Originally published on the Oxford Policy Podcast.
In this episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast, Nick Fabbri and Dr. Paul Monk discuss the crises facing the liberal democracies today, and the lessons that the Roman Republic and Greek democracies may hold for the 21st century. We cover Paul's recent papers delivered to the Institute of Law and Strategy, and his tours of Finland, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia discussing the wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and the broader geopolitical situation.
Dr Paul Monk is a writer, poet, and highly regarded Australian public intellectual with a background in security, intelligence, and consulting. His writing regularly appears in the Australian press, and he has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty, to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilisation in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China.
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Transcript below ^_^
[Nick Fabbri] (0:00 - 1:08)
A very warm welcome, dear listeners, to another episode of the Oxford Policy Podcast. My name is Nick Fabbri and I'll be your host for today. As you might be able to tell from my accent, I'm from Australia and I'm studying a Master of Public Policy here at the Blavatnik School of Government within the University of Oxford.
I have a background in the humanitarian sector and in government. I also do a bit of podcasting in my spare time on a conversations podcast called Bloom and I've recorded many episodes with our guest today, my dear friend, Dr. Paul Monk, who is a public intellectual, writer, and poet from Australia. Paul is a regular contributor and advisor on security issues and geopolitics, and today we're going to speak to him about the current crises facing the democratic world and what lessons we might draw from studying the classical republics and democracies of the ancient world.
And also what words of advice and wisdom Paul might have to fellow public policy students who are seeking to tackle some of the intractable policy problems that we face in our respective countries. So, welcome to the show, Paul. It's really wonderful to have you here and a very happy birthday to you.
[Paul Monk] (1:09 - 1:14)
Thanks very much, Nick. It's extraordinary to be here at Oxford University on my 67th birthday. It's a great pleasure.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:15 - 1:25)
Wonderful. We've got a lovely lunch at the Ashmolean Rooftop Restaurant awaiting us after this, which is very exciting. It is.
And how have you found being in Oxford so far? You've been here a couple of times throughout the course of your life.
[Paul Monk] (1:26 - 1:43)
Six or seven times, actually, and the first time almost 40 years ago, so it's full of memories that I come back to Oxford, almost as if I was a student here myself in my youth. It's a wonderful place. You know, it's full of history and colour and art and learning, and I love Blackwell's.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:43 - 1:49)
I'm addicted to that bookshop. Very dangerous for the wallet, though, isn't it? You sort of walk in there and it's substantially lighter when you leave.
[Paul Monk] (1:49 - 1:50)
Yes.
[Nick Fabbri] (1:50 - 1:59)
And so, for our listeners who aren't as familiar with you and your background, could you give us a brief overview of your work and career and some of your primary interests and why we might be speaking today?
[Paul Monk] (2:00 - 3:08)
You know, I grew up in a conservative Catholic family in Australia, and by the time I left secondary school, I thought, I'm not comfortable going straight into a profession. I want to understand the society, the religion, the political culture in which I've grown up before I try and become an actor in it. And so I ended up doing a liberal arts degree in European history, ancient, medieval and modern, by the end of which I thought, OK, I've got a reasonable grasp on that, but why is there a Cold War?
What's going on in the contemporary world, this being in the early 1980s? So I then did a PhD in international relations on US counterinsurgency strategy in the Third World throughout the Cold War. And then I needed a job and I wanted to test my ideas, so I went to the intelligence service and they assigned me to work on China, Japan and Korea, so I reinvented myself yet again.
And that was exceptionally interesting, but in the end, frustrated bureaucracy, I left and set up a consulting company in applied cognitive science, which had nothing to do with China or indeed European history as such. And I've since become a full-time writer on a variety of topics and a poet, so it's been a very interesting odyssey. And I should add, speaking of Blackwell's, I bought Emily Wilson's new translation of The Iliad as soon as I arrived yesterday, as you know, in your company.
