ALTHOUGH I HAD LITTLE EXPERIENCE WITH THE INSURANCE INdustry, I found that it provided surprisingly useful ingredients for new approaches to policy problems.

In 2014, I was invited by Mario Greco, the CEO of Generali, the world’s third-largest insurance company, to advise him on his ambitious corporate change program. Greco was unimpressed with conventional corporate social responsibility, which to him felt dominated by the PR and marketing agendas of companies rather than being driven by corporate strategy. He asked me to suggest some ambitious, original global programs that would enable Generali to play a more active and helpful role in the societies where it was active. I developed two projects for Generali: the Human Safety Net and the Global Learning Trust.

The Human Safety Net was a project that aimed to build resilience in the developing world, using both simple and advanced risk-management techniques to ensure that families, individuals, and businesses in poor countries were better equipped to manage risk, uncertainty, and misfortune. An important principle of the concept was that economic progress in the least developed countries is always fragile, always has the potential to go into reverse: a single bad harvest, for example, can wipe out a family for generations. Insurance, I suggested, is the missing element that removes the reverse gear from economic development. I proposed incorporating insurance cover into development assistance, for example “baking in” a few cents of risk cover into each brick provided for house building, or a fraction of a cent of cover supplied with each seed to farmers, so that by the time the house was built or the field planted, both would be fully insured.

The Global Learning Trust was an ambitious plan to educate the next generation of children worldwide to behave in ways that would prevent, mitigate, and resolve the global challenges humanity is now facing.

The Human Safety Net has gone from strength to strength. It has established partnerships and invested in social enterprises and NGOs in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and today has twenty-four active programs in twenty-one countries, with a network of thirty-six partners. The HSN Foundation has created programs for families, for refugee startups, and for newborns, designed to have a long-term impact on the lives of the most vulnerable people and enable them to use their talents to the fullest extent.¹⁹

Mario Greco moved on to lead another company, and the Global Learning Trust was never implemented. But the idea stayed with me. Its relevance to the issues I was determined to tackle only seemed to grow over time, and with each new experience its value seemed to increase. It was to come back into my life several years later, in a way I hadn’t quite expected.

Looking back over the governments and leaders I’d advised over the previous fifteen years, I realized that despite the obvious disparities between their circumstances, it had been more than ten years since one of them had told me about a truly domestic challenge—one that was unique to their country and that offered no obvious parallels to problems I’d helped to tackle elsewhere.

This couldn’t be because I’d somehow already encountered every possible scenario that the world had to offer. The only explanation was that all the challenges which these countries were facing, and which they considered serious enough to tell me about, were local manifestations of global phenomena.

And as part of my initial investigation of the challenges these countries were facing, I’d been lucky enough to meet their leading experts: experts on social, environmental, financial, security, human rights, and educational issues. In some cases, they were global as well as national authorities on their topic, so purely as a learning opportunity, these were valuable conversations. But I noticed that, more and more often, the conversations began to take a familiar turn.

Once they’d described their problem to me, I would naturally ask, “And do we know the solution to this problem?”

And the expert would reply, “Yes.”

“So why hasn’t this solution been implemented?” I would ask.

“A lack of resources.”

“But surely if it’s one of your country’s most pressing issues, the resources could be made available?”

And the expert would explain that since the challenge was international in scope, and any effective solution would need to be implemented on an international scale, the country didn’t have sufficient resources to resolve it: only a concerted joint effort by all the countries implicated in the challenge could do the trick. And this was usually impossible to negotiate within the period that any one government was in office, even if it was supported by the United Nations or another international body.

So it occurred to me that the main problem we face in the twenty-first century, a problem that underpins and in many senses eclipses all the others, is that up till now we’ve been far more successful at globalizing our problems than globalizing our solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic is a dramatic illustration of this principle: globalized trade and transport links can turn any novel virus into a pandemic in a matter of days, yet the means and the will to tackle it on a global level have been conspicuous by their absence.

