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The Reith Lectures 2023

with Prof. Ben Ansell

Lecture 2: The Future of Security

ANITA ANAND: Welcome to Berlin for the second of the 2023 BBC Reith
Lectures. We’re at the Hertie School of Governance, close to the Brandenburg
Gate and to what was once the epicentre of the Cold War. Located in the east of
the city, the building was previously used by the former Communist GDR
government. These days, students from more than 80 countries come here to
learn about international affairs and government. So it really is such a terrific fit
for this year’s series, which is called ‘Our Democratic Future’.

Now, last time our lecturer looked at how we might improve democracy.
Now he is going to be assessing our safety in its broadest sense and asking if we
are becoming too complacent about threats, both from home and abroad. And
this is a place that really understands what our lecture is talking about. Berlin’s

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geopolitical location between Western and Eastern Europe has often placed it
right on the front line and Berliners have long been mindful of vulnerability,
vulnerability that reaches back to Red Army soldiers or the Stasi.

Let’s hear what the professor of comparative democratic institutions

from Nuffield College Oxford has to say. Will you please give a warm welcome to
the BBC 2023 Reith lecturer, Ben Ansell.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

BEN ANSELL: A quarter of a century ago, when I have to say I looked a

little younger than I do today, I had a brick thrown at my head. I was walking to
the petrol station about 300 metres from my house in Manchester and two
teenagers asked me for a cigarette and, unusually for once, I didn’t have any so I
replied honestly, but it seems an satisfyingly, I walked away and then I felt a brick
hit my right ear. And I still recall the supposedly soothing words in the
ambulance, “Well, it doesn’t look like you’re haemorrhaging.” And weeks
afterwards, my inner ear would trick me about the direction of gravity. Months
later, I would bristle on the street when unknown strangers passed by at night.
Years on, I still felt a profound sense of insecurity. Because security from fear,
from violence, is the most fundamental thing that each of us desires. And it’s also
the very first job of our governments.

A world without order, a world of anarchy, it’s one where we can have no
certainty, no reprieve from looking over our shoulders, for bricks perhaps, no
time to relax, to dream, to create. It’s an empty world of dashed hopes. But in
grasping for an escape from anarchy, we face the abiding risk of tyranny and
nowhere has that uneasy dance been more evident than here in Berlin because in
Berlin, the shadow of insecurity crept under every door. Every museum, every
tourist site bears witness to man’s inhumanity to man, the cataclysms of the 20th
century of totalitarianism of the Holocaust. They’re barely decades old, still
waking nightmares for older Berliners.

And the Cold War, of course, runs like a concrete scar through Berlin’s
midriff. But now, now the city is at peace. Berliners are free to say what they
want, to believe what they want, to meet who they want. Berliners can now
devote their time to the deeper questions of modern life, how to open new bars
and restaurants without pushing up rent prices.

Today, for those of us in wealthy countries, from Germany to Japan to

Britain – yes, I hope we still count as wealthy – when we walk out of our front
door, we know we’ll come home, to the same home, with the same possessions in
it, healthy, uninjured – well, almost always uninjured – and we live in a protective

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bubble of security. And we often can’t see that bubble and each of us in this room
feels near invincible daily, but I hate to put it to you, we’re all just bags of fluid
protected by a thin membrane of skin and yet, madly, we’re happy to get into
canisters of metal moving at incredible speeds or to wander through clouds of
pathogens, to jostle shoulders with unknown others. It’s a wonder, really, that
any of us are alive at all.

But the bubble, the bubble seems to work. It protects us from the
capriciousness of anarchy and the cruel intentions of others. Today, when I
walked here along Unter den Linden, I didn’t expect that people on the street
might attack me, and perhaps that’s because in Berlin, few people are destitute
enough or desperate enough to do so. Perhaps, instead, they’re deterred. They’re
deterred by cameras, by police, by the threat of punishment because let’s say I
did get unlucky, as I did that one time in Manchester, well, then, the security state
will come alive. I can approach a police officer to report the crime, and they will
turn the ignition key of the criminal justice system, which will, in turn, investigate,
prosecute and incarcerate the criminal. Order once transgressed, is restored –
Alles ist in Ordnung.

At least that’s the idea. And sometimes, in the rich countries of the world,
all these pieces of the security jigsaw do fit together, but not for everyone
because the bubble that I live in, it’s not universal. So look at me, affluent – well,
affluent-ish – white, male, sadly getting old, my safety walking down the street,
my bubble, it’s a privilege. My trust in the criminal justice system, I treat it like a
birthright, but that trust is naïve because the police who we employ to protect us
sometimes end up predating on us.

The London Met, the world’s first civilian police force, formed by the
citizenry to protect the citizenry have, in recent years, had officers kidnap, rape
and murder those very same citizens. In the United States, the killings of Michael
Brown and George Floyd have confirmed suspicions of endemic police racism.
Now, fortunately, Berlin’s own police scandal is more farce than tragedy. Six
years ago over 200 officers from Berlin were fired for having a drunken party,
with what I will refer to as adult activity, while guarding the G20 conference in
Hamburg. Oh, Berlin.

But the forces of order, who we trust to protect us, they often abused
their authority and, increasingly, I think we all recognise the corruptibility and
inequality of our day-to-day security in the bubbles of the West. And then we
turn our eyes to the east because less than a thousand kilometres away a land
war rages in Europe once more and we see our bubble of international security
burst apart.