[Nick Fabbri] (3:08 - 3:46)
Yes, how fantastic. And so I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk with you today, given your interests in the classics, history and geopolitics, especially considering the various challenges besetting democracies around the world, from multiple wars, challenges to the constitutional order in the United States, the rise of populism and increasing inequality. And obviously we're here at a school of government, a school which is sort of dedicated and set up with the idea of improving public policy, how it's done, how we think about it.
And ultimately, as the motto of the school goes, a world better led, better served and better governed. I hope I got that right. It’s probably out of order in some ways.
[Paul Monk] (3:47 - 3:50)
People have been trying to get it right for thousands of years and still a work in progress.
[Nick Fabbri] (3:51 - 4:17)
And so you recently attended a conference on the classics at the University of Melbourne called How Democracies Die, The Greek and Roman Classics and Our Contemporary Dilemmas. And then before coming to Oxford, you gave a paper at the Institute for Law and Strategy in New York on threats to the current world order and its liberal principles. So could you talk to us a little bit about that conference at the University of Melbourne and how it informed the paper that you gave in New York?
[Paul Monk] (4:19 - 6:53)
Yes. The conference was organised by a friend of mine, Frederik Verweertoos of Belgian origin and is a professor of ancient history at the University of Melbourne, and he invited me to come and simply audit the conference, which was a privilege. So my job was not to give a paper, but to listen to papers and then ask questions, which I did of every speaker.
And what struck me and what I wrote about in the press afterwards was that this was a high quality conference, the papers were genuinely interesting. They weren't tedious, merely academic papers, as some people might put it. And moreover, the debate about classical Greece and Rome was clearly informed by and motivated by concern about what's happening in liberal democracies today, not least in the United States, which of course has long been advertised as the beacon on the hill and the great republic, but which is manifestly floundering in a number of ways.
So it was well worth writing up that conference and saying, this is encouraging that these debates are taking place, that this quality scholarship, which was international, it was not just a bunch of academics at Melbourne University, they came from all over the world, from the United States, from Spain, from Italy, Korea as well, yes. And I should add that Frederik and the others were delighted that I wrote about their conferences being of high calibre and great value, but I didn't do that to flatter him or anybody else. I really was impressed by it.
And I think these issues are of the greatest importance. To segue then to the paper I gave in New York, it was at the invitation of a great scholar called Philip Bobbitt, who is a professor of constitutional law at Columbia University, a friend I've had for close to 20 years. And I was invited to give a paper, and as it happened, when I was preparing to undertake the trip, the war in Gaza broke out, and I was unable to go to Israel to give the paper I'd been due to give at a conference on international security there.
So I had to rewrite my paper and reframe things. And basically what I said is that the Pax Americana, the liberal order set in place after the Second World War, after the defeat of militarist Japan and Nazi Germany, framed at the famous Bretton Woods conference in terms of international monetary order, is under threat. It's not just struggling from within, it's directly being threatened from without.
And all of us who value liberties, free trade, international order, international cooperation, need to pay close attention to this, because this is very serious. If the Pax Americana crumbles, what everyone actually thinks of it, there is no fallback position and world order will be in serious danger of coming apart at the seams. That was the address in New York.
[Nick Fabbri] (6:54 - 8:17)
Yeah, yeah. And so what precisely do the crises of the ancient republics have to teach us about the current day? I mean, you mentioned the world order and Pax Americana feels like it's coming apart at the seams or threatening to, particularly with the access of, you know, Moscow, Tehran and Beijing being increasingly revanchist and hegemonic in their aspirations and stated explicit desire to overturn, you know, I guess the world order of the past 80 years, certainly.
But as Xi Jinping said to Putin some months ago, you know, changes that we haven't seen the like of in 100 years. But, you know, when we think about how precarious the world order is, one can't help but recall the lines from William Butler Yeats' poem, The Second Coming.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
the falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.
