel like they're not accessing their resources because of the failure of their government but then they sort of ascribe this to having more people in their neighbourhoods I think that there is sort of a distinction between then the sort of short answer to your question is that yes if you look at across the African Union which is a lot of 54 countries the thing that was very glaring was sort of you know the treatment of refugees not the least because of what African refugees also experience at the border trying to come into the European Union and that plays into the calculus of voting for example to abstain in the United Nations it's not because they're pro-Russian it's because they've got eyes I agree I would only add that I just despair because you know the huge population movements in the world have been from agrarian areas of the world to urban areas and only a tiny fraction have been from south to north and what makes me even more depressed is that we desperately need like in Scotland we desperately need immigration because we are an aging population and our pensions depend on you know if you want to just think about it in terms of pure self-interest you know depend on more young people of working age and yet immigration has been caught up in this culture war and we have the deputy leader of the Tory party saying fff off back to France and it's just it's so lamentable to me that we don't have a fact based humane discussion of immigration in this country or most of the west I think we're coming back to that idea of hypocrisy which we've touched on seems to have been a recurring theme we are approaching the end can I ask each of you to sum up with one minute is the west in decline? what is the west what is decline? academics I think I mean for me I think that's the question that I keep asking you know as an academic it's true we do very much like to pick terms I think that the boundaries of the west are not as clean as we would like them to be I think decline is not necessarily a negative as has been suggested here but at the same time we are part of despise China in Africa most Africans are still speaking English, French and Portuguese difficult question so I think I would say it's being I mean it's a very general it's being repositioned it's rightful place in some ways and I would say this because I love the question on sort of what a democracy is working political systems aren't that we have especially political systems where winner takes all UK and US prime examples of that and if we transfer that to the global scale of the west in decline the west was the winner and it was taking it all but now with the idea of multi polarity it's not between west or China it's about sort of how we kind of create a democratic system at a global level which allows everybody a voice that requires the west to be repositioned to its more comfortable place to listen to what others are actually saying okay, thank you yeah, no I agree the west is if we want to talk about the west in the terms that we outlined at the beginning at least I did it's in relative decline it's share of global wealth is decreasing which is natural and its cultural hegemony is likely to recede as well but this is just part of the natural order of things and not a reason for cultural pessimism or despair it's not some of the other issues we've discussed today which I didn't expect to discuss but I'm really glad we did are issues that require global inequality the climate these kinds of things they are a problem and for them to be remedied in a just way the west will need to continue to decline in relative terms okay, thank you I've three things to say firstly thank you for coming along today and thank you genuinely for such excellent questions it's been a really broad ranging discussion and I'm very grateful for your thoughtful contributions thank you to Professor Tony Hastrup to Dr Matea Peter and to Professor Peter Jackson please fill in your surveys we want to know what you think you will get them on event rights if you booked online or there are paper copies at the back and you can tell us how to improve the festival and I can remind you that there are many more events taking place today there is how to disagree agreeably at 145 volunteers in the state at 2 o'clock tomorrow there is in conversation with broadcaster and former politician Michael Portillo and a lively panel it says on the future of Scotland's arts and cultures at 5 o'clock and another full day of events on Friday so I hope you can join us and thank you very very much