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S4 Episode 23: In conversation with Mark Leonard
38 Plays1 month ago
Today John and Dejan are joined by Mark Leonard, Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Tune in to hear us discuss the UK's relations with EU, NATO, and the current political situation in Hungary and Poland.
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Transcript
Introduction to Mark Leonard and Brexit Discussion
00:00:00
Dejan
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Debatable Discussions podcast. Today we're incredibly lucky to be joined by Mark Leonard. Mark, thank you so much for coming.
00:00:09
mark
Hi, it's a great pleasure to be with you both.
00:00:13
John Gartside
So Mark is the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. However, our listeners may also know him from the many books he's written the EU and China.
00:00:24
John Gartside
So to get straight into it, we thought we would discuss the UK's relations with the EU with you, something that's, well, I suppose it's been a constant theme of British politics over the last decade.
00:00:36
John Gartside
So has Sakia strengthened relations with the EU? What has he done in the vacuum that has been left, I suppose, after Brexit?
00:00:45
mark
Well, it's been that topic of Britain's relationships with Europe is something which has been a big deal for much longer than 10 years.
00:00:48
Dejan
Thank you.
00:00:54
mark
It's been like one of the big dividing lines in Britain since, you know, for most of the kind of political period after the Second World War and Brexit,
00:01:06
mark
was a really defining moment in it because it overturned a long period of time where British citizens and governments understood that a lot of our core interests are very similar to the countries around us, that in a world where people trade globally, they trade a lot more with their neighbours, but also when people think about their security, a lot of the security questions things which
00:01:32
mark
more closely shared with neighbors. You know, that ranges from questions of war and peace through to much less dramatic questions like immigration or an organized crime and climate change, energy security.
00:01:50
mark
And I think what happened when Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine was that
00:01:51
Dejan
What happened when. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Brexit's Impact on UK Economy and Migration
00:01:57
mark
A lot of people in Britain realised that their security was bound together with that of other countries around us and our neighbours. And even before the election, we saw shift where Britain was working more closely with other European countries, was trying to think about how it could cooperate and reverse the dynamic which we'd seen after Brexit of moving ever further away from...
00:02:23
mark
from the European Union and treating that an end in itself towards a position where people are trying to think in a more pragmatic way about, you where do our interests lie?
00:02:33
mark
And the most basic interest of which any government tries to promote is how to keep people safe.
00:02:33
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:02:39
mark
And that was something which already started to shift under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, but which is, and Rishi Sunat, but which has accelerated massively since Keir Starmer came to power.
00:02:52
mark
And you've seen that if you look at the debates around Ukraine, that Britain is one of the countries that's been bringing together this coalition of the willing, that's been trying to think about how to both help Ukraine and to support them.
00:02:57
Dejan
Thank you.
00:03:06
mark
so that they are able to carry on resisting Russian aggression, but also lead the diplomacy with the White House and to make sure that Donald Trump doesn't force Ukraine into a position which would not just destroy Ukrainian sovereignty and independence, but endanger the security of Europe. And that's something which has been really, really important.
00:03:31
mark
I think in parallel with that, There has been a recognition and the government's finally started to talk about it more openly that Brexit's been totally catastrophic for other British interests on migration. used to have a situation where the French would take illegal migrants back to France and there were all sorts of arrangements to cooperate around migration, which is a really big issue. But that had totally broken down, partly as a result of Brexit and the fact that Britain left a lot of the arrangements that were taking place there. But even more dramatic has been the impact on the British
00:04:10
mark
economy, which has been really, really catastrophic. You know, people estimate that 5% of the GDP has been lost, which is, you know, it's massive.
00:04:22
mark
We've been in a kind of no sluggish, no growth environment for a very, very long time now. And it's very difficult to escape from that. And that takes longer to change. And I think the government has been quite cautious about around that, probably too cautious. And as a result, they're having to make really, really difficult decisions in this budget where, you know, Rachel Rees is having to think about putting tax up in different areas, but she's not doing some of the things which would be the easiest ways of getting growth back, which would be to fundamentally change the relationship with European Union to remove a lot of the red tape and the barriers which have been brought in as a result of Brexit.