You know, this idea that the centre of all the things that liberal democratic traditions or, you know, and there are many people listening to this podcast who don't come from liberal democratic traditions, but at least some kind of sense of stable world order, the way things are that could all kind of disappear, right? And so when you think about the classics and the ancient Roman Republic and the Greek democracies, what crises did they face and how did they seek to preserve the institutions of democracy, such as the rule of law, freedom of speech from, I suppose, challenges both external and internal?
[Paul Monk] (8:18 - 12:01)
Well, to put it very succinctly, one must bear in mind in studying the history of Greek democracy and later of the Roman Republic, that in both instances there were always throughout the history struggles between, as they used to put it, the many and the few, the rich and the poor, or at least the very rich and the middling rich. And that led to varying degrees of stability and instability and innovations, which are what we really look back to with fascination and have sought to reconstitute in the modern world. Innovations in how the greater mass of citizenry, let's call them the middle class, would get to participate in public deliberations, get to vote on candidates for office, get to hold government accountable.
How ballots would be conducted exactly to ensure that they were, as we would say these days, clean and fair. Non-regal, as Trump would say. Yeah.
Well, indeed. And the very fact, we'll come back perhaps to that, but just in passing, since you mentioned Trump, the very fact that in the United States of all places, the constitutional order is being challenged in terms of its legitimacy and transparency by presidential candidates taps into that whole history. And perhaps one way, therefore, to succinctly sum up the resonance of the ancient republics and their fate in the modern world is that when the founders of the American republic in the 18th century put it together, and parenthetically, let's remark that it was a small group of educated slave-earning white males who did it, right?
But they wanted a republic that, unlike the Greek and Roman republics, might actually last. So they sought to learn every lesson they could about why the other republics failed. And one of the processes they put in place, quite deliberately, was an impeachment process so that if a candidate managed to win election as president, but then started to behave in a tyrannical manner in office and disregard the constitution, he, because they always assumed it would be a he, could be removed by legal process rather than by violence.
And it's very rarely been the case in the course of American history that an impeachment has even been contemplated. It's only been tried a handful of times. But when the day Trump was elected, let me say, in 2016, I wrote an opinion piece for the Australian press in which I said the fact that a man of this moral calibre can become US president is going to raise issues of constitutional moment.
And I quoted Alexander Hamilton from The Federalist on why the impeachment process was in place. That was day one. I wasn't, shall we say, disappointed in terms of my prediction, though I'm very seriously concerned about where the American republic is heading.
So to wrap up in terms of the ancient lessons, it isn't simply that the Greek or Roman republics offer wonderful models that we should stick to and emulate. Rather there are lessons both in how they achieve such democracy and government accountability as they did and how that then unraveled and both fell. So in the case of Athens, the democracy diminished somewhat, but it was eventually conquered by Alexander the Great and they were subordinated to monarchy.
In the case of the Roman Republic, the monarchy was internal and became what we call the Roman Empire after a series of civil wars and upheavals inside the republic. And what's been happening recently is a number of American scholars have been saying, well, are we like the American republic? Are we now entering into a kind of terminal crisis of the republican institutions?
If we are, what can we anticipate in terms of American history? Can we learn anything from the fate of their own republic? That's why that conference was held, of course.
[Nick Fabbri] (12:02 - 12:55)
Yeah, brilliant. And obviously in the piece that you wrote for The Australian about this classics conference at the University of Melbourne, you spoke about the, as you just did before, The Federalist papers and the work of Alexander Hamilton. There was also a series of letters that he exchanged with James Madison and John Jay published in the newspapers in New York City between October 1787 and August 1788, in which they discussed those principles which should underpin the founding of the American republic, right, as you just mentioned.
And each letter was signed Publius, right, which is about the public good or the public thing, the res publica, right, from which we derive the word republic. Could you talk a bit about that and I suppose what we mean by the idea of the res publica or the public thing or almost like that Aristotelian idea of the public good being the highest virtue or something?