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 Now, a decade ago the psychologist, Steven Pinker, argued that mankind
had listened to the better angels of our nature. War and violence, if still tragically
common, were in terminal decline, becoming obsolete. But maybe those weren’t
angels we were listening to because interstate war never went away. The late
political scientist, Bear Braumoeller, he cautioned us against the false optimism
we might have about the state of global security. By his reckoning, 2016 was the
most violent year since 1945 and the peace dividend of the end of the Cold War
has proven illusory.

Wars have raged in Iraq and Syria and Sudan, in Yemen, civil wars still
flare up throughout Africa, Central America, South East Asia and, of course, most
recently we’ve again witnessed the violent polarising tragedy of Israel and Gaza.
And so the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, it shouldn’t have surprised us.
After all, the Russians had occupied the Donbas and annexed Crimea in 2014
and, yet, we were surprised. In the western mind the revival of interstate war felt
dissonant, that the city of Kyiv, superficially like any other Central European
metropolis, could be peppered with rockets, that the glorious theatre of Mariupol
could be bombed into a skeleton. Those felt to us like misplaced memories of a
different era. We had lulled ourselves into a false sense of security about our
security. We ignored human suffering when it didn’t threaten Western lives,
wealthy cities and affluent neighbourhoods and then reality threw a brick at our
heads.

Now perhaps these memories are fresher for Berliners. London is

protected by the English Channel, America by two oceans, but Berlin, Berlin sits
prone at the end of the Great Eurasian Plane that stretches all the way to the
Urals. So violence from abroad, or indeed from Berlin, knows no natural
boundaries and the ruins of tyranny and destruction that contour Berlin then
they’re not remnants of an extinct peril. They’re reminders that our security
bubble can easily burst.

And that places us on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Our temptation as

we face these new insecurities will be to tighten every screw, plug every hole in
the ship of state to protect us and prevent the horrors of anarchy from seeping
in, but, inadvertently, we may end up summoning tyranny instead. We might find
ourselves tempted by the demand for order above all by a demagogue who
exploits our fears to bolster their hold on power, or we might constrain ourselves,
inadvertently layering rule upon rule like layers of bandages until we accidentally
mummify ourselves.

So our task then is to find a balance, to secure security without

abandoning the core principles of liberal democracy, and to do that we will need
to trust one another. So what then is trust? The political philosopher, Jon Elster,

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defines trust as lowering one’s guard. When I interact with someone else I do so
without taking precautions, and if we completely trusted one another, well then
we could unlock our doors without fear of theft, we could hitchhike across
Eurasia without fear of assault, we could scrap our nuclear weapons without fear
of war, we could walk to the garage without fear of bricks, but we don’t in fact
trust everyone at every time. Our trust is conditional and it’s contextual, and we
distrust others for two reasons. First, they might indeed mean us harm by lying,
stealing, or cheating, but, second, they might actually mean us well, but simply
be incompetent, unable to fulfil their promises to us, and that, I think, explains
why we often don’t trust politicians. It’s not that they’re liars, it’s just that they’re
incompetent.

Complete trust comes about when we choose not to monitor other

people, and Elster provides the example of not reading your spouse’s diary. So
trustful marriage is one where you don’t have to lock your secret journal away.
But when it comes to our security outside of the household, well then we have
different levels of trust. We move away from a pure trust to a more sceptical
trust. When we’re unsure of other people’s motives, we need certainty about
what they might do, and there is a nice way of doing this. We could get to know
people. We could become friendly and, hence, have more certainty that they
mean well. That would be nice.

But the not-so-nice way is to remain sceptical to trust, but verify and that
means monitoring others. Rather than assuming good faith, we assume nothing.
Except that if people know that they are on camera – hi there – then they’ll
behave. Our technologies today, from facial recognition, to drones, to artificial
intelligence, they allow us to create that kind of sceptical trust. But think about
it. Notice what we’ve lost by doing that. We’ve lost the trust that comes from
friendship and from contact and can we really be sure that this new technology
won’t itself fall into the hands of those who mean us ill because now we have a
new problem of trust. To paraphrase the Roman poet, Juvenal, who monitors the
monitors? We may need to be just as sceptical about trusting our so-called
protectors.

So let’s dig a little deeper into the challenges we face in securing security.
We have to strike a balance between two enemies of security, between anarchy
and tyranny. And let’s start, as human society itself did, with anarchy. A world of
anarchy, it’s not one where no one is enforcing order. It’s one where there is no
single entity with a monopoly on the use of force. So civil wars are anarchic,
international politics is anarchic, and so, with our daily life, at least for most of us,
before the origins of national police forces.

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 Before 1800, there was no police force to call on if you had something
stolen or were harmed. It was instead a self-help system, and not the nice kind of
self-help, like mindfulness and scented candles, this was vigilantism. The first
modern police force, the first modern civilian police force, was not founded until
the 1820s in London. Germany’s first civilian police force was founded here, in
Berlin, in that momentous year, 1848. But until the 20th century, even in Europe,
criminal laws were rarely uniformly enforced throughout every country. And in
the rest of the world, even today, anarchy has often barely been conquered at all.

Let me give you an example. This summer, I travelled to Rio de Janeiro. I

stayed in a hotel on the golden smile of the Copacabana beach. From the 14th
floor swimming pool, which I realise sounds ridiculous, I could turn around and
look at the lapping waves of the Atlantic on one side, or I could swivel all the way
around and stare at the steep hillsides of Rio and see the favelas there. One and a
half million people live in those favelas, in shanty houses with gerry-rigged
electricity. And if you’d like to see the favelas on Google Street View, well, you’re
out of luck because, just like the taxis and Ubers of Rio, Google’s
image-capturing cars won’t enter them.