Public and Government Stance on Brexit Reversal
00:05:01
Dejan
Do you think that there's any way for the EU to welcome back Britain in it? Do you think there's any sort of... I don't think there's another word for reversing Brexit, but is that a possibility?
00:05:16
mark
I don't know. I think you guys might be around for long enough to to see a new situation. But definitely, there's very little desire from this government to have another referendum and to try and reverse Brexit. And I think you'd have to go through a democratic process to do that. But what's interesting to me is that both British citizens and citizens in other EU countries realised that The world that we're when people voted for Brexit in 2016 is pretty different from the world in 2025.
00:05:48
mark
And it's not really a question of going back to where we were then.
00:05:49
Dejan
It's really a question, but it's not really question.
00:05:51
mark
It's about how we can survive world where there's a war in Europe. You have aggression from Russia. You've got China bullying different countries with access to rare earths and putting them under a lot of pressure. And you've got a very unpredictable and unreliable American president who is raising questions about NATO and about how much we can depend on the US in the future.
00:06:20
Dejan
on both sides.
00:06:23
mark
My organisation, European Council on Foreign Relations, did a big opinion poll both in Britain, but also in about a dozen European countries
00:06:28
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:06:33
mark
after Trump was elected and asked them about that. And what we saw is that On both sides, people have moved on from the Brexit era divisions and they want to find ways of working together pragmatically on security, on building closer economic relationships.
00:06:50
mark
And on the EU side, people said that their governments and the European Union in Brussels should think about moving beyond the red lines, which we had during the Brexit debate and give Britain more economic access if that went along with building a closer security relationship.
00:07:08
mark
And in Britain, what we found is that even in parts of the country that had voted to leave the European Union in 2016, large numbers of people, a majority of people, including majority even of leave voters, were in favour of introducing all sorts of ways of getting closer to to Europe, including even having return to free movement if it meant that Britain could get back to having access to the single market.
00:07:36
mark
So I think there's much more pragmatic atmosphere at the level of public opinion than there is in
Euroscepticism in Italy and Hungary
00:07:45
mark
governments, because governments are very, very cautious and I think slightly traumatized by the experience of 2016.
00:07:45
Dejan
Thank you.
00:07:51
mark
But in my mind, and I think certainly in the mind of most British citizens, you know, the question is not about going back in time and getting back in a time machine to 2016 when, you know, Barack Obama was in the White House and he had a very different global environment. We were talking about having golden age of relations with China rather than being worried about Chinese economic coercion.
00:08:17
mark
And Britain was, I think, still the fifth biggest economy in the world. And we're now in a very different place to that. And I think we need to find pragmatic ways of of working with our closest neighbors on trade, on security, and to deal with issues like migration, energy security, and all the sorts of things which are driving up bills and the cost of living for British citizens.
00:08:41
John Gartside
And I agree that. I think the main thing for Sakiya is not to think about rejoining the EU, but as you said there, to acclimatise, because 2016 and that Brexit referendum and the protest was so long, it was so expensive, that wherever you fall on the debate,
00:08:48
Dejan
That's a good day.
00:08:59
John Gartside
And it's so impractical almost, as you said, go back in time and try and hold another referendum. And for the, I mean, definitely for Sakia's government, he almost needs to acclimatise and focus what he can do best, I suppose.
00:09:13
John Gartside
How, but across Europe, I suppose, tensions are still quite tenuous with the And in particular, we've seen with Italy, think they've introduced another sort of rule change recently.
00:09:25
John Gartside
How are their relations with the in particular, in the idea of there's been sort of talks about Georgia Maloney wanting to further distance Italy from the European Union?
00:09:35
mark
Actually, Georgia Maloney talked a lot about that and her party did before she became prime minister.
00:09:42
mark
But she's been very, very determined to make sure that Italy was a good European citizen and was right at the heart of European decision making since she's been in.
00:09:54
mark
You know, few years ago, before she became prime minister, there were people in her party who were talking about leaving the euro, maybe even leaving the European Union.
00:10:03
mark
And when she came to power, she made it absolutely clear that she had no intention of going down that route, that she believed in Italy being a kind of firm member of the European mainstream.