This can change only when countries learn to harmonize their domestic and international responsibilities more effectively; when they discover that you can cooperate and collaborate without losing a competitive advantage; when they start to do so in innovative ways that nobody has dreamed of before. It will change when they find out that thinking internationally isn’t about altruism or self-sacrifice. If it’s done well, it produces better thinking, and that means better policies, with better outcomes both at home and abroad.

In the past, people in positions of power and authority only had to live up to a single, simple mandate: they had to look after the interests of their own people and their own slice of territory. And while they were doing that, if they ended up harming other people or other territories, that was just fine, because it showed a truly uncompromising commitment to their duty of leadership.

Today, this isn’t just unwise, it’s suicidal. My view is that people in positions of power and responsibility must accept they now have a Dual Mandate: they are responsible not only for their own people but for every man, woman, child, and animal on the planet; not only for their own slice of territory but for every square inch of the earth’s surface and the atmosphere above it.

And if they don’t like the sound of this, they shouldn’t be in a position of power or responsibility at all: not for their country, their city, their town, or even their own family. This is the new rule for life on earth.

To achieve this, the culture of governance worldwide needs to change, from fundamentally competitive to fundamentally collaborative. For centuries, the basic rule has been competition, with a little collaboration and cooperation sprinkled over it when it is absolutely unavoidable or very clearly in everybody’s immediate interest. Now and forever, the basic rule needs to be collaboration, with competition sprinkled over it when it is clearly and universally beneficial or at least harmless.

You could describe this change as a gender shift: from predominantly masculine to a more balanced system that more closely resembles the actual makeup of our species, although I’m using the terms masculine and feminine here in an anthropological sense rather than a political or biological one.

According to Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, the dominant values of a traditionally “masculine” society include material success and progress; sympathy for the strong; and a belief that conflicts should be resolved by fighting them out. The dominant values in a traditionally “feminine” society include caring for others and preserving nature and the family; placing importance on people and warm relationships rather than on money and things; sympathizing with the weak; emphasizing equality, solidarity, and quality of life, and believing that conflicts are best resolved by compromise and negotiation.²⁰

It’s interesting how closely the transition from the traditional, competitive, self-serving nation state to the Good Country maps onto this dimension of the Hofstede model (at least I’m not unconsciously projecting my own cultural norms onto the rest of the planet: my native British culture is markedly masculine, as is the American). Since our species is composed of roughly equal numbers of males and females, it does seem like a rather bad idea if the dominant models of statecraft, national governance, and international relations are so dramatically skewed toward the masculine end of the spectrum. It suggests an uncomfortably traditional scenario where feminine values are incorporated to some degree in the domestic environment, but as soon as you get to the level of decision-making and, especially, going out to fight the enemy, the male values predominate.

When I tell leaders around the world about the Dual Mandate and the advantages of becoming a Good Country, the first objection that many of them raise is one of capacity. They say, “We have enough trouble meeting the demands of our own parliamentary party, let alone seven billion foreigners who can’t even vote in our elections.”

But I’m not suggesting that governments place the same priority on other populations as on their own. That would be absurd: Of course their first duty is to their own people. This is why, for example, I don’t have the slightest objection to President Trump’s mantra of “America first”: this seems to me a statement of the obvious. If you’re elected to be your country’s leader, then naturally you must put its interests first. What I’d like to challenge is the assumption that putting your own country first necessarily means putting everybody else last. Over the years, America has proved over and over again that helping other countries aspire to becoming first equal is very much in its interest. More of the support that America still enjoys around the world comes from the gratitude of its friends and beneficiaries than from the fear of its competitors and adversaries.

The “zero-sum” version of American supremacy is in nobody’s interest, least of all America’s. The Nation Brands Index shows that it is already producing a steep decline in global public sentiment toward America, a feeling that will inevitably translate into a decline in foreign investment, talent attraction, tourism arrivals, consumer preference for American products and services, international career prospects for American nationals, trust in its institutions, and the smooth running of its cultural and diplomatic relations.

