The Faster lane / Tyler Brûlé
State of the nation
Thursday morning in Munich felt like early May. The sun was out, the birds were singing, outdoor cafés were packed and the city, which often thinks of itself as Italy’s northernmost outpost (in lifestyle terms at least), was putting on its best show. Traffic was a bit on the slow slide as world leaders, generals and chiefs from aerospace and arms companies shuttled into town – some in motorcades, others on regional trains – for the Munich Security Conference (MSC). As things weren’t moving on the streets of Schwabing, I took the opportunity to call our editor-in-chief, Andrew, who had just wrapped up a few days at the World Government Summit and was about to fly out of Dubai (see yesterday’s column). Andrew was positively buzzing about the conversations that he’d had, the people he’d met and the observations he’d made. “It’s our world here,” he said. “It’s our crowd. There are wide-ranging, complicated conversations and the discussions are refreshing.” We caught up on other business, I updated him on our plans for the MSC and we ended the call, agreeing that we were both looking forward to our forthcoming Warsaw tour next week. (Attention readers and listeners: we’ll be hosting a special edition of The Globalist from the Polish capital on Thursday morning. Tune in or join us live.)
The traffic started to move again. I watched locals and visitors sipping their first Aperols of the season (it was only 11.30), I reviewed the line-up of guests that our team from The Foreign Desk would be interviewing over the coming days and I dropped a note to Hannah about the planning for the cocktail that we’d be hosting later (photos below). But something was bothering me. I arrived at my meeting and met our hosts and my colleague Raffi. While I was “in the room”, I was still picking apart my brief conversation with Andrew, trying to find the set of words that had darkened my mood. Was it the “discussions are refreshing” part? Was it linked to that?
We left the meeting, made a brief pit stop at the very well-appointed shop Falkenberg (one of Bavaria’s better retailers, for sure) and the unidentified, nagging thought disappeared. Lunch at Schumann’s was a further distraction from whatever was bothering me but as soon as I was out in the sunshine, walking back to the hotel, it hit me. By the time when I reached my room, I had pieced together the formula. The source was a conversation that I had with some policy folk in Ottawa a few weeks ago. Though I made note of the importance of the topic in the moment, we all moved on to talk about the pull of Paris, the ongoing hollowing-out of many sectors in London and lazy diplomats who feel that they can do a global job from the comfort of their living rooms, thousands of kilometres from where they’re supposed to be posted. The spark was both my conversation with Andrew but also the setting: one of the world’s most liveable cities as a backdrop for a conference that deals with some of the most urgent issues facing not just Germany and Nato nations but also the world in general.
During our Ottawa dinner we landed on the theme of national identity and whether social capital had become so eroded that being Canadian had lost much of its meaning. Did someone whose family arrived from Portugal in the 1970s feel Canadian or more Azorean? What about the family from Ontario’s high north, who could trace their roots back centuries? And the recent arrival from Haiti? Was Canada, in modern speak, more of a platform to live and earn rather than a nation that came with codes, traditions and expectations? And then there was the big question: would Canadians put on uniforms, pick up arms and fight for their nation? Would Swedes? Brits? Austrians? Kiwis? Spaniards? Another motorcade whooped past and I wondered whether this was a subject on the MSC’s agenda. Would there be panels discussing how to get liberal democracies to remember that in order to freely wave rainbow flags, you might also need to wave your national stripes atop an armoured personnel carrier, rally around an anthem (learning the words would be a good start for many) and follow orders?
Later that evening this theme, in various forms, was a talking point as Monocle gathered around a mix of readers, contributors, journalists and members from the security community. A financial consultant reminded a hotelier that just because some people are right of centre doesn’t mean that they’re fascists or radical – simply that they’re fed up with crumbling infrastructure, failing hospitals and a migration policy that has failed to absorb the people who it welcomed in the first place. A gentleman in aviation explained that Boeing’s current problem has much to do with putting the wrong people in leadership and struggling to recognise that they’re a company based on engineering and keeping planes in the sky, as opposed to one made for ex-bankers and HR consultants to play armchair pilot in. As he saw it, Boeing became distracted by too many fashionable workplace topics, too little oversight and direction, fear of honest conversations and a loss of mission – and now they’re in their current fix trying to keep doors on aircraft and recruit the right people to get the company back in the game. The same could be said for many nations attending the security conference. Mission drift, loss of focus and erosion of common-sense conversations have left them less than resilient to actually fight for their beliefs rather than simply market them.
For more of the week’s biggest talking points with Tyler Brûlé, including analysis of the death of Alexei Navalny, tune in to Monocle on Sunday on Monocle Radio.
