YEAR BY YEAR, AS I BEGAN TO GET A BETTER SENSE OF THE SCOPE and scale of the challenges humanity is facing, and the obstacles that lie in the way of resolving them, I was far from despondent. I love a complex challenge, and somehow the more intricate the problems appeared, the more enthusiastic I found myself becoming about the possibility of their being resolved—as long as one can keep a grip on the simple fundamentals without getting too distracted by the complexities.

As I wrote in the preface, I was learning to revere simplicity: not the simplicity that comes from seeing only the surface of things, but the simplicity that comes from seeing through the surface.

Part of my growing optimism also stemmed from what I heard and learned from some of the countries I had recently worked with. I started to find more than a glimmer of hope from the margins: the countries which, in the recent past, had been widely thought of as powerless, remote, perhaps exotic in a passive kind of way, but without the resources or the experience to produce change even inside their own borders, let alone globally.

These “second-tier” countries find themselves invested today with all kinds of powers and assets which were never previously noticed or valued. Not least, the past victims of imperial ambition are beginning to find themselves becoming more popular than the perpetrators, and this gives them the soft power, the power of attraction rather than coercion, which in our globalized world is a source of ever greater influence.

I observed this new sort of power when working for the government of Kazakhstan, one of the few countries I had so far advised that wasn’t configured as a Western-style democracy. (It was described by Freedom House when I first worked there as a “consolidated authoritarian regime.”)²¹ It is widely considered to fall below acceptable international standards in terms of respect for human rights, freedom of the press, freedom of expression, political freedom, and in several other key areas. Much of the world’s population lives in such societies, and in many far less free, so getting the know the governments of such countries, as well as some of their citizens, was and remains an essential learning experience.

By definition, any government that asks for my advice is interested in improving the way that it engages with the international community, since that’s what I advise on. In countries whose values and systems are in conflict with the mainstream at this point in history, I’m always on the alert for governments that want to disguise or artificially enhance their true nature in the eyes of the world: would-be propagandists, in other words, who are looking for a shortcut to international approval and aren’t prepared to do enough to earn it. This, as I mentioned earlier, would have been my concern with the Russian Federation had they asked me to advise them, and it has been the case with one or two other countries that I’ve declined to work with.

This is partly because I only like to work in countries where I feel I’m able to give advice that, if taken, stands a real chance of achieving its objectives; and it’s partly because, if I’m being honest, my professional career has long had a hidden agenda.

Actually it’s a poorly hidden agenda, since I make it perfectly explicit to every country I work with: my aim is to help and encourage as many countries as I can to become Good Countries, in order to help bring about that change in the culture of governance worldwide, from fundamentally competitive to fundamentally collaborative, which I believe to be necessary for humanity to survive in peace and prosperity without damaging itself or its habitat any further. The fact that such behavior also happens to be the only way countries can improve their image, and consequently their ability to attract more tourists and investment, as well as sell their products and services at a higher margin, is a “free bonus” and a useful motivator for governments, but not what I’m really interested in, nor is it what I believe governments should treat as their highest priority, either.

This not very hidden agenda means that governments will know, at least in principle, what I’m going to tell them before I start, and if despite that they still feel it’s worthwhile listening to my advice, there’s a good chance they will listen closely and take it seriously.

The position of the government of Kazakhstan was clear. They felt that there was an urgency to map out a new relationship for their country within the international community at the same time as they were pursuing domestic reform. The domestic reform, according to the then president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, needed to be pursued cautiously and at exactly the right pace: too slow, no doubt, for the sternest critics of Kazakhstan, but perhaps no faster than Kazakh society could manage without the risk of instability.

They also knew that they needed to start contributing more fully to humanity and the planet if they wanted to improve their relationship with other governments and their citizens around the world, and they were keen to understand how this could be done. The desire to participate, to move from the margins to the mainstream of the international community, in a considered and principled way, was palpable.

As usual, during the early stages of my investigation I met a number of experts in Kazakh history and culture. Although the population of present-day Kazakhstan is by no means exclusively Kazakh (the country has for millennia experienced wave upon wave of immigration from all points of the compass), the dominant culture of the country until fairly recently has been a nomadic one, and the echoes of nomadism are still everywhere to be heard.