00:10:27
mark
I think one of the consequences of Brexit actually is that a lot of countries where you had large Eurosceptic parties have changed their position because they saw what a disaster Brexit was for Britain.
00:10:40
mark
So the paradoxical impact of our referendum to leave the European Union was to make the European Union really popular everywhere else. It had like record levels of popularity.
00:10:52
mark
and a lot of the eurosceptic parties whether it's the national front in france now called the the national assembly the rassemblement national party or maloney's party in italy or some of the more eurosceptic polish parties which were talking about leaving a pole exit leaving leaving the european union they all had to say actually no no that's not what we meant at all we're not going to go down the the route that
00:10:55
Dejan
Awesome.
00:11:18
mark
Britain went down. We just want to change the European Union from the inside. We want to to refound the European Union. But they had to run away from the from the idea of leaving because Brexit was seen as such a bad decision by a lot of people in all of these different countries who could see the economic costs that we paid Britain and the chaos that the country entered into and the fact that we were still negotiating and talking about it many, many years after the referendum had taken place.
Poland's Economic Growth and EU Integration
00:11:47
Dejan
Yeah, I think a very different sort of politician is Viktor Orban and the way he's been dealing with the EU and blocking the EU. How do you sort of, what's your read of him and how he's positioned himself in the last year, but also way earlier?
00:12:06
mark
So Viktor Orban is a fascinating figure. He first came to light in the anti-communist opposition in the 1980s when he was this young liberal firebrand who helped his country chart a path to freedom and to escape from the shadow of communism.
00:12:22
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:12:27
mark
And he was elected prime minister and was very much
00:12:31
Dejan
is
00:12:32
mark
a liberal politician who wanted to join the European mainstream. And then he lost the election, was out of power for a long time. And he then came back as prime minister, having reinvented himself as an anti-liberal nationalist,
00:12:50
mark
And he's an extraordinarily talented operator. He's very, very clever man. And he's sort of over the years been developing a completely different philosophy, which he started talking about the idea of illiberal democracy.
00:13:09
mark
And now it's turned into a strand of thinking, which a lot of the supporters call national conservatism.
00:13:10
Dejan
This is...
00:13:16
mark
But essentially, it's about putting national interests above European interests. It's about going back to seeing Hungary as a Christian country and preserving traditional way of life, including traditional families with women staying at home and having lots of children rather than going out to work.
00:13:38
mark
sticking to quite sort of traditional ideas of the role of religion, stopping immigrants from coming into Hungary.
00:13:49
mark
And also changing the nature of the Hungarian economy, which has benefited a huge amount from inward investment from countries like Germany and instead trying to create more of a national economy.
00:14:04
mark
And he also wants to change Hungary's geopolitical relationship. So he's very unhappy with the war in Ukraine and thinks that Europe should have a better relationship with Russia and with Vladimir Putin and that there should be a deal done to stop the war.
00:14:22
mark
He's opposed the idea of Ukraine ever joining the European Union. And He's quite isolated in European circles for those sorts of reasons.
00:14:33
mark
He's got a lot of supporters in Washington because... He's seen what he's done over the years of trying to dismantle a lot of the institutions of Hungarian democracy and the liberal checks and balances of the state.
00:14:48
mark
These things are very popular in the MAGA world, in the Make America Greater Again community around Donald Trump.
00:14:52
John Gartside
Thank
00:14:56
mark
So he has a lot of admirers on the right of politics in different places who see his playbook of coming to power, staying in power for a very long time and gradually shutting the opposition out of the media, changing the law courts and other institutions so that they don't stop him from doing whatever he wants to do in Hungary and using them to wipe out opposition in civil society and other political parties.
00:15:25
mark
So, you know, it does represent another model.
00:15:28
mark
He's pretty isolated in Europe at the moment and There are big questions about what he's going to do in the medium term. There are elections in Hungary in April.
00:15:42
mark
He's at the moment miles behind in the opinion polls. There is an opposition politician called Peter Magyar who's running against him, who is leading in the opinion polls.
