so
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so
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well uh good early evening everybody in
bratislava and berlin
and uh good morning uh in san francisco
or the bay area if that's the case uh to
francis fukuyama
thank you very much for joining us and
thank you
everybody here in the audience i just
remind you that we have an
online audience and you can ask
questions using the globsec app
and i think that those people who are
here actually have that demonstrated to
them so uh please feel free
and uh i will endeavor to read out
questions
as this conversation goes on now
unfortunately of course
uh we only have 35 minutes so we are
going to have to be relatively quick
um in our answers and our questions
and so i would ask everybody if they
could uh to to respect that for the
purposes
of a uh good discussion um
there's very there's very little
uh that can be got out of a discussion
about democracy these days in my opinion
um if simply we're just going to sit
here and lament
and i think it's even worse if we're
going to sit here and blame the public
i want to try and drive this discussion
in the direction
of what it is that the public
or sections of the public have against
the mainstream against the establishment
but much more importantly than that do
they have
just cause uh you know i think it's very
easy and this is one of the dangers
i fall into it myself of talking about
populists i
actually think this discussion would be
a lot better if we abolished the word
populist
uh from it uh since it seems to cover uh
so many different bases
um but i really think that if we're
going to get something out of the next
30 minutes
i think we should try and do something
which isn't very often done which is
actually try and look at things to
employ empathy
and try and see what it is that sections
of the public have against the
mainstream
and do they in fact have a point as you
can see
uh on your programs to discuss this uh
we have francis fukuyama
from stanford university um thank you
very much for joining us particularly at
this early hour
where you are we have sandra brecker ceo
of the robert bosh
uh stiftung joining us from berlin thank
you very much also for being with us
today
and uh here in bratislava we have
jakub visnevsky thank you jakub for
being here jacob is the vice president
of globsec so let me just go straight in
then
uh with this question why do people
distrust our democracies
and do they have just cause francis
fukuyama
i think that there's been this big
debate over the last few years
as to whether that distrust is driven by
primarily economic uh or primarily
cultural reasons
i think that both of them are at play
because obviously
globalization has disrupted a lot of
jobs
and created a lot of inequality but i do
think that the cultural
dimensions are ones that are really
critical to
understand that there's a huge social
divide that's
opened up between better educated people
living in cosmopolitan urban
areas with lots of access to the global
economy
and people that live in second and third
tier towns and villages or in the
countryside and that
has generally been the social base of
most of the populist voters
and i think that the cultural
i mean you wanted to distinguish between
in a sense
legitimate and illegitimate
sources of anger i think that you know
we would all regard
uh kind of racism against immigrants uh
or
racial minorities or women or uh
lgbt uh people uh as illegitimate
uh but it's also important to understand
that that cultural divide
has also produced a kind of lack of
understanding
of the struggles that especially working
class
people you know that don't have access
to
globalization to the same extent have
felt
and a lot of the anger i think is
justified
as a result of you know what's really
the arrogance of
people that have more liberal views and
in fact
denouncing uh populist voters simply as
a group as racist
uh or uh xenophobes i think adds to that
uh perception of a kind of social
contempt
do you think also just to ask a
follow-up question to that i mean
there's the social dimension the class
dimension and you mentioned
which is often mentioned in this
discussion about globalization and those
that have been left behind and you also
drew the distinction between
liberal metropolitan elites uh i live in
washington d.c
where i believe 93 of the population
voted for donald trump
and i'm not sure whether trump got more
than the libertarian candidate but it
was a close run thing
what about the dimension that it isn't
just that that there might be a sense
that our democracies
in the era of the digital revolution
when people
have access to the conversation in the
way they never have before
but the levers of power are pretty much
the same i mean the american
constitution is a particularly
interesting example it's almost frozen
in time
how america does its politics despite
changes obviously
um in some respects i mean are our
democracies outdated
uh well in a certain sense technological
change has fueled
a real scrambling of democratic
discourse
and that is something that is genuinely
new