Security in the favelas, such as it is, is provided by local drug gangs. But
the favelas are not anarchic simply because the drug gangs are in charge
because, often, nobody’s in charge at all. Indeed, some police officers have
formed militias in the favelas that have got into the extortion and drug business
there and, in the past decade, Rio’s police have killed over 10 ,000 people. So in
the favela, it’s not that there is no one you can trust to protect you, it’s that you
don’t know who you can trust, or for how long.

Now, the anarchy of Rio is unfortunately commonplace in Latin America.

The Mexican beach city of Acapulco, once the favourite haunt in the 1960s of
Frank Sinatra and Brigitte Bardot, today has one of the highest homicide rates in
the world. In 2018, its entire police force was disbanded because it had been
infiltrated by drug cartels. And at its worst, anarchy can derail the very heart of
government itself. In Ecuador, today, again, drug controllers have seized control
of security from the police. But, now, their new targets have been presidential
candidates, three of whom have been assassinated this year.

Now, no democracy, certainly no liberal democracy, can survive when it

doesn’t hold a monopoly on the use of force. We cannot then truly defund the
police. But curtailing anarchy doesn’t end our problems because, when we aim
for security, we might end up oversteering like a drunkard on a narrowboat and
then we find ourselves, again, prone to bad actors, the very ones who we employ
to protect us.

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 Our second enemy, tyranny, replaces anarchy. And the word ‘police’ has
its origin here in Germany, in the rather ominous phrase, “well-ordered police
state, wohlgeordneter polizeistaat”. This encompassed everything, from
regulating measurements to what clothing you could wear on holidays, to how
old a child had to be to get a funeral. And the state has always sought this kind of
authority over us, an inward conquest of our minds and our bodies. But in our
contemporary liberal era, we shrug away these as impingements on our freedom
and indeed for good reason. Until, that is, we feel insecure, and then we may find
ourselves granting tyrannical powers to our protectors that we wish we hadn’t.
Not a well-ordered police state, simply a police state. We exchange anarchy for
tyranny.

In America, this means police forces who increasingly predate on and

profit from the citizens they are supposed to protect, fining them for the most
minor of infractions. When the US Department of Justice investigated the police
force of the city of Ferguson, Missouri, they found that it essentially ran a
protection racket. Let me give you an example of one especially egregious case.
The police arrested a black man they found cooling off in his car after playing
basketball. After he questioned why they wanted to search him, they arrested
him at gunpoint and first they charged him with not wearing a seatbelt, though
he was sitting in a parked car, and then they charged him with using a false name
because he gave his name as Mike’ when it was Michael. He was fined, sent to
court and lost his job, all for what?

And in Europe too we’ve also been willing to curtail freedoms in dealing
with asylum seekers. The Danish government strips new arrivals of their
jewellery, the Greek government has physically pushed boats back to the Turkish
shore and, in the UK, our hostile environment, meant to dissuade illegal
immigrants, means the banks, landlords, employers must all check the
documents of anyone seeking their services. Even me, as a professor, I am
obliged to report on my PhD students. So when I ask for papers please, it’s not
just a request for more academic publications, rather darker in tone.

Now all of us felt the tyrannical hand of government during the COVID-
19 pandemic and politicians were asked the unimaginable, to keep citizens at
home for 23 hours a day, solitary confinement experienced collectively. And that
was draconian, but most of us understood and obeyed, but it has left farcical
memories of police officers fining people for drinking coffee on a walk, of Italian
police drones chasing sunbathers down a beach and tragic memories too of
families kept from dying relatives, of students fined £10,000 for hosting a soiree,
while politicians partied away from the public eye. And that’s because tyranny is
always arbitrary. Some face the wrath of the state, others enjoy the privileges of

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immunity and when we set aside our rights and our rules, well then security
becomes unevenly enforced.

So how then do we know if, in our quest to curtail anarchy, we’ve edged
too far into tyranny because in Western democracies our COVID era tyranny was
temporary. The state ended social distancing rules and it hasn’t brought them
back even with new COVID-19 waves, but for several years that was not true for
Chinese citizens. China implemented three full years of a zero COVID strategy
and, at first, that literally meant sealing citizens into their apartments with blow
torches. Even in late 2022, just a year ago, Shanghai was shut down for two
whole months, and previous threats to our security in the West have also led to
long-lasting tyranny.

The US Patriot Act following 9/11 massively increased state surveillance

and it lasted almost two full decades. But it could be worse. Licensing laws
created in the UK during the First World War restricting drinking times at pubs,
well, they lasted 91 years. Oceans rose and fell before you could get a drink after
11 p.m. in a British pub.

How then are we to strike a balance between anarchy and tyranny? What
does a successful future of security look like? Well, our key task, our key task
must be to ensure that the technologies that we use to better protect us from
anarchy do not themselves overwhelm our rights and our freedoms because our
abilities to monitor each other have expanded exponentially, tied to the
processing power of microchips. We can now see everything, but can we really
trust ourselves with that power?

Now, today’s digital panopticon is not entirely new because every British
teenager growing up in the 1990s, like yours truly, remembers CCTV cameras
outside of the off-license – hi there, Mr Security Guard – but nowadays facial
recognition software can cross-reference these images, and that can be crucial as
a deterrent or to investigate crimes, it’s even used in wartime to identify Russian
soldiers, in Ukraine, but that technology can easily fail us, and sometimes it
simply doesn’t work. Live facial recognition was piloted at London’s Westfield
shopping centre, but of the 42 suspects that it identify, only eight were accurate,
and that’s the kind of predictive power you would associate with a
pseudoscience, like phrenology.