00:15:52
mark
It's quite possible that Viktor Orban will find a way back. As I said, he's an extraordinarily talented political operator and he has also made it very, very difficult for other parties to function and to get time on television, on the radio because of the changes he's made to the country. Things are not looking so great in Hungary. The Hungarian economy is also not in a very good shape. If you compare Hungary to other countries that joined the European Union when they did, like Poland, they've grown much faster than Hungary has over the last decade or so.
00:16:25
mark
And those are some of the reasons why they're having trouble with the electorate at the moment, because Hungary's economy is not as strong as they'd like it to be.
NATO's Revitalization and Europe's Defense Goals
00:16:35
John Gartside
And you mentioned there Poland, and that's quite an interesting country, just because it's sort of been in the news occasionally for their strong economic growth. And why is this exactly? Why is Poland seeing this sort of great period of prosperity at the moment?
00:16:51
mark
I think a lot of these former communist countries have seen very fast growth because they were very poor when they joined the European Union. And they then, a lot of them opened up their economies, introduced a lot of economic reforms.
00:17:09
mark
And they had... the advantages of having quite well-educated populations who were very low wages because the countries were very, very poor.
00:17:20
mark
So there was a lot of inward investment from other parts of Europe to make things there. So Germany, for example, moved a lot of its car industry, the production of cars from Germany to countries like Hungary and Slovakia and Poland and other places.
00:17:39
mark
And so you sort of saw fast growth because they're going from a kind of low level of economic development, but had these very well-educated workforces, which they had from beforehand. And also because they were in European Union, they had access to the single market, which means that, you know, you get access to half a million,
00:18:05
mark
a million consumers as a result of being able to operate there. So these were very, very positive circumstances.
00:18:18
mark
And in Poland, it's a very polarised country. In some ways, Polish politics bit like American politics. You have these two big tribes, a kind of more liberal, cosmopolitan group, and then a more kind of conservative nationalist group that takes inspiration from Trump. And you have a lot of big fights between these different groups. But both sides...
00:18:40
mark
have tried to introduce economic policies which help Poland grow and to create a positive business environment for foreign investment. And that's allowed Poland to catch up very quickly with the countries around it. And if you've ever been to Warsaw, you can see country that's had a huge amount of investment where there are lots of new buildings and it's a very buzzy and exciting place, which is very, very different from the capital city that it was when Poland got rid of communism at the end of the
00:19:18
Dejan
Another sort of topic that we've touched upon is NATO. How do you think NATO is changing?
00:19:24
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:19:24
Dejan
And how do you think NATO is changing, especially because of the war in Ukraine, with a lot of these European countries, such as the UK, France and Germany coming together and sort of distancing themselves a little bit from Trump and America?
00:19:40
mark
So when the full-scale war in Ukraine started, this was an absolute body blow to many European countries who saw war come back to the European continent.
00:19:49
Dejan
Thank you.
00:19:54
mark
They felt very, very uncomfortable and scared, frankly, and realized that the long peace dividend, which had started at the end of the Cold War, was going to need to come to an end. And as a result, lots of countries started investing much more in defense.
00:20:15
mark
than they had done beforehand, but it also revived the transatlantic relationship. You know, the French President Emmanuel Macron had said that NATO was brain dead before that, and there wasn't much interest in working on European security.
00:20:25
John Gartside
Thank
00:20:29
mark
The Americans had been thinking much more about shifting resources out of Europe towards Asia. There was a pivot to Asia going on. And when President Biden was still in office, there was a big shift back to thinking about how you contain Russia?
00:20:45
mark
How we stop Russia from completely destabilizing the European continent and attacking other neighbors? How you support Ukraine in its efforts to defend itself, but also deter Russia from further invasion in other places?
00:20:53
Dejan
Thank you.
00:21:01
mark
And lots of European countries, struggled for a while to really pull their weight. at the beginning of the war, America was providing the bulk of the military support for the Ukrainians and a lot of the money which went to Ukraine.
00:21:17
mark
And it took quite a long time for European countries to have been enjoying living in a period of peace to be able to produce artillery and shells and the sorts of things that were needed to fight this war.
00:21:22
Dejan
Thank you.
00:21:31
mark
What you've seen over the last few years is an absolute revolution in terms of how European countries think about their own security. And it started when President Biden was still in office.
