All states are equal (in terms of international law), but in political terms (due to differences in power) some are more equal than others. This truth is old and indisputable. The fundamental inequalities in terms of power mean that the system of international coexistence is based on a hierarchy of states. International relations are therefore hierarchical (because some states are more important than others) and anarchic (because there is no legal superior authority). Therefore, in a spontaneous way, the relations between individual countries are arranged in the formulas of domination (hegemony), competition (rivalry), fight (confrontation), cooperation (alliance) or isolation (i.e. lack of relations, because lack of relations is a form of relations).
In the past, power was equated with leadership. Politics was set by the strongest.
Thanks to Thucydides, we know exactly what the competition for a place in the hierarchy of powers of the Greek city-states looked like. We also know the great dilemma when one of the partners gaining power is growing beyond its size and threatening the current hegemon, i.e. the so-called Thucydides trap.
We remember from reading about antiquity how total domination, whether Roman or Chinese, can guarantee stability.
Paul Kennedy, an outstanding researcher of empires, formulated the principle of three superpowers in the context of European history. In the 18th century, it was formed by the triangle Spain – England – France. In the 19th century: Great Britain – Prussia – Russia. The beginning of the 20th century was dominated by the Germany-UK – USA triangle.
After 1945, the principle of three superpowers ceased to apply. Until 1990, the world danced to the music played by the USA and the USSR. After the Cold War, we relied on the unipolarity of the “Pax Americana.”
For a good decade, the greatest minds in international relations have been arguing about how many power poles the new system of world leadership should and will have. As you already know, I am not interested in participating in this discussion, or even following it, from the conceptual point of view. Politically, of course, yes. Because the relations between the poles determine the weather in international politics.
Today, power equated with leadership is no longer so closely related. Leadership stands for the ability to define the international agenda, set the directions of international policy, and the ability to lead (by example, persuasion, but also, unfortunately, pressure and even force) other members of the international community.
Today, you can have enormous power, including military or economic power, but not reveal any aspirations to leadership. For years, Germany was called an economic giant and a political dwarf. Today, this existential dissonance has been transferred to the European Union as such. Japan, an economic giant since at least the 1970s, has not intended to attract any large fan club even in Asia. Perhaps China would like to lead the entire group of developing countries, but it does not always succeed. Xi even hinted at playing the role of a spokesman for the globalization process. India’s aspirations are still only regional and contested (not only by Pakistan). And Russia has to reconcile its longing for leadership with obvious failures, because it was pushed out of the Balkans, and the erosion of influence on the so-called the post-Soviet area is progressing. Not only have Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia (the latter not so irreversibly yet) finally broken free from Russian leadership, but we also have to wait until Armenia goes on its own.
Therefore, I am amused by attempts to decree the existence of six or even more poles in world politics, because most of these poles either do not show leadership energy or do not have the basic attractiveness for other countries to want to gravitate towards them on their own, of their own free will.
So what does leadership mean today? Using my considerations from my book “The Hourglass and the Throne”, I would say that leadership is the ability to create time and the rules for its consumption, but I would have to explain for a long time how politics and leadership are coupled with the time paradigm, so I will only invite those interested in explanations to read my book about time.
Leadership costs money. Americans found this out after the Cold War. They spent trillions solving problems that many American voters doubted to require American effort and money at all. And Trump didn’t even want to spend American money on NATO. The abdication of the US from world leadership is the dream of many autocrats and ordinary international thugs.
The state may have the power to lead. But it is always used by a specific person, by concrete people – the ruling class, the leader of the country.
Of course, there is a fundamental difference between the way a leader exercises power in an autocratic state and in a democratic state. An autocrat has a different perception of time and a different measure of the success of his policy. And undoubtedly, today’s tension between the camp of democracy (the West) and the camp of autocracy (Russia, China) is a clash of time perspectives in politics, a clash of time paradigms. I wrote about it in “Hourglass and Time”, so I have to refer you to the book again.
What democratic and autocratic leaders have in common is undoubtedly a sense of loneliness when making decisions. Foreign policy in difficult and decisive moments is practiced in solitude and is a test of the leader’s leadership abilities. Because advice is advice, rational analyzes are rational analyses, but in politics the last word always belongs to intuition. And that’s why you can become an outstanding politician without wasting time reading books. (Besides, reading books is generally harmful, as a famous Polish film director once rightly pointed out. Because reading damages your eyesight. So reading is not so much about the quantity, but about the quality of books. This is not the only reason why the famous director’s thesis has many fans among politicians, especially on the right. There, to this day, you can even find the opinion that only one book is worth reading, but if they read it at all, they read it selectively and without understanding). Moreover, the complexity of the world exposes the powerlessness of intellectual control over it. We inevitably start to rely on hunches and moods.