But these technologies are getting better and dictatorships can use them,
not to protect people, but to strip them of their freedoms. For example, the Putin
government employs facial recognition technology to identify Russian protesters
against his invasion of Ukraine, and authoritarian use of facial recognition is
especially advanced in China. Now, you may have heard of the so-called social

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credit system that monitors Chinese citizens and potentially blacklists them from
flights and from universities, but that policy so far is embryonic, it’s not yet an
all-judging digital eye.

Where the Chinese government does use more advanced technology is to

monitor protestors, particularly the Uyghur residents of Xinjiang, and there is
now a perverse symbiosis between the Chinese government on the one hand and
Chinese software companies who train their algorithms on protests and, in turn,
they receive more lucrative government contracts to better finance more
tyrannical algorithms.

So we may want to use facial recognition to curb anarchy, but the risks of
it falling into the authoritarian hands of ill-meaning governments are profound.
We have a choice to make. We could throw our hands up and follow San
Francisco and simply ban the use of facial recognition software, but at a
minimum, we need to tightly control access to and use of these databases.

And we could also flip the problem and we could use the digital
panopticon to prevent the people who protect us from exploiting that power. So
police bodycams are one possible solution. One study found that they halved
homicides committed by the police, but bodycams have limits. Now, police unions
will argue that wearing cameras over-restrains them, prevents them from doing
their job, but on the other hand, the police officers who murdered George Floyd
or who witnessed it, well, they were wearing body cameras too, so even the
panopticon of constant video recording cannot always restrain bad actors.

Now, it’s not only new technologies that can destabilise our security. New
technologists are often equally challenging. My one-time colleague at the
University of Minnesota, Colin Kahl, became the US Assistant Secretary of
Defence. He was tasked with American support for Ukraine’s defence against the
Russian invasion, and that meant dealing with Elon Musk. Now, according to the
New Yorker magazine, Kahl had to beg Musk to maintain access to his private
satellites, known as Starlink, and Musk apparently shut off Starlink when the
Ukrainians planned a drone submarine attack on the Russian naval fleet so even
the American military, the most powerful guarantor of security on Earth, ended
up reliant on the caprices of a billionaire.

New technologies, they forced us to think about how to protect our

liberal democracy from tyranny. The Russian invasion of Ukraine reminds us it’s
just as important to protect liberal democracies from actual tyrannies. Now,
arguably, Vladimir Putin launched his fatal and, one hopes, futile attack because
of a misunderstanding about that fundamental element of security, trust. Not
trust in Putin, I don’t think anyone in this room is naive enough for that, but

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Putin’s misunderstanding about trust among Western allies, and trust is most
effective when we can rely on shared knowledge of each other’s motives and
perhaps Donald Trump’s posturing around NATO had convinced Putin that the
Western alliance was fractured and distrustful, but that was a mistake.

Now NATO’s powers seem to come from legal obligations to defend one
another, but, in reality, these are unenforceable. Who do you call if America
doesn’t show up to protect you? What mattered instead was a trust in how other
NATO members would behave, and that trust, that trust is built on a shared
commitment to liberal democracy and not money, but politics, because there was
a common misconception that economic ties would enable peace, that the
coupling of China and Russia to Western economies would make warfare
obsolete, but we can’t trust someone just because we trade with them.

Real trust, real security comes from being able to let down our guard, and
that we can only do with our allies, with those who share our common
commitments to order without tyranny, liberty without anarchy. And, ultimately,
the future of our security depends on like-minded states determined to preserve
the principles of liberal democracy, both from the sirens of authoritarian
populism at home and from the cynical despots of autocracies abroad, and, in
Berlin, where both threats are living memories, that message must ring clear.

So I began with a story about a brick, but Berlin’s story, of course, is about
a wall, a wall of division, of despair, of distrust, a wall built in international
anarchy that symbolised tyranny. But that wall came down, and as we seek for
security between the perils of anarchy and tyranny, it’s up to liberal democracies,
it’s up to us to prevent new walls from rising.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

ANITA ANAND: So we’re going to take questions from the audience. Can
I just start with a question, though, first of all, Ben, the world feels more
dangerous than it ever has in my lifetime and I wonder whether the organisations
that are meant to give us that sense of global security – and you mentioned
NATO, but I’m thinking about the United Nations – where we have seen horse
trading, deals, vetoes, people falling out, are they fit for purpose for the future?

BEN ANSELL: I think the first way to answer that question is to say what
else? So in the absence of a United Nations, that presumably means that we just
go to a world of competing alliances. Now, we already have that world, but at
least having some kind of overarching framework that can push against the worst
tendencies of competition among hostile powers, I think is better than its
absence. But the United Nations worked more effectively in some ways in the

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early Cold War because there was a sort of place where the superpowers could
come up with deals where they agreed and then obviously couldn’t resolve issues
like Korea or Vietnam in a useful way.

As that balance of power has shifted, first to an American-led world, but

now to a world where it’s not really clear where the balance of power lies any
more, I think the United Nations is going to struggle, not because it’s an
institution that’s any worse than it was, but because worlds of competing powers
are very difficult because it’s anarchy.

ANITA ANAND: Okay. Very interesting. Let’s take some – oh, hands
shooting up straight away. Let’s start with you.

