JD Vance’s era-ending Munich speech
Peter Ramsay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He is also one of the founding editors of The Northern Star
This article originally appeared at The Northern Star
I knew I was far from alone as I gasped with astonishment listening to JD Vance speak at the Munich Security Conference last week. It may be a low bar, but this was the most powerful and enjoyable political speech I can recall. There was no soaring rhetoric, barely any applause, the two jokes fell flat. Using plain words, delivered in an even and civil tone, the US Vice President delivered a series of short, sharp and stunning political blows to his audience, salting them with poisonously barbed references to their shared values, friendship and unity of purpose. And those listening in the room absolutely hated it.
The assembled European political leaders and securocrats expected to be told (again) that they would need to spend more to protect Europe from external threats. But Vance ambushed them by focusing almost entirely on what he described as the most worrying threat to democracy in Europe: ‘the threat from within’, by which he meant them. He pointed the finger first at the EU, for backing the cancelling of Romanian elections and threatening the same in Germany, then at the repressive censorship laws in Sweden and Germany, and finally at police repression of Christian anti-abortion protesters in Britain.
But he went further than merely calling out the subversion of democracy by authoritarian liberal elites in Europe. In his scathing attack on the Stalinist character of European officialdom’s targeting of ‘disinformation’, he exposed the real and fundamental problem of European politics:
‘You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.’
Vance then put his finger precisely on the core weaknesses of European democracy. First, he exposed the hollowness at the heart of the West’s preoccupation with threats and security, upending the long reign of the politics of fear:
‘…I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?’
And he identified the reason why that vision was missing, and why there will never be security without it: ‘I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.’ To really believe in democracy, he argued, meant believing that each citizen has a voice and ‘if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little’.
Perhaps most remarkable of all was the positive vision of what Vance thought we should be securing, the idea that democracy is the only workable basis of political authority that permits effective government:
‘there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things.’
This is a core political truth of developed modern states that has been buried for a long time. Only with adequate democratic authority will the state get anything useful done.
Vance’s words, spoken in such a significant setting and by such a figure, mark a major break with the oppressive spirit of fear and of disdain for ordinary citizens that has marked the last three decades of Western politics. It was an immense relief, like a tremendous weight being removed.
Now a cynical leftist can talk Vance’s intervention down by saying that for all the drama of the speech, and more generally of Trump’s first month in office, it is essentially just more of the same. The Americans are still calling the shots in Europe. A new American order is replacing the old, remodelling its sphere of influence, and the Europeans will scramble to adapt. And this is also true. Part of the speech’s power lay in the implicit coercion. Vance spoke softly, knowing he was carrying a big stick. And he didn’t hide it: ‘In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town.’ Moreover, he declared that he had come ‘with an offer’ from his boss and spelled out its political content.
If European governments want to stay on good terms with the Americans, Vance warned, they must not only pay more for their own security from external threats but also stop the censorship and cancellations: ‘just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.’ And European elites had better start taking into account the significant electoral support for their populist critics. In a clear reference to the upcoming German elections, and the likely strong performance of the AfD, he added ‘There is no room for firewalls.’
This was the immediate practical political message of the speech: give our populist and conservative friends in Europe a break or you will fall out with us. His joke comparing Greta Thunberg’s interventions in US politics with Elon Musk’s interventions in European politics was bound to fall flat because it contained a barely concealed threat. Many things can be said about Greta, but she is not the richest man in the world and she does not control one of the world’s most important satellite communications systems and one of its most important social media platforms.
The Trump administration’s attempt to coerce European governments may or may not have the effect of slowing down or reversing the authoritarian drift in Europe, or merely changing its direction, but either way it amounts to external interference intended to change Europe’s domestic politics. That should alert us to the truth of Vance’s jibe about the weakness of democracy in European states whose leaders claim that elections can be swung by Russian bots. We live in politically feeble states, long dependent on and dominated by the USA. They may now be too sclerotic to adapt to the dramatic change of direction in America; they seem far more likely to try to maintain their current authoritarian path; and for all anyone knows we may soon be welcoming our new Chinese overlords.
Politics is going to see more turmoil, and we should take the sceptical response to the new American stance seriously. Given the long history of US domination of other states and the fact that Vance’s paean to democracy itself amounted to a practical interference in European politics, there was more than a whiff of hypocrisy in a high American official lecturing the Europeans in these terms. Vance would perhaps claim that the bad stuff belongs in the past. The Trump regime has already gutted the CIA front USAID, and Vance admitted that ‘sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country’, conceding that ‘the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation’. He immediately sought to distance the Trump administration from previous practice by giving an example of ‘so-called misinformation’ that went straight for the jugular of authoritarian liberalism in Europe:
‘Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.’
Although, of course, official efforts to discredit the lab-leak theory began in the last year of the first Trump presidency. At any event, we would be wise not to take Vance’s democratic commitments at face value, and to expect the US to pursue its own interests and not ours.
We will see if Vance and his boss can live up to their own declared standards of democratic continence in the use of their huge powers. But in the final analysis that is what was uplifting about his speech. The new American administration may well turn out to be hypocrites, but hypocrisy is the vice that pays homage to virtue. and Vance set high standards of political liberty and democratic accountability by which we should judge him, and Trump. In so doing, the Vice President of the USA widened the horizons of politics, raised expectations of government, in a way that no Western politician in power has dared to do in a very long time. It’s a historic opportunity for American sovereigntists and democrats to hold the American government to its own stated aspirations, and for Europeans to apply those standards to our own.
You write:
“Vance set high standards of political liberty and democratic accountability by which we should judge him, and Trump.”
Do you mean that it is OK to storm the Capitol, to deny lost elections and to deliver heavy bombs to a genocidal state?”