Political intuition grows out of personality, and personality, regardless of natural, genetically programmed predispositions and limitations, is formed in the culture of the environment, generation, and individual experiences. Political leaders who experienced the war, even as children, looked at Europe differently, and those who only learned about it at school see it differently. Leaders who personally experienced the status of second-class citizens in colonies ruled by foreign masters looked at the world differently, and those who were able to enfranchise themselves on the country’s independence see the world differently.
The problem with modern leadership is that people who are brought to power are judged on the basis of the national agenda offered to voters. They rarely have any international experience and rarely have a thorough knowledge of the world. And this applies also to countries that have a leadership role to play in the world, e.g. the USA. It is difficult to deny the logic in the voices suggesting to make the influence on the outcome of the US elections available, at least to a symbolic extent, to the citizens of the world. Because this choice has enormous significance for the world.
It is surprising, especially in Europe, how the political elites still lag behind the rapidly globalizing, cosmopolitan consciousness of the young generation. In Poland, subsequent elections were won and Poland was governed for eight long years by a party whose leader did not know foreign countries at all, did not want to know them, and had a rather vulgar understanding of international politics (foreign countries are conspiring against us, the enemy is lurking everywhere, so take what you can from them and run away).
Secondly, governance has become so pragmatized that its essence has become efficient corporate management with a view to winning the next elections. The electoral calendar has therefore come to govern international politics, and its lack of synchronization disrupts diplomatic efforts. Because no one wants to make concessions on the eve of the elections, nationalist music is then turned up, and the elections are one year here and another year elsewhere, so you have to wait for their results, because their results may influence the behaviour of the states concerned. In addition, politicians are incapacitated by the fear of unforeseen consequences of their own decisions, and those in foreign policy are enormous because they escape national control. The archetypal politician of this school of prudence was undoubtedly Angela Merkel. Its default method of foreign policy was delay, and its main instrument of political kinetics was the brake. Combined with President Sarkozy’s ADHD leadership style, this may have given Europe some sense of balance. But in the case of policy towards Russia, it gave way to Putin, who ignored the unforeseen consequences of his policy and believed that fortune was in his favour.
Finally, the third weakness of the modern leadership class is inertia. While in office, leaders are usually incapable of questioning the validity of their current position, fundamentally revising their views and radically changing course.
The conventional truth about leadership qualifications is that a good leader should neither get too far ahead of the crowd, because then he loses contact with it and the public may lose sight of him and go their own way, nor should he follow the crowd, because then he is a poor leader. Therefore, a good leader should always be one or two steps ahead.
But this conventional truth has been shaken by contemporary politics in conditions of enormous time compression. The extent of this compression, especially in international politics, is unprecedented. Today, you have to react and act under incredible time pressure. If international politics is supposed to resemble a game of chess, then in some situations it is not even a “blitz” type of chess, but even a “bullet” type of chess. And the leader becomes a prisoner of social emotions, which Kissinger called “mass consensus.” And these emotions can sometimes become paranoid. It is true that Jared Diamond claimed that leaders and countries should from time to time practice “constructive paranoia”, i.e. demonstrate excessive vigilance and fear. But sometimes paranoia can simply paralyze.
The celebrity way of doing politics leaves its mark on the mentality of those in power. Much faster than in the past, they develop a condition described as the hubris principle, i.e. self-importance syndrome, which weakens the ability to critically evaluate one’s own behaviour. It is enough to remember how quickly, after taking office a few years ago a certain VIP believed that he was a born political speaker (not only in terms of the content of his speeches, but also the form of delivering them, including facial expressions and pauses) and that he spoke English perfectly.
And Western leaders were lost in the void left by ideology (rightly eliminated from politics), which was used by liberal thinking in foreign policy. Because the two great camps in Western democracy – socialist and Christian Democrat – have succumbed to the charms of the liberal vision of the world in international politics.
Liberalism has many sins. First of all, it is based on blind faith in the logic of history. Because if progress has its vector, sooner or later the future must materialize, even if we do nothing for it. Even Marxists were not so passively deterministic, let alone communists. Because they assumed that since the logic of history and the final goal of progress had already been discovered, why delay, history had to be accelerated, history had to be helped. But liberals do not have such enthusiasm. Well, maybe apart from the short period when the Americans announced their “regime change” policy in the world. But they quickly burned their hands, so they gave up trying to speed up history.