[Paul Monk] (12:55 - 16:24)
Yeah, and a point of entry might be actually Hannah Arendt's book on revolution in which she wrote in the early 1960s that one can seek personal happiness in private life through one means or another, but public happiness, the feeling that one belongs to a polity in which one's liberty to participate, to debate, to express one's opinion is undergirded by the law. That is a higher form of happiness. That was her argument.
And of course, she famously said in that book that the American Revolution was a triumphant success because it laid an enduring foundation for liberty, whereas the French Revolution deteriorated into tyranny and yet became, in the eyes of radicals, the model for what revolution ought to be like. That's a very interesting topic in itself. But of course, now we're in a situation where the durability of the American Republic and its institutions is actually in question.
And I think she would be the first to acknowledge that that's the case and to be very concerned about it. Indeed, as early as the 1970s, before she died, she wrote a book called Crises of the American Republic, reflecting on the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon and Watergate and so forth. But to go back to Alexander Hamilton, he and those colleagues, as you say, Jay and Madison, who wrote the Federalist Papers, were steeped in the classical history.
They knew their Greek and Roman history. And so they saw themselves in a kind of way as modern Cicero's, you know, Cicero being the great orator and lawyer who opposed what he saw as the looming overthrow of the Roman Republic. And we blend the two.
Catiline, one of the sort of scurrilous dictators of Rome. He refused repeated invitations from Julius Caesar to join his side. And as a result of his opposition to the Caesarist party, he had his throat cut by Antony Stuggs after Caesar's assassination.
And his head and hands were hung up in the forum on the Rostra where, you know, you could say the idea of Roman liberty had been constituted. It was symbolic of that. And it's symbolic of the destruction of those liberties that his head and hands should be hung up there by the bloodthirsty Antony.
So the public thing has to do with we're not ruled by some pretentious tyrant, by some hereditary monarchy. We are ruled by a set of laws. And those laws are open for review by due process.
And they include the civil and political rights of people. And above all, freedom of speech. And the downfall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the empire was chronicled by the great Roman historian Tacitus.
And he made the point that under the Republic, there were debates about policy and strategy in the Senate and between the Tribune of the Plebs and the senatorial class and so forth. Under the empire, decisions of that nature were made in secret in the councils of a military dictator essentially. That's the shift.
And that's what I would imagine most of us want to avoid. The question is, how do we tackle that problem in the contemporary world?
[Nick Fabbri] (16:24 - 16:52)
Yeah. And one reflection I have from your comments just now is that the founding fathers of the US were steeped in the classical tradition and history. And I find so much really of that kind of deep hinterland is kind of lacking, I think, amongst modern political leaders.
It's sort of, I don't know whether it's a problem with our broader education system, but I think we often lack that deeper perspective or understanding or appreciation of the tradition that we're a part of and in terms of our institutions and ultimately how fragile they are.
[Paul Monk] (16:53 - 18:53)
I think that's true. But in fairness to contemporary politicians, I think it must be said that the longer history has gone on, the more there is to try and keep up with. And if all one did was learn Latin and Greek and study the history of Greece and Rome, one would not be adequately acquainted with the pressing challenges of the modern world.
That modern democracies aren't something that was instantiated, say, three or four hundred years ago and has remained static. They've evolved enormously, not least in the extension of the franchise and the passage of legislation, much of it in just the last hundred years, which enfranchises women, which recognises a variety of gender and sexuality orientations, which has made possible the exercise of liberty in a way that, in theory, older constitutions did, except as notoriously as the case, when the American founding fathers said that all men are at liberty, they plainly created equal. Yeah, they plainly didn't include women and they didn't include black Americans. And it's an indication of just how difficult it is to achieve genuinely open and functional democratic institutions, that even though that constitution was set up in the name of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it could not solve the problem of slavery short of a civil war that was very bloody.
And even after the civil war was won by the emancipating side for the following hundred years, the former slaves and their descendants lacked civil rights. That's extraordinary on the face of it. And that's not because American democracy was uniquely hypocritical or bad.
On the contrary, human politics works that way pretty much everywhere. And that's our challenge as human beings in the 21st century. Can we improve on that record, not just go back to it and think we can reinvent the Roman Republic and be okay?