when the internet was first introduced
in the 1990s we thought that this would
be a big boon to democracy because
everybody would have access
to information and therefore to power
but we've now seen the ways in which it
can be
weaponized and in the united states
today
something like a third of american
voters believe a completely false
narrative
that last november's presidential
election was fraudulent and that donald
trump
actually won it and i don't think this
would have been remotely possible 20
years ago when you had a
kind of domination by legacy media that
acted as a filter for
uh information and we haven't figured
out how to deal with this
uh you know we're putting pressure on
the big internet platforms to
moderate that content but i think in the
end that's not an acceptable solution
for a modern democracy so in that sense
i think it is
absolutely the case that the political
institutions really have not
kept up with the kinds of social and
technological changes that we've
experienced um sandra brecker in
berlin i'm certainly not asking you
simply to talk about germany although
germany is a very important
in some way say the key democracy in
continental europe
but from where you're sitting and how
you observe
um this problem of disillusionment among
significant sections not entirely
uh true of the whole of the population
but significant sections of the
population
do you think and to what extent do you
think that they're
actually the people who have a complaint
have just cause
thank you robin it's a pleasure to be uh
on this panel well
you know as francis fukuyama just said
one of the strongest drivers of
polarization is
inequality in all of its different
dimensions both within societies and
internationally and these inequalities
have been
exposed and further exacerbated by the
pandemic
i think we've seen how you know strong
these
inequalities are we have to acknowledge
the inequalities which are real
or which we consider real but also
understand that they are no less
relevant if they're a matter of
perception
they're as important so yes you know
there is just cause
um we need to assess society as
individual you just spoke about germany
so i think it's very important to look
at societies individually and not
have one theory for all with their
social political and cultural context
and history in mind and
apply contextualized measures if you
talk about really how to address these
issues
and learn from each other i think one
very important aspect
is that we usually pay special attention
to those segments of society which are
considered as
polarized on one or the other side of
the spectrum
we recently commissioned the study to
better understand who the ambivalent
though not anti-democratic groups are
and the study um you know which covered
germany france britain poland and the us
and focused on those segments of society
that feel left out of democracy are
are disappointed by its results these
groups
still also have in them you know
ambivalent positions
and reaching them is crucial as they are
of a relevant size almost everywhere
from 23 in germany up to 51 in poland
um they offer considerable potential to
play a role in overcoming
polarization i mean our societies are
not all black and white
and we we have to support citizens to
uh to receive the competences and learn
the competences to participate in the
analog and digital worlds
and have the skill sets um you know like
the ability to compromise to endure
ambiguities and rapid change as well as
the increasing
complexity of issues which fuels
frustration in addition to the
inequality i just mentioned
you know the likelihood of engaging with
someone who has completely different
opinions
is decreasing and real-time face-to-face
conversations have proven to be so
highly effective dismantling the biases
prejudices and stereotypes at fuel
division
so dialogue is important we need to find
i think
uh credible formats of direct
participation and i mean this very
seriously which complement
established forms of representative
democracies
so uh you know deliberative practice is
important
um and all of us who are working in
these fields have a responsibilities to
reach out to different target groups
and to seek for new ways which
complement what we already have in terms
of
democratic practice sandra i know you
don't speak for the european union but
i'm sure you
make of the european union a central
part of your your thinking and the way
you you
look at politics in europe since anybody
who's sensible does exactly that
um in terms of this question of
just cause and i think francis wickham i
raised actually crucial point about
distinguishing between the kind of
criticisms of the status quo the
establishment mainstream
call is what you want which are
fundamentally unacceptable which is
racially driven
gender driven uh homophobic this kind of
thing and those would actually
are in part perhaps you know a cry from
the depths a plea
uh from people who are dispossessed and
poor and simply don't feel they have
a stake in society um but there are
political questions aren't there there
are political questions of legitimacy
and i was just having a conversation