It’s interesting how deeply ingrained the idea seems to be, among most politicians, that the needs of their own population and the needs of the international community are necessarily in conflict. They are sometimes, but by no means always, and by no means is that conflict always irreconcilable.

In any case, the idea that countries can be “in competition” against each other is a pervasive one, but it’s little more than a metaphor and a rather unhelpful one at that. A company can seize a competitive advantage within a given marketplace by charging less or delivering better value than other companies, and its reward will be greater profitability; other companies will face lower returns or go out of business. But countries don’t make profits. A trade surplus, which is simply the consequence of a state producing more than it consumes or invests, doesn’t sit on a country’s balance sheet as a retained profit; it is reinvested abroad.

Be that as it may, it’s important to stress that what I’m recommending isn’t altruism, nor is it self-sacrifice. The idea of a nation voluntarily sacrificing its interests in favor of those of another country is patently absurd. No, being a Good Country works because it’s enlightened self-interest.

I’ve had the opportunity to get to know many governments and leaders over the years, and I do believe that the overwhelming majority of them really would like to do more for the global community. Very often, the problem is simply that they believe it’s not what their citizens want. They’re afraid that if they spend “too much time” on foreign affairs, then their citizens will penalize them at the next election. But depending on which country they are in, it may surprise them to learn that more than half their population might strongly endorse the idea of world-friendly policies and reward them for coming up with them (this fact was revealed by research which I will describe in Chapter 17).

In any case, the vast majority of people in the vast majority of countries would certainly applaud their government for attempting to improve the country’s international standing, to earn it the respect and admiration of the international community, even if there might be differences of opinion about the right ways to achieve this goal. Indeed, it’s a common characteristic of nationalists that they long for their country to be regarded as preeminent in the world. No chauvinistic patriot wants his or her country to be unknown or ignored. Seen through this perspective, working to improve the country’s profile—even if this involves working with other countries rather than against them—seems more likely to be a vote winner than a vote loser.

There are other, yet more powerful reasons why being a Good Country makes good sense. As several of the policies I’ve already described in this book show, by bringing the international dimension into every aspect of domestic policy making, the quality of that domestic policy making can be greatly enhanced. “Stirring up the gene pool” and thinking in a more dappled way can produce significant extra levels of innovation.

It may sound to some like a recipe for compromise, but what I’ve learned over the last twenty years is that there’s a whole world of policy making that most governments have, so far, not even dreamed of. We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what can happen when you look at obligations as well as opportunities, when you collaborate as well as compete, when you stir up the gene pool in your thinking, when you look globally as well as nationally, when you think long as well as wide.

Taking responsibility for the whole of humanity and the whole of the planet isn’t an extra burden and doesn’t necessarily require extra resources. It’s a new perspective on policy making that can truly galvanize the process of government.

To help convince governments that they can realistically aspire to the Dual Mandate, I felt that a useful tool would be a book detailing all the best recent examples of policies which successfully balance domestic and international responsibilities (apart from the ones that I’d personally suggested; it was important that this exercise be objective and neutral).

My intention was to collect dozens of these case studies and publish them in a book that I would call the Policy Playbook. I would give priority to policies that were particularly imaginative, because the best kind of Dual Mandate policy is one where the combination of domestic and international thinking has inspired a more innovative solution—an example of “2 + 2 = 22.”

Then, whenever a government expressed skepticism about whether it was really feasible to balance domestic and international needs, I could throw the book at them, metaphorically speaking.

Ideally, the Policy Playbook would become a yearbook, with new examples submitted and included in an updated edition each year. The yearbook would then form the basis of an annual award, in which the best newly included Dual Mandate policies were publicly recognized and the lessons learned spread as wide as possible.