ROBIN ALEXANDER: It’s Robin Alexander from Die Welt, which is a

German newspaper. Our Chancellor announced that Zeitenwende, which is like
an historical turning point, and he had in mind security politics and we are
building a real army now, which we haven’t had for decades, and I always had the
impression this feeling, giving all your trust to the American protectors, feeling
super-secure that would be a very German thing, but your lecture gave me the
impression it’s an overall Western feature. So do we have a special German
problem concerning security?

BEN ANSELL: People who’ve been trying to get the Germans to pay 2%
of GDP for NATO would have liked many other countries to do so. It really is only
France, the United Kingdom, Greece, a couple of other countries who paid that
amount. So it’s a much more general European problem. What makes the
German situation distinct is, of course, Germany’s historic legacy and the
concerns of other countries about what a re-armed Germany would look like and
then the kind of self-reflection of Germans about how they feel about that. So I
recognise for Germany there is a double bind.

I think it’s important for Spain, for Italy, for other countries to take
seriously the challenges of protecting Europe in the potential absence of a kind
of American 800-pound gorilla coming in to knock heads. I do think that
Germany’s double challenge probably involves reassuring other European
countries, but also, I think, reassuring Germans that re-armament is being done,
or increased spending, however we want to call it, is being done within the time-
tested and strong tenets of liberal democracy within Germany, that this won’t
accelerate into tyranny.

JEREMY CLIFFE: Jeremy Cliffe, I’m from Open Society Foundations. I

think it’s fair to say that most Germans and most Brits alike take for granted the
fact that their security is underwritten to a large extent by American military

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power, and yet that arrangement may well be on the ballot at the presidential
election next year. Do you think that we are overly confident or complacent even
about our security, especially here in Western Europe?

BEN ANSELL: Yeah, I mentioned in the lecture that NATO doesn’t work
because you can legally oblige the United States to show up and defend you. You
can’t. We have relied on the United States making what seemed to be a diamond-
hard commitment to that, and maybe that diamond is now A zirconium and it’s
not quite as strong, particularly in a new Trump administration. One could have
argued, I think, from 2016 to 2020, that Trump, in part, was trying to resolve the
problem of getting other NATO partners to spend more money on the military,
and with some success, arguably, on that. But that’s not to say that Trump will be
happy if Germany and other European countries spend 2% or more on GDP. He
may just still abandon the whole game, right. So that might just end up having
been a kind of nice side benefit of Trump being difficult in the first
administration. So I think that is a real risk. I think it means that if Trump
abandons some of the NATO commitments that we end up in an even more
multipolar world where Europe really does have to take providing its own
security itself far more seriously.

ALMUT MOLLER: Thanks very much, Professor Ansell. My name is

Almut Moller. I’ve been involved in government actually over the past years and
we were trying to keep our people safe from what you described as insecurity
working in regional government as a state secretary in Hamburg that you also
mentioned in your speech. We’re very much trying to keep our people safe, but
we have a new level of insecurity, the war of aggression against the sovereign
state in the heart of Europe that you’ve been describing. You know, it’s bringing a
whole discussion to this country that is about, you know, what do we have to do
to step up security, invest in security, but on the other hand, it implies that we
need to confront, I think, our people, our citizens with new realities of insecurity
that I never thought we would have to do.

BEN ANSELL: Yeah. I mean I think that connects to this question of

whether the US security umbrella has made people dependent in a way that has
neutralised arguments about how to pay for security, what the trade-offs are to
provide it, in every country in Europe about how the disparate countries of
Europe might collectively militarise or have joint operations. Many of these
questions were unresolved. In part, they got brought into questions about the
European Union and whether an European army would go alongside, in part
they’re questions about whether German re-armament, as I guess many
Europeans would think about it, was something to be encouraged or discouraged
while the Americans are willing to provide the arms.

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 I don’t think that that debate is resolved in Germany, but I also don’t
think it’s resolved in other European countries that border Germany. Clearly,
there needs to be a step change in serious thought about defence, given what’s
happening to Europe’s east and south and southeast, in ways that are going to
lead to really hard conversations where most of the conversations that have been
had have been about creating an ever more perfect union. This is grittier stuff
that I think will be a challenge for European leaders.

ANITA ANAND: There’s a young woman over there.

EVA TOSATTO: Hi, thank you. My name is Eva Tosatto. I’m an alumnus of
the Hertie School. I’m Italian, that’s why the accent. My question is on personal
security and it deals with what I think also impacts that and it’s economic
inequality, both at an individual level and at a collective level. What do you think
that this problem, this global issue, what role will it play in the future of security?

BEN ANSELL: So that’s a really interesting question because a lot of

social scientists have been working on the relationship at home in countries of
having high levels of inequality with perceptions about crime, and there’s an
argument out there by some of my Oxford colleagues that governments will
actually end up re-distributing money to prevent the inequality when it becomes
very associated with crime, right? So you could think of that as a good kind of
thermostatic response to rising inequality on kind of mean merits, right. When
rich people are really worried about having their stuff stolen, well that’s when
they’re willing to pay higher taxes, but there’s a political logic to that.

I do think that when people talk about defunding the police in the United
States often what they really mean is the United States should spend less on the
criminal justice system and much more on a welfare state because, if it did, it
would have crime levels like in Europe because those crime levels are because of
lower levels of destitution in Europe. And that might be true, but I think there are
lots of other things going on in countries like the United States like the mass
availability of guns that makes it harder for me to assume that if Joe Biden were
to increase the generosity of unemployment benefits that it would really have
any effect.