here at globsec this afternoon about um
where things went wrong uh in the
2000s in the european union with repeat
referendums
um ireland was famously asked twice uh
to repeat referendums when it didn't
give a result that uh that brussels
wanted
um there are all the shenanigans over
the lisbon treaty the public were
watching this
the public were watching this do you not
think that there are there is a part of
the whole
way that the establishment itself has
been behaving in the last
couple of decades that does give some
just cause
um for concern about the way our
politics is run
well uh in particular last year i think
the european union made one of the big
mistakes of not showing much solidarity
uh
in the pandemic and also not necessarily
the mobility and the fast responses that
you would need to
really actually cater to citizens
interests to protect citizens uh
in an equal manner you're absolutely
right robin in saying that there is a
uh you know a disconnect between
citizens and
and public elites um and that is
very strong uh in terms of the european
union institutions
union institutions and and different
from country to country
uh what it does is it it erodes you know
public trust
and that is a huge issue that we have to
face
uh if you look at the crisis of trust
that we have not only within countries
but also in the european union
uh it has been increasing but we also
have to say that irrespective of
political systems delivery of government
services and this also goes to european
union services to citizens
and the ability of a state or of a union
to protect its citizens are defining
factors in whether people have trust
um i guess in in terms of the european
union
you know there is a matter of
representation and legitimacy
and we've you know had discussions
around this uh
for many many years there is um an issue
of solidarity which people don't see
um and there is uh you know the lack of
fast response
and also a risk aversion that the
european union has shown
which doesn't necessarily fuel trust
uh let me just turn quickly to um uh
uh to to jakub visnevsky um here in
bratislava
um we are going to go in a few minutes
to a member of our online
audience but i wanted to ask you um
jakub
i've been coming to and i've actually
lived in this part of the world for a
long time and i used to argue
certainly back in the 90s and the 2000s
that
central eastern europe uh was materially
behind
but conceptually ahead in the sense that
the political intelligence year here i
my impression was um was was more
original in its thinking
had been schooled uh school of hard
knocks of course uh under communism
actually understood
certain things that the west european
intelligence was perhaps a little less
ah a little less able to understand and
particularly when you see
issues like belarus today i think it's
the central east europeans that really
step up because they understand
uh what the heck's going on over there
here in central and eastern europe
um where is the disconnect taking place
and why we clearly have a major problem
in the country to our immediate south
uh in hungary um perhaps you can shed
some light on on the good sides and the
bad sides to this question that we've
been discussing
right it seems to me that the problems
of central eastern europe
are not radically different from these
of
developed countries be it america or
western europe they are simply
more complicated more profound
given the immaturity of democratic
institutions
and smaller preparedness of a civil
society
to face certain populist moves on the
part of
establishment i'm not saying that the
populists are more
represented here in this part of the
world what i'm saying is that
there is less of a protection
in in as regards institutions uh um
against the populists and i think
it feather complicated matters because
there is always a temptation on the part
of this or vet government
to say massage the figures so that
they look nice or to manipulate the date
of the elections
so that they can happen
in the exact moment when the government
wants it or
imagine some by elections in some region
where suddenly many more vaccines are
available in comparison to what is
available in other regions and this is
thanks to the government
so this temptation is so strong that
there is
some some governments cannot resist it
which which leads to the further
deterioration of standards of democracy
and by
turn in turn it leads to deterioration
to to the levels of trust our research
proves it that there is not
there is a big difference between um
moods
and attitudes of say bulgarian romanian
but also
polish and czech society versus the one
that we study which is representing
western europe
that is austria so for example if you uh
measure the trust in government saying
the truth
if you measure the prevalence of a
certain
conspiracy theories for example but it's
a
the whole covet does not exist it's just
a fake
and we can see that central eastern
europe is
full of this this confusion and they the
people seem not to have authorities more
allow for
these intellectual authorities to turn
to which is always
problematic i i am myself as a citizen i