[Nick Fabbri] (18:54 - 19:16)
Right. So, I suppose at a more flexible conceptual level, just to wrap up on this topic of the classics. I mean, how do the classical institutions and phenomena such as ideas of the rule of law, you know, the nature of liberty, voting procedures and elective office versus monarchy inform the accountability or even health of our democracies and democratic institutions and governments today?
[Paul Monk] (19:17 - 23:00)
Well, I think one concise way to encapsulate that might be to say that many people would agree that the Roman Republic started to flounder when instead of being a city-state or even the capital of a Romanized Italy, it became a capital of a Mediterranean-spanning empire. And it was just too big for Roman senators to deliberate upon and deliver executive decisions. So you might say modern democracies, they grew up in nation-states.
But in the last 50 years or so, particularly in the 21st century, they have to be states embedded in a global order, which is moving very fast, which is very complex, which now consists of far more independent, feisty and prospering states than ever before. How do you do that? Not easily.
And perhaps, we're beginning to suspect, not successfully. And that's an ominous thought. So to enlarge on that, I mean, the paper I gave in New York, essentially taking off from a large book published 20 years ago by the convener, my friend, Philip Albert, called The Shield of Achilles, was essentially that it could be what we're seeing right now is a crisis of the order of nation-states that grew up in the 20th century, where the liberal democratic nation-states managed to fend off both fascism, Italian, Japanese and particularly Nazi, and then communism in terms of the Soviet bloc and Maoist China. But that what shaped the new order, would assume, has not been adequately resolved.
And that many people thought when the U.S. had won the Cold War, essentially, because it was pretty much the U.S. and its various allies, but the U.S. did the heavy lifting, that this unipolar moment opened possibilities for a greater visionary world order. But it might reasonably be said that American leadership, and we're thinking Bill Clinton, for example, was actually not very ambitious. It was almost the Frank Fukuyama moment, history's over, it's all good from here.
Until the shock of 9-11, which was a wake-up call for many people thinking, well, there might be those of us who think that liberal democracy is clearly now the best system, that capitalism and market economics are the best, but it's clearly not everybody. And what's happened over the last 20-odd years is that it's become clearer and clearer. And so you alluded earlier to Xi Jinping's remark, where he didn't simply say to Putin, it looks as though things are going to change more than in 100 years, he says, we can bring about more radical changes to the world order than have been achieved in the last 100 years.
You go back 100 years, and I'm confident this is what he was alluding to, and you've got the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. That's what he's got in mind. He wants to radically change the world order.
He makes no bones about that. He pretends that the new world order that he envisages would be an improvement on the current one. But I think the only way one could construe the order he's got in mind or Putin's got in mind as an improvement is if you're resentful of Western preeminence and U.S. leadership and you simply want to get rid of it. If that's your goal, and you can bring it down, in that narrow sense, things improve. In terms of global governance and order and peace and democracy, Putin and Xi would make a very bad leadership combination for the world order. So we've got a lot of thinking to do.
And I picked up Philip's idea that what's emerging in the 21st century is what he calls a nation order and market states. That is something with implications not only for the world order between nations or states, but the constitutions of states, the way we understand relationship between government and people and so forth.
[Nick Fabbri] (23:00 - 23:43)
And to pick up on the modern challenges that we're facing and the instantiations of crises that we've talked about throughout the conversation today in the modern world, you've just been on a tour of New York where you delivered the paper to Poland, to Finland, to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, the Baltic states, talking with people in think tanks and senior national security figures about the state of the world order and our democratic institutions, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its global implications.
Could you talk to us a bit about some of the conversations you were exposed to? What's the thinking, I suppose, in that critical part of the world, that critical theatre about the current state of affairs?