It struck me how quintessentially modern the ancient ideas behind nomadism really are: the idea that since you don’t own the land, you can’t mind anybody else using it (perhaps this has something to do with the relatively low levels of xenophobia that are to be found among the Kazakhstani people); and the idea that you must tread lightly on the soil because you’re only passing through and will one day come back again. There’s a strong sense that the land is never one’s freehold possession to treat as one likes.

Such ideas can be traced back to the Tengriist belief that the meaning of life is living in harmony with the surrounding world. Heaven, earth, the spirits of nature, and the ancestors provide for every need and protect all humans, and by living an upright and respectful life, in harmony with the natural world, human beings will keep the world balanced and sustain their personal “wind horse” (an allegory for the human soul).

These nomadic values of tenancy rather than ownership are absolutely central to sustainability, and just as Bhutan’s “gift to the world” was Gross National Happiness, so the gift of Kazakhstan, along with all the peoples around the world who share the nomadic tradition, could be nomadology: the essential recipe for our future relationship with the planet.

One slightly more provocative but not entirely ludicrous suggestion I made to Bakhytzhan Abdiruly Sagintayev, the prime minister of Kazakhstan, was that the country should unilaterally “disarm” from fossil fuels (they had previously done this with the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union after independence): to promise, in other words, that because to extract and burn all the oil and gas that lies under their territory would inevitably damage humanity and the planet beyond repair, they would promise to leave it in the ground.

This move, if carefully carried out, could be the springboard to achieving one of the most vibrant green economies in the world. Sadly, they wouldn’t do it, not even if the plan was significantly diluted, even though it seems obvious to me that, today, divesting from an economy based on the export of fossil fuels is only jumping before you’re pushed.

Despite the good conversations, what I did find difficult in Kazakhstan was shifting the debate from opportunities to responsibilities, which is essential for a country that really wants to play a meaningful role in the international community. No matter how often I reminded the participants that we weren’t trying to think of things to brag about, it struck me how quickly some of the participants in the process reverted to this mode, telling me about this or that achievement of the country, this or that claim to fame. A real rival to Croatia’s claim to the invention of the cable-stayed bridge is Kazakhstan’s scientifically proven claim to be the original home of the apple and thus perhaps the true Garden of Eden. Well, the apples are certainly delicious there, and some of them are very large.

This tendency to revert constantly to national self-promotion made me wonder if perhaps the country is still too new, too hungry, too fast-growing for this kind of talk. It’s fixated on its own development, quite understandably, but this seems to leave little or no room for a sense of international responsibility. As with so many developing countries where I’d worked, I could feel the slight sense of inferiority and the yearning for competitiveness just racing through their veins. They were unable to suppress it, no matter what I said or how I said it, and seemed unwilling or unable to picture their country in anything other than a “challenger” position. This fierce desire to seek out foreign investment and international growth opportunities, to market one’s assets and achievements to the world, was certainly encouraged by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the 1980s and 1990s. It was striking how difficult it now was to question what had become firmly rooted neoliberal instincts or to challenge the universal doctrine of marketing.

To show leadership in the international community is neither necessary nor even desirable; but to think and behave as equals with all other countries, and to contribute courageously and imaginatively in a sustained and principled way to that community, is fundamental. This takes practice: I hope that Kazakhstan and its peers may one day soon be ready for it.

It does feel a bit, at this point in history, as if the skies are lowering over Europe. To give one example, in Hungary I recently found intelligent, educated people too frightened to talk openly to me about their country and their government, even in private. I begin to perceive the possibility of real chaos in Europe for the first time in two generations.

The instinctive response of many countries in Europe (and beyond) to the coronavirus outbreak in early 2020 was to close their borders. As it happened, they were doing the right thing for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time. An early closing of borders during the containment phase can indeed help slow a pandemic, as long as it’s done multilaterally, humanely, and based on proper testing; to do it once the pandemic is established creates more problems than it solves.

What’s truly problematic is the tendency of so many politicians to treat all globalized phenomena—the spread of foreign people, foreign ideas and habits, foreign cultures and languages, foreign products and even foreign investment—as if they were contagious diseases, and to protect their people against them.