i'm often confused whether government is
not massaging
certain figures unfortunately well
sometimes they actually do massage
figures so
so you're not always being irrational
when you distrust the government i mean
uh you know governments are sometimes uh
dishonest and we know that because
scandal is something that anybody who
grows up with politics in western
society
is is a word that actually has real
meaning um i
i just wanted to to jump into um the
online audience we have a question
from from mauricio in mexico
hello everybody thank you very much i'm
mauricio from the mexico research
center for peace my question is
regarding the mass media
part of the phenomenon is a deep
distrust in mass media
and what yale abraham brahms has called
the traditional narrators of truth so
what would you recommend that's
something that in mexico we have
started very very deeply the
disconnection between
people and the mass media what would you
recommend to
traditional media to rebuild trust
in truth in data and science thank you
thank you very much i was going to turn
to the to the question of actually what
to do
uh in terms of policy but it's good to
sort of this is what the media is the
media is a medium
so this will be the bridge to the
question about what politicians can do
and what kind of legislation
uh or what kind of legislative remedy
could we we could enact in order to
address this problem but francis
fukuyama
on this question that mauricio raised
about the media
uh what can the what what role can the
media play
in in helping to to right this situation
uh well i think first of all the
question is a very good one because
there's been a lot of focus on social
media
and online interactions as the source of
populism and a lot of our problems
but it's actually the legacy mass
media television and newspapers that
also contribute to it
it differs a little bit from one region
to another but i think one
reason that people distrust the media is
actually the ownership structure
in eastern europe and in the former
soviet union
after a lot of western media companies
exited those markets
uh basically the legacy media was taken
over by oligarchs so in ukraine today
for example
you know there are maybe six or seven
oligarchs that control the entire
economy each of them owns a tv station
and newspapers and that's really the
only channel
of information and so it's not an
accident that people don't
trust the media in mexico i think you
have a very similar
uh problem with non-transparent uh
uh you know kind of oligarchic uh
influence over mass media uh the
solution for this
is not uh entirely straightforward i do
think that
in some countries public broadcasting is
a
is a solution where you have a
sufficient degree of
public trust in institutions but in
other places the public broadcasters get
captured by powerful economic and
political
actors and so that's not a universal
recommendation i think in general we
have to worry about
excessive concentration of media power
because
that is really what uh invites
manipulation
uh i call this the berlusconi phenomenon
because he's really the person that
invented this
interaction between media ownership
and political power and that's a pattern
unfortunately that's been repeated in
in very many countries and breaking that
connection i think is important
you mentioned berlusconi effect which
which may well be new but in fact i mean
certainly in the uk
and the british media has traditionally
been owned by british media is
traditionally oligarchical
and uh we used to refer to the owners of
the uh
the major newspapers as the press barons
and so and britain by
relative standards has been a fairly
successful democracy so
i'm kind of wondering why this
phenomenon that we have seen before is
more problematic today is it the kind of
people that are owning the media
francis fukuyama i don't think no i i do
think that
berlusconi really did set a new pattern
it's not just oligarchic ownership of
media
but using that ownership to then propel
yourself personally into politics
then to become prime minister and then
to use your political power to protect
your business interest
and that i think is a pattern that we've
seen i mean rupert murdoch in a way
comes closest to that in his association
with donald trump but he himself did not
go into politics but i do think that
that's a
kind of toxic combination that's been
you know exploited
particularly in central and eastern
europe and in the former soviet union
you'll be pleased to know that i'm not
going to ask one of the questions with
me it's like do you still believe the
history has come to an end
since people have asked you that every
day for the last 30 years i'm not going
to ask it to you
um but i am going to ask sandra brecker
to follow up on on what you were saying
about uh media i mean
germany has some very big me i mean the
actual springer group in berlin is a
is a huge uh media group i mean how is
the the traditionalists we can talk
about traditional and non-traditional
medium feel free to talk about whichever
of those you like but to what extent is
the traditional media
in germany respected by the public
