IN THE AUTUMN OF 2014, I WAS IN COPENHAGEN TO SET UP AN organization whose purpose was to put my research and advisory activities on a more formal footing, with links to governments and universities around the world. The Capital Region of Denmark, which was supportive of the idea that I should run my activities from Copenhagen rather than London, generously provided an office while I worked on getting the project started, and introduced me to a number of influential people and organizations in Denmark.

During one of these meetings, I observed that Frank Jensen, the mayor of Copenhagen, spoke less fluent English than most of his staff. I wasn’t complaining, of course: I speak no Danish at all, and Frank’s English was more than adequate for everyday purposes, but I couldn’t help noticing his accent (melodious, but strong) and the fact that his deputy needed to help him here and there with an English word.

This was surprising only because one is so used to Scandinavians speaking English with near-native fluency. (One of the main reasons for this, regularly overlooked by education ministries around Europe, is that English-language movies and TV programs in the Nordic and Low Countries are always subtitled and have been since the Second World War. In much of the rest of Europe, where shows are dubbed and have been since the Second World War, average competence in English is lower. The pattern correlates strongly with the extent of fascism in Europe: dictators don’t like their populations to access foreign cultures.)¹⁷

Now Frank is a competent and highly educated official—an economist by training, not a linguist—and there’s nothing wrong with his international credentials. Like many other Danes, he is well informed about global affairs, active on environmental issues, widely traveled and, I have no doubt, culturally sensitive too. But hearing him struggling a bit in English made me realize that I had often found myself in meetings where the highest-ranking politician was the only one in the room who was monolingual. Indeed, in several countries where I don’t speak the language, I’d been able to converse directly and freely in English to everybody in the cabinet except the head of government (or sometimes even the head of state), and an interpreter had to be called in.

It’s well known that quite a few presidents and prime ministers insist on speaking their native language in public, even when they can manage other languages perfectly well, because they are afraid their citizens might regard it as an act of treachery for them to speak the language of another nation. That has never been the issue with the leaders I advise because my meetings with them are usually in private. But what an extraordinary state of affairs it is when pretending to be ignorant and narrow-minded goes down better than admitting to being cultured and internationally competent! The idea that some citizens might actually be more proud of a leader who speaks more languages than other countries’ leaders doesn’t seem to occur to anyone. The logic of this is so muddle-headed, I hardly know where to start.

The tendency to monoculturalism among leaders is no trivial issue, and I’m sure is one of the reasons why a world made of countries practicing, for the most part, democratic party politics, fails so signally to deal with its cross-border issues. The way our political systems currently work, we place such heavy emphasis on domestic issues that the people who win elections are much more likely to be the sort of people who, by nature or by habit, are inwardly focused.

And in most countries, you have to be inwardly focused to get anywhere in politics. Campaigning for election at the local, regional, and ultimately national level, appealing to voters on the issues that are closest and therefore most pressing to them: this is the cost of access to political power. By the time you’ve climbed the slippery slope to head of government, head of state, mayor, regional president, or state governor, your mindset, your workload, your experience, your expertise, your priorities, and your preoccupations are likely to be 100 percent domestic.

Dealing with that inconvenient little detail called the rest of the world is something most senior politicians I’ve met do only when it rears its ugly head, and it’s very much a sideline, an unwelcome intrusion into what they see as the real business of their work as a national or city leader, party chief, and policy maker.

Traditionally, this tendency to monoculturalism and minimal international experience has been more noticeable among politicians at the city and regional level, since their exposure to international issues is limited; it’s the national government after all that deals with foreign policy. But this distinction has become less and less clear in recent decades, as cities and regions become diplomatic players in their own right, often undercutting or overreaching national governments to engage with other cities, regions, and even nations around the world. As long ago as 2006, the United Kingdom signed a climate pact, intended to lead to an emissions-trading scheme, with California. The then prime minister Tony Blair naturally denied that he was sidestepping President Bush after failing to achieve an agreement at the federal level, but it’s pretty clear that this was exactly what he was doing.

Since then, major international agreements between cities and regions have become more common, and one might wonder if the future of the international community lies more in the hands of mayors and governors than monarchs and presidents: a return to the city-states and principalities of the Middle Ages, perhaps. The nation-state, after all, is an experiment we’ve only been pursuing since the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648.