[Paul Monk] (23:44 - 24:55)
Yes, there were exhilarating conversations a lot of ways, because that part of the world, especially Poland and the Baltic states, to a much lesser extent Finland, have over the course of their history repeatedly suffered invasion and partition and bloodshed. And they're very concerned that if Ukraine was allowed to fall, if Putin manages to achieve his ambitions, they're next. And Putin's made no secret that it is his ambition to impose Russian suzerainty over what used to be the Soviet bloc and starting with Moldova, Armenia and the Baltic states.
Probably in that order, taking the most vulnerable first. And of the Baltic states, the one with the proudest and longest history is Lithuania by a country mile. It used to be a very large state in the Middle Ages, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, the Grand Duke of Lithuania.
And it's a little state these days, but it's a very interesting, very European, sophisticated little country. And I spoke to the National Security Advisor to the President there, I spoke to the Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister, I spoke at think tanks, I addressed a group of parliament. I recorded a podcast similar to this one.
[Nick Fabbri] (24:57 - 24:59)
You're in the habit of it, clearly, you've got a passion for it.
[Paul Monk] (24:59 - 25:52)
Yes, well, it's, I may say so, a great privilege to be able to participate in this way in discourse crucial to the condition of the world and to be able to do it freely. I'm not an Australian government official. I'm not at an institution that wants to control what I say or how I say it or what research I choose to undertake.
I'm a completely free public intellectual. So when we talk about freedom of speech, when we talk about the liberties in classical Athens, in the Roman Republic before it became an empire, in the modern republics and democracies, I live those liberties and I hold them very dear. And for that reason, I know from long study of history, should a Xi or a Putin or some novel dictator we haven't seen yet take over, I'm the kind of person they censor and get beaten up in prison, torture, executed.
They do it. I know the history. Many, many people have suffered those fates.
[Nick Fabbri] (25:53 - 25:58)
Like Cheng Lei in Australia recently, a journalist who was sort of, you know, interned for three years and deprived of her liberty, appalling stuff.
[Paul Monk] (25:59 - 26:37)
Yes, yes. And I mean, in both Russia and China, great things happened. I mean, the crushing of liberty in Hong Kong by Xi Jinping is an outstanding case in point.
And we're digressing slightly, but it's germane to the point here that the Australian ambassador to China at the National Press Club in Canberra, only a matter of a year ago, said we will take Taiwan back, whatever that requires. And when we have, we will re-educate the people of Taiwan to know their place in the Chinese world. Those are ominous, almost Orwellian words.
There's 24 million people in Taiwan. They very clearly do not want to be ruled by communist China, by Beijing. But Beijing's saying, you don't get to choose.
We get to choose.
[Nick Fabbri] (26:37 - 26:37)
Yeah.
[Paul Monk] (26:38 - 26:57)
Right? So my personal stance is I hold to that tradition, that complex history of the development and claiming of liberty. I live it myself, and I will have no trouble with Germany.
But if things go badly, my life is at risk, and that of many people with whom I sympathize and whose stories I know.
[Nick Fabbri] (26:58 - 27:45)
And to come back to some of the discussions and meetings you had in Poland and the Baltic States, Finland as well, is your sense that they feel the Western liberal democratic alliance and support for the Ukrainian effort is solid, or is it probably more in line with some recent commentary in The Economist in which, you know, it feels as though, I suppose, the Western alliance, you know, given the prospect of the return of Donald Trump, I think Viktor Orban in Hungary withholding billions of dollars of euros and other sort of critical support for Ukraine. Is there a sense in which the Western support of Ukraine is coming apart, and what would that represent for, you know, democracy and the region? I mean, it's an appalling thing to think about, right?
[Paul Monk] (27:45 - 29:21)
To answer the first part of that question, absolutely there's concern in the Baltic States and in Poland, because they feel that the Western democracies, the bigger ones, you know, let's say Britain, France, United States, don't altogether understand what it's like to live under the Russian thumb. When I was in Riga, when I was in Vilnius, capitals of Latvia and Lithuania, I visited the KGB museums that are there, and they exhibit, they testify to a very grim history with large numbers of people, you know, intellectuals, military officers, governing officials, farmers were just taken away and shot or sent to the Gulag by Stalin. And these states claimed their liberty, and they know what being ruled by tyranny is like, because that simply was a tyranny and a systematic one.