SUSAN NEIMAN: I’m Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, and I
have a short comment and a question. The comment is I’m glad the police force
looks so good from over the water, but there have been police scandals here that
are not as funny as the one at Elmau like the failure to protect, but also to
investigate the murders of a number of Muslim citizens have disturbed people
very much. So that’s a short comment, but the question is since somebody has to
mention or ought to mention the elephant in the room I might as well do it. I have

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been thinking a lot in the last month about the parallels between September
11th and October 7th, and in both cases the world was shaken by a horrific act of
terror that was then, for security reasons, understandably, George W Bush
offered all kinds of reasons for attacking Iraq, military decisions were made that
were actually against long term security interests of both those states and I just
wonder when people are actually making those decisions, how short term do they
think, how long term do they think, how can one weigh those concerns?

BEN ANSELL: I think the challenge that the US faced, that Israel will face
and, indeed, Western democracies more broadly face with terrorism is what the
long run plan beyond any kind of reactive defence response will be and how to
make sure that that plan fits within the framework of liberal democratic rules
within those countries. I do think there is a challenge in Israel about the state of
liberal democracy, given the protests against Netanyahu that have been going on
for the last year, that has made it harder for the state to remain safe. Now, of
course, the horrendous attack could have happened for all kinds of reasons, in all
kinds of ways, but I think that a state that is already debating its own principles of
liberal democracy is in a worse position than it otherwise would be.

I think you can see similar things that happened after 9/11 with the
Patriot Act, right? It took 20 years to get rid of it, and that temptation is always
going to be very, very strong immediately and it is not a popular politician who
says, hold on, slow down, how does this work within our own framework, and
maybe not a politician who can win re-election. So I acknowledge it’s a major
challenge.

JOHN KAMPFNER: John Kampfner, journalist and author, part Berliner,

part Londoner. I wrote a book called ‘Freedom for Sale’. It was looking at the
Singapore model. I was fascinated by the willing decision of many very educated
people to waive public freedoms, not private freedoms, public freedoms, in return
for security and prosperity, looking at the attractiveness of that model around
the world, particularly in the global south and a lot of countries that are now
called middle ground states. If you look at Western liberal democracy, as we
understand it, it’s 80 years old. Political systems don’t normally survive that long.
I just want you to give some thoughts about why we assume that Western liberal
democracy is the only bulwark between anarchy and tyranny, but maybe there
are other alternatives as well.

BEN ANSELL: From the Singaporean perspective, for those Singaporeans

who perhaps didn’t care about forming other political parties or the extent of
their free speech, it was a pretty good deal, right. The country did grow at an
incredible clip and remain secure in a not always peaceful part of the world. I
don’t think that liberal democracy is the only system that can keep people safe. I

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mean, arguably Chinese citizens are kept relatively safe and crime is not
incredibly high there. What I do think is that having liberal democracy does not
mean trading off and getting higher levels of crime, right, as we know in Europe,
with very, very low crime levels.

What I think is a challenge for those of us, though, who would want
people to believe that liberal democracy leads to security, is to acknowledge that
it’s easy from the perspective of people who live in one with low crime rates to
not want to give up our freedoms and to look around and say, well, I feel pretty
secure day in, day out. For those people who live in countries where those
freedoms are not existing already, then a promise that liberal democracy, where
it feels like the handbrake has been taken off, will somehow improve security
must seem very illusory. And, indeed, the Singapore model or the Dubai model
will look, I think, like a successful one for them to follow.

And so as the many middle income countries of the world get richer over
the next 30 years, I think this is one of the reasons that we might not anticipate
the kinds of liberal democratisations that we saw, say, in the ‘80s and ‘90s
because that more securitarian model, which might not be completely
authoritarian or totalitarian, but will lack some of the rights that we cherish, will
prove effective to some degree in terms of securing security for people.

DIMA: Hi. My name is Dima. I’m an MIA student here at the Hertie School.
So, Russian military doctrine assume that their next war, even before Ukraine,
would be against a superior opponent, a war of attrition that would be long
enough until they could end it on favourable terms. Do you believe this bubble of
security that you had mentioned makes liberal democracies disadvantaged to
confront bad actors for as long as it takes?

BEN ANSELL: That’s a great question because I think Putin’s view of

liberal democracies is that they are decadent, that they cannot possibly fight on,
that they don’t really care and that it will therefore be simple to decapitate the
leadership of nearby countries, in Ukraine, but presumably he wouldn’t have
stopped just there and that the West wouldn’t be able to stay the course. So I
think he was proven wrong in his first guess, in the sense that the Western
alliance was far stronger and, of course, Ukraine, while having a relationship with
NATO, it’s not in NATO, it doesn’t have a ring on it, and that means it’s much
harder to convince people that the West was really going to protect Ukraine.

And so Putin could well have been proven right, and he still could be
because the situation is now one of stalemate. It’s stalemate, by the way, that’s a
lot better than the stalemate it would have been in May of last year, right,
because the Ukrainians have managed to conquer a lot of their territory back, but

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we are now stuck. And I suppose the question is how lucky does Vladimir Putin
feel? Is he really that confident that in two or three years’ time of continued
isolation from the rest of the global economy and occasional mini-coups by
generals running mercenary groups that he really can last that period of time?
So, yes, I think we have a challenge, but I wouldn’t underestimate the challenge
facing Vladimir Putin either.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you. Just a very short one from me, and maybe
this will start you thinking about other things, but when it comes to security and
personal security versus state interest in security, can we try a little thought
experiment? When it comes to encryption on social media, should authorities
have the right to break that encryption on social media? If they say, you know,
they need it to find terrorists or paedophiles or people who mean to do harm to a
great number of people.