well first of all i want to say
something about conspiracy theories
because conspiracy theories are not
necessarily um you know in the ownership
of eastern and
southern european countries anymore
we've seen
and i think this is an effect that we've
seen over the past one and a half years
an increase in conspiracy theories where
we haven't had them before
fueled by different media outlets
including germany so
we see this phenomenon um you know in in
countries where we haven't had it to
this extent before
and while i say this as you speak of
germany interestingly we've also seen an
increase
in um in trust in the public
broadcasting system
so they've had a considerable increase
in in viewership over the past one and a
half years over the pandemic
uh which means that that you know this
public broadcasting system
has strong value and still thank god
has um despite all of its criticism all
of the criticism we have towards it
has a very strong role to play we also
have
you know media outlets which are uh only
in a different manner and
have been contributing to certain public
opinions and moods
um and that is a problem but i i think
there are two
you know they're very different
situations you have countries where
media are completely politically
instrumentalized and where you don't
have any independent media anymore
you have countries where you have public
broadcasting where it can be
still be strengthened and very pla plays
a very important role for example such
as germany
and you you in order to strengthen media
you have to have a regulation of the
digital space of information
um and that is actually an issue of the
state if we don't have a regulated space
in terms of fake news in uh what you
call the social media or the digital
realm
you know you will not be able to
strengthen uh what we call traditional
media
which have seen in most countries and a
decrease
you know whether it's the press germany
is a very different place we still have
regional newspapers which are very
strong as opposed to many in the united
states which have been uh which had to
close and
and so on a decrease in uh in power and
support
so you have to look at it country back
country but i really think that
regulation in the digital space
is relevant and of information in the
digital space will be very relevant
to preserving you know objective um sort
of information and coverage
and uh encountering fake news
uh jakub um in slovakia um
and in central eastern europe generally
and and please
if you if you could give us some sense
of uh
what is going on right now in hungary in
this respect and to what extent
is the media trusted by the public uh
the mainstream media uh the traditional
media
uh trusted by the public here in
slovakia
i think that slovakia is a odd man out
in comparison to
its neighbors to north and south
with public broadcaster relatively
uncontroversial
and not making waves and relatively
trusted
there is there are some problems around
public broadcaster
namely lack of resources and lack of
this packaging which makes the product
attractive
and as regards hungary and poland poland
to answer quickly your question i think
that the biggest proponents
of uh law and justice in poland and the
urban
fides party in hungary have no illusions
that these
there is a capture of by political class
of
public broadcasting and they hang on to
it
as a sort of fruit of the power but
nobody has illusions that this is
something that is a standard
that they want to be kept once the power
changes
and how to redesign it it's a very tough
question i think that
we need a sort of day one um zero moment
zero
when we go back to the drawing table and
invent
bbc of poland or hungary once again
surely this would be
this would mean less of influence of
politicians maybe some
academia represented in some supervisory
bodies
we need something like bbc uh in poland
or hungary even
knowing the flaws of bbc and let's be
clear that as long as victor orban's
prime minister of hungary that's never
going to happen
i mean isn't hungary an example of where
the digital revolution
actually comes storming through for
democracy and that that is the only
place
that's true that civil society can go to
actually mount a challenge
yes yes this is a very strong dilemma
where if you
if you don't regulate you have all these
populist and crazy
people present which vie for the
attention of the population and they
capture this population
if you um if you regulate you you have
tendencies on the part of some
dictators to be who can try to capture
the power and make
themselves electable for another term
this is a good segue into a question
that i have on my tablet from
uh from one of the viewers uh from uhana
if i'm pronouncing this correctly
um and the question is and we'll start
off with uh
sandra uh if i could can trust and
democratic dialogue be restored
if social media giants maintain their
current business model
which favors echo chambers sandra
well um you know the echo chambers are
obviously a huge um a huge problem and
what we have seen over the past one and
a half years that what we normally have
as individuals we have our private space
we usually have what we consider our