Secondly, the weakness of Western liberalism is transactionism. Western politicians assume that everything can be negotiated, that you need to talk to everyone and that you can come to an agreement with everyone. Also with Putin, also with Kim. And they began to negotiate the truth, most often agreeing that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And the truth, as Bartoszewski said, does not lie in the middle, but lies where it lies. It is difficult to find a better illustration of the blind track of transactionism than the pilgrimages of Western politicians to Putin before the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
Today, the choice of leader in Western democratic societies is very limited and does not provide satisfaction. The voter faces a fundamental dilemma: what is more important: the politician’s honesty or competence. The choice is difficult. Because beauty (the physical attractiveness of a politician) is identified with both goodness (honesty) and wisdom (competence). But this is the logic of electoral politics in the times of oculocentric transparency.
Few people ask about the breadth of a politician’s horizons. And even more so about his vision of the world.
On the one hand, the world wants good leadership, people complain about the leadership deficit, but on the other, they demand democratization.
Democratization of international relations has become the flagship slogan of the Global South. And both Russia and China picked it up. Politically, its meaning is obvious: it is about limiting the dominance of the West in foreign policy. If treated honestly, it should assume that each state can co-decide on everything related to international politics. Of course, the vast majority of countries do not aspire to have a view deeply rooted in national interests on all points of the global agenda. In the political sense, the global agenda is actually being implemented by the USA and the European Union, by Great Britain (by historical inertia), and Russia is trying very hard to implement it (even on a spoiler basis, because it has no sufficient resources) and, increasingly, by China.
Voting in the UN General Assembly gives every country a voice, even if a given country does not have a specific view on the subject of voting. Once, while conducting consultations in several East African countries on the issue of UN reform in 2004, I heard in one of the capitals of a quite large country an explanation that on most global issues, the country’s position is determined in New York, at the country’s permanent representation to the UN, and not in the capital. And it results more from looking at others than from own political analysis, because there is the Group of 77, there are countries in the region, there is the African Union, etc. I noted this phenomenon as another illustration of the power of fluid diplomacy.
Democratization is also demanded by states that do not have democratic credentials themselves. Can authoritarian states speak credibly about the democratization of international relations? In fact, not only do they speak out, but they are also the loudest in speaking out, just like China or Russia.
Is it morally right to allow democratic procedures to decide the politics of international states ruled by dictators, despots, autocrats? What legitimacy do they have from their nation to speak about the fate of the world? So if we are to democratize international relations, we must ensure that the democratic will of the population shines through. But this would require a fundamental reconstruction not only of international institutions, but of international relations as such. No hope for that in the foreseeable future.
The democratization of international relations is most often reduced to the formula: one state – one vote. It does not take into account the disproportions in population and GDP (e.g. we experienced electoral inequalities in Poland, realizing in 2023 that the vote of a voter in Warsaw’s Żoliborz district was worth half of the vote of a voter in Osiek). This formula in no way reflects the polarization of views within one country. The democratically voted view of the so-called international community, i.e. the assembly of all countries may differ significantly from the view of the vast majority of the Earth’s inhabitants.
However, in the foreseeable future there is not the slightest chance that the reform of the international order will be guided by the intention to harmonize international policy with the vox populi of the world.
Well, someone will say, all countries suffer from a democratic deficit to some extent. The West is struggling with populism and illiberal democracy. The plague of military coups has spread again in sub-Saharan Africa. And in Latin America, populist (Venezuela) or communist (Cuba) dictatorships, fortunately few in number, remain strong.
I gave at least a few presentations on democracy in 2011-2018. I warned against demo-enthusiasm after the Arab Spring, but I also fought against demo-defeatism when democracy began to “collapse” in some regions.
I see no alternative to democracy. It is certainly not meritocracy, as discussed in more detail elsewhere. But I am in favor of exploration. The practiced model of democracy needs to be constantly refreshed. Therefore, I wholeheartedly support ideas for its improvement: subsidiarity (deconcentration of power), deprofessionalization of politics (elimination of the politician’s profession by limiting the number of parliamentary terms), including citizens in the decision-making process (citizens’ assemblies, referenda), limiting the meritocratic monopoly (final election to positions through random choice after screening the candidates based on their merit), destroying the hierarchical management system (in favor of networking), investing in mechanisms of justice in access to education, health care, etc.
Let’s be honest, nothing weakens democracy more than politics. Also internationally. In times of crisis, the desire for conversation, communication, consultation and democracy decreases. The stronger ones enforce their aspirations to make decisions, as Bush did after September 11, 2001, and Sarkozy and Merkel did after the financial crisis in Europe in 2008.
The only conclusion: only by making possible a stronger citizen’s voice can we ensure that, to paraphrase the iconic phrase form a Polish movie about the sugar content in sugar, there will be less politics in politics.