BEN ANSELL: So this is a question that has been in a lot of recent debate
in the United Kingdom because our government has sought to ask WhatsApp and
other companies to decrypt their messages so that anyone can read them and,
from the perspective of the social media companies, this is essentially asking
them to undermine their raison d’etre because the whole point is to be able to
have encrypted messages. So they look sort of shell-shocked at the government
and I think it will be very hard for a government to do this for one important
reason, and that’s international capitalism. That if WhatsApp really were to say,
“Well, okay, Britain, I guess no one in your country gets to use WhatsApp
anymore because we’re not going to decrypt our messages,” then I think you’d
find the government reversing very quickly.

And that does raise an important question, which is why shouldn’t

governments have that right? If a democratic populace elects a government on
the basis that it ought to be able to decrypt messages, then I guess that has
democratic merit, but I suppose voters have to make trade-offs too. That might
mean no WhatsApp. We don’t like having our phones bugged. We generally set
very high standards for governments to be able to do things like that, but we
have accepted our phones being bugged. But I will note, our phones still work.
British Telecom doesn’t threaten to leave the country and I think the government
is going to find that global tech capitalists are a harder battle to fight on that
front.

ANITA ANAND: Okay.

DANIEL GAFKMANDENOSA : My name is Daniel Gafkemandenosa, and I

study public policy here at the Hertie School. You’ve talked about trust and
insecurity. There is a lot of countries in the global south where people want

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democracy or want to keep their democracy and they have faced a lot of
insecurity and, for also historical reasons, they have a lot of distrust in Western
democracies. How can we do better?

BEN ANSELL: That’s another great question. So the low levels of trust in,
say, Latin American countries often lead to figures like Jair Bolsonaro, right, lead
to figures who promise that they will get a handle on crime and, indeed, that
crime, of course, may come from inequality. The difficulty that we face with those
figures is that Jair Bolsonaro and others don’t usually stop just with control some
crime, they have a series of authoritarian impulses that tend to rail beyond that.
And it then becomes very difficult in some of those countries that have an
understandably chagrined view of American power, for liberal democracies from
America, and sometimes from Europe to come in and say, well, you’re doing it all
wrong when they say, well, look, we have much higher levels of insecurity, it’s not
surprising that people like Bolsonaro or Milei in Argentina are popular.
And so a softly, softly approach from other countries is always helpful in
this area. It’s not really the job of the United States to tell Brazil how to run its
crime policy, that’s the democratic right of Brazilians and they face very distinct
challenges.

MAX KOSCHYK: Hello Max Koschyk, Deutsche Welle, foreign

broadcasting in Germany. I would like to come back to your tech aspects of your
lecture. Perhaps because of Germany’s history, Germans today are very sceptical
about technology and very fierce about their data protection, the fax machine
rumours are true, and I’d like to know from you what can-----

ANITA ANAND: What is the fax machine rumour? I don’t know.

MAX: Germans are famous for still employing fax machines for a lot of
public communications. In the public sector we’re still dependent in some seeds
to kind of, yeah, get a fax through to get something done.

ANITA ANAND: Because a fax is private and everything else might be

compromised.

MAX: They’re just more sceptical of adapting modern digital technology

to kind of foster any kind of public sector growth or efficiency.

ANITA ANAND: Okay.

MAX: And I’d like to know what can public institutions do to actually
harness technology for good, especially since what you called in your lecture, you

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know, we’re so dependent on capricious billionaires and their sometimes actually
also undemocratic tendencies to kind of use technology.

BEN ANSELL: Yeah, we certainly can’t point at all tech billionaires and
say trust those guys, I think that’s well understood. I do think that the most
annoying, but maybe useful change in European and in British law are data
protection rules, right? So I have to deal with them, as an academic, all the time
and I think academics in the past did do things – this is just speaking from our
perspective – sending students’ grades around by email or Excel spreadsheets
with all of their private information, just without thinking at all. And so some of
these processes that we now have to follow, which, yes, they’re annoying at first,
are things we should have been doing a long time ago.

But notice the technology allows us to move things very rapidly. We’re
not sending these by fax machines, by the way, that’s not how people get grades
at Oxford, they get them on postcards sent from college to college. We, as the
users of this technology, have had to learn new norms and trust that each other
will use those norms and trust that if you really violate those norms, you get in a
lot of trouble. That, I think, ultimately, is how you develop trust. It’s not just from
some technology that prevents us from having to make decisions. It’s about
making decisions ourselves and learning those new norms. And, of course, that’s
very challenging, but some of the legal frameworks we have, I think, encourage
that.

ANITA ANAND: A question at the back.

GREG BOND: My name is Greg, Greg Bond. I work at the Technical

University of Applied Sciences, Wildau, which is here near Berlin. I’m interested in
trust, and I’m particularly interested in trust in democratic institutions within
democratic liberal countries and we’ve seen that eroded. People are losing trust
in democratic institutions and I’d be very interested in your take on that and on
the future of democratic societies. Thank you.

BEN ANSELL: The future of security can’t be separated from the future
of liberal democracy, both in the sense that liberal democracies tend to trust one
another to provide security, but also if the core of liberal democracy itself falls
apart, it’s unclear that we do have that security. As you say, there have been
dramatically declining levels of trust in Western countries. Some of that is not
thinking that the government looks out for you, but perhaps, even worse, is this
growing sense that it would be better to have a strong leader who could ignore
parliament, and you see higher support for that in almost all Western countries.