00:21:42
mark
So you had countries like Finland and Sweden that had been neutral countries that had not been part of NATO, joining NATO and completely changing the way that they thought about their security.
00:21:55
mark
And the other countries like Germany that had, because of the legacy of World War II, had had quite a pacifist culture and were very worried about getting involved in wars.
00:22:07
mark
start to take defense much more seriously and to massively increase the amount that they were spending on defense. And then when Donald Trump came into the White House and expressed some doubt about the viability of NATO and said that he has a very different attitude towards allies. Most American presidents see alliances and allies as making America much stronger, whereas Donald Trump had this idea since the
00:22:35
mark
allies are basically like vampires that are sucking America dry and getting Americans to pay for things that they should do themselves. So he's been obsessed for a long time with getting other countries to pull their weight.
00:22:44
Dejan
Yeah.
00:22:48
mark
And you saw as soon as he came in, a real sense amongst European countries that they needed to do a lot more to keep themselves safe. So you've had big increases in defense spending and So as part of the Trump management strategy, they agreed in The Hague earlier this year at the NATO summit to increase their defence spending to three and a half, because before that, they'd been a target of 2%, which no one had met.
00:23:14
Dejan
uh
00:23:15
mark
Now, Europeans are really meeting the, if you collectively, they're meeting the 2% target. And most countries, most European countries in NATO have already passed that threshold.
00:23:28
mark
they agreed to go up to three and a half percent on military and then another one and a half percent on thinking about how you prepare our societies so that to be ready for for an era of where there's much more insecurity and that together adds up to five percent which is a big signal to the americans but ultimately at the moment europeans
00:23:48
Dejan
Thank you.
00:23:51
mark
and European armies, because they're so used to fighting with America and having American support, can't do a lot of the basic things that you need to fight a war without America. So there big gaps, you know, gaps to do. Some of it's to do with logistics.
00:24:06
mark
How do you do air-to-air refueling? How do you transport large numbers of troops around? Some of it's to do with particular capabilities like long-range missiles and above all nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrents, but also things such as intelligence, satellites, reconnaissance and things like that.
00:24:28
mark
There are big gaps in what Europeans can do where they rely very much on America. What they realized when Donald Trump was elected was that it's not really on for 350 million Americans to be paying for the security of 500 million Europeans forever and ever, and that Europeans need to pull their weight more, but also that America might not be there if there are future problems and that the Europeans need to start working out how they can defend themselves without America or with less America.
00:25:03
mark
So we're going through this period where, on the one hand, Europeans are trying to keep America engaged as long as possible to persuade Trump that they're pulling their way in NATO and to bind him in.
00:25:16
mark
but at the same time, quietly trying to prepare themselves so that they don't depend as much on America. And that's a long project. There's some things you can do now immediately, but it takes a long time to build up defence stocks and new types of weapons and technologies.
00:25:31
Dejan
uh
00:25:34
mark
And these things can take years, sometimes even decades to come online. So there's this delicate balancing act on the one hand, doing the Trump management, which you need for the short term to keep him on board and in the longer term to start building Europeans' ability to stand on their own two feet.
00:25:53
mark
And, you know, that's the big project that all European countries are engaged in. And I think that's the most dramatic way that Britain's got closer to Europe. It's trying to help other countries go through the same process that British people themselves are going through.
00:26:10
mark
So no one wants to undermine NATO and to encourage the Americans to withdraw any more quickly than they would anyway. But at the same time, it would be irresponsible to assume that they'll be there in the way that they were during the Cold War in the future.
00:26:24
John Gartside
Yeah, and that idea is very interesting because, know, as someone who's watched the news when was young, you have seen this sort of awakening in the importance of NATO.
00:26:25
Dejan
Yeah.
00:26:34
John Gartside
But then I even remember when being at school, when Trump expressed those concerns quite a few years ago and was almost threatening the US to leave NATO.
00:26:46
John Gartside
And I did, you know, I'm by no means a Trump supporter, but I did understand where he was coming from in the base way of, he was almost bankrolling NATO.
00:26:56
John Gartside
And, you know, Trump thought wrongly in a way, but I mean, he's right to think this, but Trump saw Europe as dependent on the USA. And I suppose, you know, he's, he's not a particularly generous leader in many ways. So perhaps he didn't feel the need to come to Europe's defense, but I can see what was going on in Trump's head.