The consequence of all this is that “international” tends to be treated as a small, specialized subject within the broader framework of politics and public administration, rather than as the framework itself within which domestic activity should be positioned: domestic as opposed to foreign, rather than our country as part of the world. Typically, only the defense minister (fighting foreigners), the foreign minister (trying to avoid fighting foreigners), and the trade minister (separating foreigners from their money) are expected to have any expertise in this area.

But then again, it’s relatively uncommon anyway for ministers in democratic countries to have expertise even in the work of their own ministry, since cabinets are constantly being reshuffled for reasons of domestic politics and electioneering. At any given moment, chances are that the foreign minister is a lawyer or economist by training who has never read a single book on international relations or diplomacy, has never traveled abroad except on holiday, and because another minister has quit or been sacked, has suddenly been put in charge of the rest of the world.

Increasingly, in most countries, nobody at the cabinet level has any particular interest or experience in international affairs even at the moment they come into power, since the conventional academic disciplines for politicians are law (national law, of course), political science (mainly domestic), history (mainly national), economics (generally domestic), and increasingly these days, marketing or public relations (based exclusively on Anglo-American principles).

Even in diplomatic circles, discussions still focus on ways of “projecting influence.” Whether this is through hard or soft power makes no difference: they’re still perceived as methods for achieving an advantage, and this is why I increasingly find the whole notion of soft power to be pernicious. A worldview that regards foreigners either as enemies to be liquidated, or customers to be marketed to, is a broken worldview.

I think it was the Alternative Party in Denmark that proposed renaming foreign policy as global policy, so it seems as if we are thinking along the same lines. This is, after all, the party that at one stage mooted the slogan “Denmark, best country for the world.” A pity they didn’t use it: you can’t get more elegant than that.

Denmark had, only a few years previously, briefly found itself at the epicenter of the constant tensions caused by the globalization of human society—and it was not a comfortable experience.

In December 2005, an international furor broke over the publication of satirical cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten and other newspapers, which eventually resulted in rioting and numerous deaths, as well as widespread boycotting of Scandinavian goods in shops all over the Muslim world. A serious rift appeared to have opened up between the values of Islam and some aspects of secular liberal Western democracy.

The episode was a stark illustration of the real meaning of globalization: almost every nation and culture on earth are now sharing elbow room in a single information space. We used to drive around in separate cars; now we’re all sharing a crowded bus. Few conversations are truly private any longer, no media is domestic, and the audience is always global. And everybody knows what happens when a group of human beings with different backgrounds, habits, values, and ambitions are thrown together in the same crowded space: sooner or later, tempers start to fray. Somebody treads on someone else’s toes; some say by accident and some say on purpose; insults get traded, a fight breaks out.

The fallout from the cartoon crisis was reflected in the Nation Brands Index: Denmark dropped from sixteenth to fiftieth place—below Israel, in fact—among the nations most admired by Muslims worldwide, and its reputation has still not recovered today, fifteen years later. Norway’s ranking suffered too: perhaps because people confused the two countries, perhaps because they felt they shared the same values. Only America improved its view of Denmark. (This was probably more relief than schadenfreude: for once, Americans weren’t the ones in trouble.)

Not long afterward, in France, the Charlie Hebdo murders and a wave of other terrorist attacks around Europe made me wonder, as it made many others wonder, how far freedom of speech should be and could be taken; whether in order to survive and to make any sense it must be an absolute doctrine to be pursued in an austere and fundamentalist fashion, whatever the consequences; or whether it can still be helpful and meaningful if treated as a general principle, a rough guide to behavior.

We live in a very different world from the ones in which Voltaire and even John Stewart Mill lived—perhaps in some ways a fundamentally different world—and their excellent principles surely need intelligent modification in order to be useful at this later stage in the human journey, as indeed do all the belief systems that are involved the debate.

I was invited to speak at the tenth Valdai Forum in Russia, an annual summit organized by the Valdai Discussion Club, an international affairs think tank (frequently described as a Kremlin-backed propaganda machine by Western commentators), and after my opening keynote I received an invitation to dinner with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, at his nearby country retreat.

Putin in a small group is a very different man from Putin in a large group. There were six of us at dinner, and it was a rather unreal experience, partly because the house was severely postmodern and the food ultrasophisticated, yet we dined off what might well have been the Romanov dinner service: the most elaborate display of flamboyantly gilded nineteenth-century porcelain I have ever seen, and enough plates, dishes, bowls, cutlery, and glasses to flummox your average archduke.

