MEP and former Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt told delegates at IHIF EMEA in Berlin that we are entering a new age of geopolitical uncertainty.
In a session entitled Leadership in Flux: A Conversation on Geopolitical Dynamics, Verhofstadt said that we had entered the “age of empires” which had followed the international financial crisis of 2008.
“This new world order is based on big continental countries or companies and not necessarily on countries and the world order will be an age of empires, with the likes of China, India, the US, Russia wants to become one again,” he said. “In this world nations and sovereignty will be less important, but empires and the protection empires will provide will be vital.”
Verhofstadt identified three key risks to this global macro change, each of which could make the world more unstable.
“The first risk is geopolitical and security. The core of this military risk is that the empires have different ideas and are not all liberal economies. The world of tomorrow will be a very brutal world, of competition, military, technology, economy, not just on earth but in space,” he warned.
The second risk he identified as they regulatory economic risk, especially due to the ongoing economic rift between the US and China, which he said started with President Trump but has effectively continued under the Biden administration.
“We also see deglobalisation, certainly since Covid as countries started to re-establish their supply chains, which will also potentially have an enormous impact on different technologies being developed in different parts of the world,” Verhofstadt said.
The third risk he identified as politics, which he said many people already feel in their everyday lives, which has been evidenced with the rise of populism in liberal democracies around the world. This year will be an important one because of so many elections, he pointed out.
We live in an era of polycrisis [multiple crises rather than just one issue], which he identified as especially migration, economic inequality, plus the perception of oppressive policies such as green policies.
“These have been amplified by social media, which has acted against liberal policies,” he said.
“We are not ready in Europe militarily, which you can already see in Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia,” he said as he pointed out that military investment between the UK and Europe is nearly three times that of Russia and yet is not as effective as it should be, despite the fact that Europe also has a very large combined army.
Europe’s technology companies are also valued far below Asia and the US, he added, as the continent lags the giants such as Apple, Amazon. Microsoft, Alibaba and Samsung among others, as he said that Europe is making the content but the other continents “are making the money”.The final element, he said, was competition rules that were made for the past so that, for example, mergers could help European companies grow in scale and where competition considerations are about the global picture, not the continental one, with greater unions for defence, fiscal, energy, health and politics driven by smaller government.
“The big question is whether we have the new generation of politicians to make the bold decisions needed,” he said as he stressed that the way forward was to “go back to ideology” to overcome the negativity of the views that have risen to fill the empty space across social media.
“It is not a given that populism will win, but it will only lose if the alternative is there, which is a vision for the future which provides hope for the ordinary citizen.”