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 And it might seem that having a strong leader who can get things done
would be good for security, but I think the argument I want to make is that’s
unlikely to be the case. The security that we have in the West comes from a series
of liberal democracies with fairly similar governing principles, trusting one
another largely because they share those governing principles. And I think the
shift away that we’ve seen in the United States is really indicative that lower
domestic trust in one of those countries can just end up producing lower trust
that that country will be there to protect you when the rubber meets the road.

MUSA OKWONGA: Hello, my name is Musa Okwonga, I’m a writer. We’ve

seen a vigorous conversation within Western democracies about external threats,
threats to borders and the rest. At the same time, within Western democracies
we’ve seen a struggle for abortion rights in Poland, in the US. We’ve also seen,
here in Germany, the AFD having sections of the party declared right wing
extremists by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, some would say
months, maybe years late. To what extent are we being complacent about
internal security, threats to security from within Western countries, from the
majority of Western citizens and maybe perhaps even bad faith actors?

BEN ANSELL: Yeah, I absolutely agree that we have to protect liberal

democracy as much from populist and authoritarian tendencies at home as from
enemies abroad. And we, in fact, created a set of apparatus to do that after 9/11,
but it was aimed at Islamic terrorism, things like the Prevent law in the UK which
requires educational institutions to check on the bona fides of people who are
going to speak. And what’s turned out with a lot of these rules that we have is
that they’ve been applied to right wing terrorists or right wing extremists
because, in fact, it was those groups who end up violating these norms more
often than the original enemies who they were intended for.

You see this also in the United States with the question about whether
the Department of Homeland Security should focus more on right wing terrorism
or right wing extremism and the huge kerfuffle this caused with Republicans
saying, “Hey, does that mean us,” and a lot of people saying, “Yes, some of you. It
does mean some of you.”

BEN PERST: Yes, hello. I’m Ben Perst I’m also a student at the Hertie
School for International Affairs, and I found the aspect really fascinating of you
saying that it’s kind of ridiculous that we even feel secure, but that states kind of
made us feel secure that we even leave our house today. But that also made me
wonder is the actual state goal not even ensuring the security of the citizens, but,
instead, more ensuring that the citizens feel secure in the country, and I think
that has some important ramifications. For example, when we think about
policies like, say, AI or the body cams that might in data not make us more

19
secure, but make us feel more secure, and do policies make us feel secure, but
not make us more secure, still a society that values that?

BEN ANSELL: I think, actually, I want to slide the question slightly over to
say feelings of trust and security can be as important as the reality because
conversations about crime often take on this tenor that the public fear of crime
doesn’t bear very close resemblance to objective crime statistics usually, right?
We live in a world of much, much lower crime than the one that I grew up in the
1800-----

ANITA ANAND: How old are you, Ben?

BEN ANSELL: Very old. I’ve been here for a long time.

ANITA ANAND: Oh, really, you’re looking good on it.

BEN ANSELL: In the 1980s and 1990s, right, crime was very, very high
then and, yet, crime is still extraordinarily salient, particularly in the United
States. And so it might be picking up kind of other authoritarian impulses people
have, or it might just be that we demand even more security than we did in the
past, or at least to be made to feel secure by the state. Feelings of safety are
important feelings and they matter in democratic politics, regardless of exactly
how closely they bear evidence to real statistics.

ANITA ANAND: Thank you. And our final question, it’s going to be the
final question.

DAVID FRANKS: So my name is David Franks. It would seem that our

sense of security is in decline. Are you optimistic that that will turn around and, if
so, what’s your optimism based on?

BEN ANSELL: I am always an optimist in the sense that I know it

sometimes seems a bit gauche to sort of point at 300 years ago and say, “Look at
how poor and ill and how early people died,” but it is, I think nonetheless, an
astonishing wonder of human society that we are all as safe and wealthy as we
are today. But I also acknowledge that pointing to three centuries of
development is not very helpful, so I’ll point to the 30 years of declining crime
rates. If I were walking to the garage in Manchester today, I’d be much less likely
to have a brick thrown at my head.

Now, what has led to that is unclear. That lowering in crime is something
that we can hold onto. I do think that the pre-Ukraine invasion decline in
interstate war was something that we could hold onto and is something that we

20
can still keep. Yes, many of the technologies that we’re developing could over-
monitor us, but I do think it is much easier to imagine keeping things secure
because we can monitor bad behaviour and we’ll have criminal justice systems
that can punish people. So our abilities, in other words, to enforce the law have
increased.

Now, of course, there’s a kind of 1984 aspect to that that I don’t think any
of us want to live in, but I also think it’s a human achievement in some way to
prevent bad actors from being able to get away with abusing people, say at
football stadiums, to get away with assaulting people outside a bar, to get away
with stealing things, all of those things, it’s much easier to catch people. It’s not a
bad thing that people who make racist chants at football stadiums can be caught,
it’s not a bad thing that people who hit people outside of bars can be arrested.

ANITA ANAND: We’re going to have to leave it there, I’m afraid. There
were so many more questions to be asked here in Berlin. Next time we’re going to
be in Sunderland, in the northeast of England, to hear Ben talk about solidarity
after the fractures of recent years, can we actually come together again? But, for
now, vielen dank to our audience here at the Hertie School in Berlin and a huge
thank you, of course, to our BBC Reith lecturer, Professor Ben Ansell.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

END OF TRANSCRIPT

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