work space and we have a public space
has been restricted to a private space
both
physically and digitally that has
increased to polarization
and you know to distrust
now you have to have more regulation
obviously but you also have to start
investing in mechanisms which
as i said before allow for citizens of
different views
and backgrounds to interact and
this is hard work this includes actually
uh you know a very inclusive and
participatory approach this also means
that you have
to work across sectors you know one of
the one of the groups actually at least
look
we looked at is our adults who who are
in the workforce
we invest quite a bit of um of effort in
young people and their education which
is very important and education is
sort of uh the the backbone of a society
of the future of a society
but we rarely look at the large
the large group of people who are in the
workforce so
how do you reach these people it's
actually through their employers we have
to think of new mechanisms to reach out
whether this is possible without
dismantling the monopolies of the
large um you know uh social media
platforms
uh is is difficult to say i guess the
these platforms have a huge pull
we i know many politicians are looking
at regulation efforts and
and how we we can counter these echo
chambers
that we have but all of us both civil
society you know
government but also business and
and all the sectors have a
responsibility to engage
and this is where the multi-stakeholder
and and cross-sectoral approach
really comes into play we have been
largely playing
lip service to that we find it's
important
but what we do is usually done in
parallel even though many partnerships
have increased so we think and we have
to think of new mechanisms and actually
get to people where they are we cannot
expect people
to come to us and to open up
we're very rapidly running out of time
but this is this question
of social media of course facebook very
recently upheld a ban on donald trump
for two years and
uh and mark zuckerberg may well be
brilliant in technology and business but
he probably doesn't
uh have the same acumen in politics
because if donald trump gets into power
in
four years time again facebook is
finished i would suggest
uh you know you can't take sides like
that without repercussions
francis fukiyama i mean is this you know
my american history may be wrong so
correct me but i believe it was 1911
when standard oil was broken up in the
most famous anti-trust
uh piece of legislation in american
history
is there a a a danger for the tech
companies that
really they've they've annoyed everybody
in in politics in washington dc they're
very unpopular that they're going to get
taken down
well uh opinion on antitrust has
shifted 180 degrees over the last few
years and now you get both
conservative republicans and liberal
democrats that
are really distrustful of the power of
the big platforms but
i don't think antitrust law is actually
going to be a way
forward because it really only deals
with
economic and not with political harms
it's very slow
politically it's very fraud it took 10
years to prosecute
microsoft in the last big high-tech uh
antitrust case and i think that
there have to be other kinds of
solutions you know either through
privacy law
i have my own proposal as a result of a
stanford working group on this
uh subject to create a layer of
competitive what we call middleware
providers to which the platforms could
outsource the
moderation of political content so that
they are not responsible
for it but i think that given the
polarization of american society
the kinds of regulatory approaches that
have been undertaken by the eu
or by individual european countries are
simply
not uh viable we we can't agree on
how to regulate because you know
republicans and democrats have
completely different
uh objections to what the platforms are
doing
um jakub a final word um i wish this
conversation could go on for another
half hour or another two hours
it'll certainly go on for years um what
do you think the politicians should do
what sort of legislation
is going to make a difference in terms
of restoring trust
very briefly okay okay i think that the
the answer will sound banal but we need
to educate people and
we need to make them love objective data
so that they are
resistant to populist arguments i think
that kovit has provided
a huge lesson that people like bolsonaro
in brazil
and at the end of the day they feel that
they they've lost touch with
society with reality and the society is
able to see
through through their arguments so as
long as we have proper data proper
indicators
people will be able to choose who is
representing
and who is electable government and who
is not
thank you very much and and thank you
francis fukiyama for joining us at this
early hour from california
thank you very much sandra brecker from
uh berlin and of course
uh jakub here for uh for hosting uh for
your organization hosting this
conference
in bratislava our masters of ceremony uh
my
three and terry will come on the stage
any second to say good night
uh but i'd like to thank you once again
for a great discussion
you