Nobody can know how long or how far the pendulum will swing this time toward authoritarianism and nationalism, and there’s a risk that in the internet age, such ideas can spread much further and faster, and in a more extreme form, than they have done in the past. The mainly European contagion of nationalism eighty years ago had terrible enough consequences for humanity. A repeat of the pattern on a truly global scale, at warp speed, is hardly to be contemplated, especially since it would coincide with existentially threatening changes to the environment on which we all depend.

In 2016 I gave a TEDx talk in which I coined the phrase “inwards and backwards versus outwards and forwards,” hoping to capture the idea that the politics of capital versus labor, of right versus left, was now dead, along with the class distinctions it depends on, and that our age was becoming defined, politically speaking, by people’s approaches to globalization. There were those who found comfort in looking to the past (this is entirely logical: since we’re alive today, what we did in the past clearly wasn’t fatal, but if we do something different in the future, it might well be), and looking to their own kind (there’s logic in this too, because the more closely somebody resembles you, the more likely you are to have interests and values in common, and the more likely you are to understand each other). On the other hand, there were those who found hope in looking to the future, always convinced of the opportunity for progress, and looking outward to other cultures, because in diversity lies richness. Most of us have a certain amount of each tendency in our makeup; few of us are exclusively one or the other.

I was rather proud of the phrase. But to my surprise, it produced a bitterly angry response from some of my followers, and I began to understand that by using such phrases I was in imminent danger of becoming a tribalist myself. The response revealed that among the people who followed me, a certain number—impossible to say how many—would certainly regard themselves as conservative, right-wing, and nationalist. There were people who voted for Trump, people who voted for Brexit, and people who supported Le Pen, Orbán, Wilders, and even Duterte, and they thought I was criticizing them. I was mortified to have unwittingly offended them but at the same time thrilled to find that the Good Country message had resonated, to some degree at any rate, across the traditional divides. I was also relieved that I’d seen how things stood before I made some perhaps more serious mistake.

If the Good Country concept ends up being nothing more than a “liberal counterinsurgency against the rising tide of nationalism,” then it surely doesn’t deserve to exist. To me, the real challenge was not to set up a rival tribe to counter the tribe of nationalists, but to diminish the divide between them: to narrow the chasm, not widen it. Most people who vote for nationalist politicians are neither bad, mad, nor stupid, and their politicians aren’t necessarily so either. I just happen to think that turning inward and backward isn’t the most effective or most sustainable solution to the problems we face. I have reasons for thinking this which I want to share, and would like to try to measure them against the counterarguments.

Now I suppose that makes me what some people like to call a globalist, although I’m sorry that it recently seems to have become an insult. Anyway, it’s the truth, and I spend so much of my time worrying about the big international problems, I really don’t get to spend as much time as I ought to on the local problems of the small village where I live. And I’m grateful that many of the people in my village are localists, but because they spend so much of their time worrying about local issues, they really don’t get to spend as much time as they ought to on the big global problems. I fully understand and share their concerns. I’m glad they exist. I hope they fully share and understand my concerns, and I hope they’re glad that I exist. We need to work together.

But a few years back, the new idea emerged—I’m not sure from where—that we should be deadly enemies, and that we should spend our spare time (once we’ve fixed all those global and local problems, I presume) going on social media, screaming hate at each other. This is surely one of the most dangerous ideas in the world at the moment, because if we globalists and localists don’t work together, we’re doomed to fail both locally and globally. We must challenge this idea that we’re enemies, whenever and wherever we meet it. It’s a wicked idea, and it makes fools of all of us.

Where does all this tribalism come from? A newborn baby experiences loyalty only to itself; this gradually extends to its mother—and to the father, if he’s lucky—and subsequently to the whole family, the village, the tribe, the nation-state. And the nation-state is where, for most of humanity, it sticks and goes no further.

This is partly because the methods used to ingrain a sense of nationhood, over the course of history, have been carefully chosen for their potency: for example, that the greatest honor to be paid to the fatherland is to lay down one’s life in its service. It’s easy enough to convince excitable young men of such a patently idiotic idea, but because women tend to be a bit more alert to the absurdity of such notions, rulers have taken enormous care over the centuries to brainwash women into brainwashing their husbands, sons, brothers, and husbands that this is indeed the ultimate aspiration. No wonder nationhood is such a sticky idea and we are finding it so difficult to push our imagination beyond it.