00:27:16
John Gartside
But he obviously should be there for the collective security of Europe. But I think he sees us all as some sort of economic burden, I suppose.
00:27:23
John Gartside
But thinking of Trump, just because he sort of seems to dominate any foreign relations news, he's called making peace deals his hobby recently as well. How successful do you think his plan will be in Gaza?
00:27:38
John Gartside
Do you think he will be able to bring peace to this region?
00:27:42
mark
Well, I think we all have to hope that he is successful.
00:27:46
mark
It's very, very difficult to see a pathway from where we're at the moment to a viable two-state solution where you have two states living together in security and in freedom. And it's a vision which I think most European governments have supported, you know, since the 1980s, and which most people think is probably the only sustainable way of stopping the bloodshed and terror and horror that has blighted the lives of many people in Israel and on the Palestinian side for a long time, you know,
00:28:06
Dejan
Thank you.
US Involvement in Middle East Peace Initiatives
00:28:29
mark
things which came to an absolutely tragic and murderous,
00:28:35
mark
took on an absolutely tragic and murderous form on the 7th of October and in the war in Gaza after then. So it's really hard to work out how we go from here to there.
00:28:44
Dejan
So it's really hard to put down a few cases
00:28:47
mark
There are lots of reasons to be pessimistic. There is no unified Palestinian authority that's able to take on the management of Gaza and the West Bank and to start building state.
00:29:03
mark
You have a far right... Jewish supremacist element in the Israeli government that is against the idea of a two-state solution and that is supporting policies which I think are going to do real damage to Israel's legitimacy around the world and its long-term viability.
00:29:23
mark
And it's quite hard for outsiders
00:29:24
Dejan
And it's quite.
00:29:34
mark
think you need to work with the grain and where there have been advances before. It's because you had an idea that there could be partners on both sides when you had Rabin in Israel and Yasser Arafat trying to change the role of the PLO, there was a hope that you might be able to move forward on that.
00:29:53
mark
It's much, much tougher now. But at the same time, what's happened in the last few weeks with the ceasefire, with the assembling of an international coalition that involves Egypt and the Gulf states,
00:30:10
mark
and Europeans to try and hold the hands of and support what comes out of these processes is a very sort of positive thing. And there's nothing that one would disagree with in the 20 point plan that Trump put forward.
00:30:26
mark
But, you know, we're already seeing how fragile it is.
00:30:30
mark
And it's very difficult to see how you move forward beyond that first phase of releasing the hostages and letting the humanitarian support back into the territories.
00:30:35
John Gartside
Thank you.
00:30:46
mark
But, you know, I think it's incumbent on Western governments to do everything they can to
00:30:52
mark
including the British government to support that process and to hope against hope, to put aside the very kind of big reasons to doubt that it's going to work in the long term and see whether you can actually build on this fragile beginning that's been opened up. I think that Trump's desperation to get a Nobel Peace Prize is a positive thing because it means that he will probably be engaged at least until the nominations close for the Peace Prize next year, which gives you a number of months where you can move things forward.
00:31:18
John Gartside
Yes.
00:31:32
mark
And I think the role being played by countries like Qatar and Egypt and Saudi Arabia is very, very important.
00:31:39
mark
And they have resources and they do seem to have a real ability to shift the Palestinian side. And Trump has been willing to face Netanyahu down in a way that Biden wasn't when he was So it's the best hope that we
Conclusion and Acknowledgments
00:31:55
mark
have.
00:31:55
mark
I think it is a real opportunity, but it's pretty difficult to be overly optimistic given how intractable this conflict has been for decades now and how much worse it's got in last 10 years.
00:32:15
Dejan
Mark, thank you so much for coming. It's been a really incredible episode. think I've learned a lot and John has certainly learned a lot as well, our viewers as well. So thank you for coming and giving your time.
00:32:25
mark
Great. Well, thanks for doing the podcast. It's wonderful to see. It's an amazing thing that you've achieved by getting this thing going and doing so many series of it as well.
00:32:36
John Gartside
thank you very much and thank you for joining us on the podcast today