Over the next few years, I kept my eyes open for the best examples of Dual Mandate policies to include in the book. I discovered that searching directly for them online was impossible, since there were no keywords to identify them. So instead I wrote to hundreds of friends and colleagues in governments around the world to ask for their own favorite examples. I ran a competition in the Diplomat magazine, calling on staff in all the foreign embassies in London to submit their own country’s best examples. I got teams of volunteer students studying international relations and political science to scour their university libraries and ask their lecturers for the best examples.

I kept up the search for four years, at the end of which I’d found a grand total of six examples that I felt confident about identifying as true Dual Mandate policies. It looked as if the Policy Playbook wasn’t even going to be a policy pamphlet.

I shouldn’t have been surprised: I’d known all along that very few governments ever even saw the need to try to reconcile their domestic and international responsibilities in their policy making. In fact, if I really had found hundreds of examples out there, then it would have put my whole approach into question: if governments were already doing this on a regular basis, then why was I worrying?

And in a way, it was rather exciting. The fact that almost no countries had managed to come up with any of these kinds of policies didn’t make me worry that it was impossible to do so, since I’d devised hundreds of them during the course of my own work. It was just because they’d never tried, and they’d never tried because they’d never seen the need (except in the case of policy areas like climate change and migration, which are international by default, so any half-decent domestic policy would necessarily have a positive international impact).

It’s pretty remarkable how little cross-fertilization there is between governments around the world, considering the benefits it offers. Things are improving slowly. One UK-based startup, Apolitical, encourages civil servants around the world to share best practices in an online forum; the most remarkable thing about this particular venture is that nobody had ever thought of it before.

The last few UK governments have acquired a habit of copying policies from Scandinavia, and this is held to be evidence of a rather progressive mindset. However, it seems to me that simply mirroring international best practices is only the beginning of a journey toward a true gold standard of good governance for the age of interdependence.

Over the years that I’d been working with governments, I’d often observed how a spirit of imaginative and courageous cooperation and collaboration benefited the quality of their policy making. And since an analysis of the MARSS model strongly suggested that a visible commitment to tackling international as well as domestic issues would, in the longer term, enhance their standing, the more systematically and thoroughly they collaborated, the better the results were likely to be.

Looking at the thirty or more countries I’d advised so far, it was clearly impossible to make a simple distinction between being and not being a Good Country. There were stages of commitment to the principle, and each had its own distinctive characteristics. I concluded that there were six of these:

STAGE 1: Focusing domestically but basing its practices on some degree of knowledge about what other countries have done (probably gleaned from history and politics lessons at school and university).

STAGE 2: Identifying and imitating recent best practices from other states (like the UK copying Scandinavia, as mentioned above).

STAGE 3: Convening international groups and commissioning research to look more broadly and deeply into international best practices and to learn more about what others have done and are doing. This is where we start to take the initiative and act responsibly in the international space.

STAGE 4: Stage 3, plus sharing the results with all participants; spreading the experience collected.

STAGE 5: Stage 4, plus working with participants thereafter to produce better results for many countries through international collaboration: tackling the issue in its broadest, most international context and convening groups to reach shared solutions through close, long-term cooperation. Taking, and encouraging others to take, shared ownership of the challenge in its full international dimension; taking shared responsibility for tackling it in proportion to its full global extent.

STAGE 6: All the above, plus voluntarily ceding limited amounts of sovereign power to collaborative governance structures.

It might look as if the higher stages of this model are purely aspirational, the sort of thing that most of us won’t see in our lifetime. But I believe that things are beginning to change. In late 2019, the governments of New Zealand, Finland, and Scotland announced that all three would be implementing a new “well-being agenda,” which places social indicators like health and happiness ahead of GDP in budget setting and policy making. Admittedly, this is a “multilocal” rather than international policy, so it wouldn’t necessarily qualify as a true Dual Mandate project, but it’s a big step forward and an indication that things are moving in the right direction.

It’s also worth pointing out that stage 6 is a straightforward description of the normal operating principle of the European Union, in my view the noblest experiment in the history of humanity.