Solidarity within nations is what has built those nations, as Hassan Damluji points out.²² But today we need to start working toward some form of global society (a global society, please note: not, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, a global government), and the microcosms of nation, race, religion, and region have so far proved antagonistic to that view. Yet it doesn’t always have to be that way. Most of us feel a range of powerful affiliations to groups of very different sizes, and they coexist without conflict.

The challenge here is that in most cases, the loyalty felt toward the “in-group,” whether that’s a tribe, a city-state, a religion, or a nation, has been forged in the crucible of conflict. So powerful is the principle that a sense of union comes from the existence of a common enemy, populists and tyrants have always made use of it in their rhetoric, selecting or even inventing an “other” against whom the people will unite. Compared with the hatred you feel toward this enemy, the hatred you feel toward your neighbor is almost like love. And one of the reasons why a strong loyalty to humanity—the one group which really, really needs our loyalty today—hasn’t yet emerged in any very useful way, may well be because of the lack of a shared enemy.

The crowd leaving the cinema after watching Independence Day or War of the Worlds is arguably the only group that feels true solidarity with the entire human race, if only temporarily. Yet perhaps such films do help, in a small way. I wonder if one could emulate the example of the most effective dictators in the past and artificially stimulate solidarity against an imaginary global enemy. For all we know, the existence of these tropes in cinema may actually be a manifestation of humanity’s deep yearning to be reunited, and doing so against a confected external threat is the only way it knows how to express this.

You’d think that climate change could work pretty well as a stand-in for a hostile force, and maybe it is working very slowly, but unfortunately it isn’t an enemy that the human psyche readily recognizes as an enemy.

In the absence of a common enemy, we somehow have to stop wasting our energies treating other subcategories of human being as enemies. It reminds me of nothing so much as sailors fighting on the deck of a sinking ship.

I was listening to a panel discussion on the radio in the UK a few months ago. The panel consisted of the usual sample of informed individuals from across the political spectrum: a left-wing politician, a right-wing politician, a centrist journalist, and so forth. The subject under discussion was unemployment, and it was fascinating how, despite the predictable differences in each panelist’s account of the causes of and remedies for the problem, every one of them concluded by saying: “Unless we do as I suggest, our nation will lose competitiveness, other countries will overtake us, and all the jobs will be lost to China,” and at this point, the studio audience would applaud.

I found myself shouting at the radio, a thing I rarely do: who ever decided that creating more employment in China was a bad thing? For the Chinese, it’s obviously a good thing. Indeed, one could argue that the marginal benefit of extra jobs is significantly greater in China than it is in the United Kingdom. And with forty thousand dollars per capita in national income each year, aren’t we competitive enough? Surely we have the means, the interest, and the capability of creating higher-value jobs rather than fighting for low-value jobs with the workforces of poorer countries?

It’s at these moments when one can vividly imagine what it was like to be one of a tiny number of individuals whose minds had somehow been opened to the reality of gender or racial discrimination in a period when such prejudices were still regarded as normal. A wide array of perfectly logical arguments would be produced to demonstrate why women or ethnic minorities shouldn’t on any account “take away” the jobs of the indigenous male workforce. It occurred to nobody at the time that these arguments were in any sense inhumane, prejudiced, or false, simply because they were commonly held. Today, they sound outrageous, deliberately offensive, almost prehistoric.

Yes, there is such a thing as benign nationalism. To love one’s country—its land, its culture, and even its people—is pretty normal, thoroughly understandable, and generally harmless. But to love one’s nation—to love its army, its flag, its leader—is pathological, especially if it is accompanied by the idea that other people’s nations are inferior or somehow less important, along with the people who live there.

I have a vision that one day, perhaps in the near future, nationalism will be regarded as taboo, old-fashioned, and socially unacceptable, in just the same way that racism, sexism, ableism, and ageism have finally started to become in our own age. Today, nationalism is still very widely unnoticed, or it’s accepted, or even treated as a virtue. Very few people are “woke” to this particular form of narrow-minded, self-destructive, and pointless prejudice.

The numbers are increasing, but far too slowly. Nationalism isn’t merely damaging to individuals and society: it’s fatal to life on earth.