I was placed between Dmitry Sergeyevich Peskov, the president’s press secretary, and the foreign minister, Sergey Viktorovich Lavrov. Conversation consisted mainly of the exchange of polite remarks about the state of the world, but I felt from the Russians—and not for the first time—a powerful sense of injured national self-esteem: a craving for the West to show Russia the respect it once enjoyed, then lost, but strongly feels it still deserves. And if respect wasn’t available, then fear would do just fine. It felt as if I was sitting on the brink of the widening gulf between the global power factions, the dangerously damaged pride of the Russians being one of the engines driving apart the geopolitical tectonic plates.

It was noticeable that the two other foreign guests at dinner were vying with each other to produce a smile from Putin, who appeared charming, modest, a little shy, and unmistakably magnetic. I’ve never been able to decide whether the charisma of well-known people is the cause or the consequence of their fame; sometimes I think that their surface, over time, becomes somehow polished by the sustained gaze of millions of people. Or perhaps they somehow grew up with a natural luminosity that attracted those gazes. Either way, the scene was reminiscent of many such encounters I have experienced over the years: highly intelligent, accomplished, powerful, self-respecting individuals shamelessly flirting with somebody who happened to outrank them in power, wealth, or fame, and sometimes coming very close to abasing themselves for the reward of a smile or a flattering comment. I don’t suppose I’m entirely immune from this myself.

The next morning I saw Putin again, now speaking onstage to a much larger group of people, and the change in his demeanor was remarkable. He appeared physically bigger (a trick I would love to learn), and his rather pleasant gray eyes which had looked warm and friendly the evening before, now looked metallic and penetrating, appearing to search people out in the auditorium as he spoke. His voice had an edge to it and his expression was tough, uncompromising, unforgiving. He was pretty scary, and I found myself hoping I had passed whatever test the previous evening’s dinner might have been.

It wasn’t until that evening, in conversation with an American journalist who knows Russia and its government well, that a possible explanation of the nature of that test emerged. According to my friend, it was obvious that I had been invited because the president was interested in getting my advice on how to improve Russia’s international standing. If this was true—which I suppose is conceivable—then I must have confused Putin and his colleagues mightily, since I didn’t make the slightest attempt to do what Western consultants are generally expected to do, and pitch my services to them.

It never occurred to me to do so, because I never do. I just don’t believe in asking to be hired. It sets off the relationship on entirely the wrong foot, because when later on I need the government to do something challenging, it’s too easy for them to refuse on the grounds that it was my silly idea to be hired by them. If it was their silly idea to hire me, they’re much more likely to do what I suggest.

But even if Putin had asked me to work for him, there’s little chance it could ever have worked out. This is not because I’d refuse on principle to work with a leader whose values or policies or behavior I personally disapprove of. There wouldn’t be many leaders left if I took that line, and anyway the whole point about my approach is helping countries see how it’s in their interest to engage more imaginatively and productively with the international community, and to harmonize their domestic and international responsibilities more effectively. So, given the opportunity to persuade a recalcitrant country to cooperate and collaborate more, it would be irrational in the extreme for me to refuse. Actually I only wish such countries would occasionally ask for my advice so I could have a go at encouraging them to be better team players, but for some reason it almost never happens.

No, the reason I’d have said no to Putin is that I assume—and I hope I’m not doing him an injustice here—that there would have been an insurmountable difference between what he probably wanted and what I could offer. I’d insist on talking strategy and debating Russia’s high-level, long-term engagement with the community of nations, and I somehow doubt whether Putin’s views on this topic were amenable to alteration. In fact I doubt whether Putin always takes policy advice from his own highly experienced foreign minister, so the chances of his taking it from me were close to zero. He was probably hoping I would reveal techniques for improving Russia’s profile in the international media, and that’s a subject I neither know nor care about.

If my friend was right, it cast the whole evening in a rather comical light. Here were Putin, Peskov, and Lavrov all waiting politely for me to offer my services—and indeed, in hindsight, I thought I did recall what could have been attempts to turn the conversation in this direction—but inexplicably to them, I stubbornly refused to do so. They were much too polite to press me, especially since I was their dinner guest, and so the moment passed, and I returned to my hotel and went to bed, blissfully unaware that I’d just dodged a missile.