In some ways, Putin is worse, because he doesn't have a commitment even notionally to social justice. He's a Russian imperialist, pure and simple, impure and complex. And so they were talking very honestly and lucidly to me about this.
And Lithuania, as I think I remarked, is the most serious, well, Poland, if you're including it, is the most substantial of Lithuanians. And I was told a joke in Lithuania that the Estonians, who have a substantial Russian minority, the Estonians will fight for liberty to the last Lithuanian. And the other joke was that the Estonians are being threatened by the Russians, and they turn to the Latvians and say, you've got two tanks, could we borrow them?
And the Latvians respond, well, you can borrow one, we gave the other one to the Lithuanians.
[Nick Fabbri] (29:22 - 29:26)
That's a wonderful Latvian on our course, I hope he's not listening to that.
[Paul Monk] (29:27 - 29:41)
So that's, you know, I mean, I was, I was interviewed in Latvia as well, and I met the Latvian ambassador to Lithuania. I really, it was the first time I'd been to these countries, and I've now got a terrific network in those countries. So I'll be part of this debate going forward.
[Nick Fabbri] (29:42 - 29:56)
And those countries are clearly seeking to engage, you know, writers and thinkers and people involved all over the world, right, in Australia to understand their cause and to appreciate the unique circumstances they're in, right? I mean, the Polish government, for instance, put you up for a week and did a lot of educational tours and things.
[Paul Monk] (29:57 - 31:07)
It was remarkable to visit Poland, and it's probably worth saying that once it was clear that I was going to Helsinki and then the Baltic states, I reached out to the former ambassador, Polish ambassador to Australia, and said, any chance I could catch up with you if I pop into Warsaw for a day to my way to Helsinki? The Polish government came back and said, why come for a couple of days? Come for a week at our expense.
We'll pay your airfares, your hotels, your meals. We'll set up meetings. And I got a very good guide and interpreter, and I had very good meetings.
And I visited the museum of the Polish uprising against the Nazis, the museum of Jewish history in Poland, the Holocaust, the museum of Katyn, where Stalin had thousands of Polish military officers and intellectuals executed in 1940. I visited Przemysl on the Ukrainian border, where 5 million Ukrainian refugees had come through in the last couple of years. This is still a town of 60,000 people.
I talked to people in the civic council and the humanitarian groups and NGOs who had dealt with that crisis. It was enormously educational and a great privilege to have been invited to do this. And so in answer to your tacit question, I'll certainly be writing about this when I return to Australia, yes.
Very good.
[Nick Fabbri] (31:08 - 32:35)
Now we're coming toward the end of the interview. We've obviously got a pretty hard time limit. I'm sure we could talk about these things for hours, frankly, perhaps we might, but not on the podcast microphone, but rather at the Ashmolean and the Turf Tavern, even over a pint or three.
On our own turf, so to speak. That's right. I thought just to bring it back to the practical realities of our student cohort here.
We have 150 students from 62 nations around the world, ranging from their early 20s to early 40s as well, all wonderfully motivated thinkers, doers, dreamers, optimists, and I think Democrats too. But many of us are confronted by the scale of the challenges in world affairs across a range of policy domains. We've talked today primarily about security and I guess the preservation of democracy, but there are so many other problems like, you know, child maternal health, poverty, climate change, et cetera.
So when that seems overwhelming, I suppose, how can we best existentially devote ourselves to the task of working for the public good, the res publica, as we mentioned before. It might be nice actually to reference the quote by Katsuo Inamori, who was the founder of the Kyoto Peace Prize, placed in the Inamori Forum here at the Blavatnik School of Government. Just as you walk down the main steps, it says, people have no higher calling than to strive for the greater good of humankind and society.
And so could you maybe sort of reflect on those sentiments? Yeah.
[Paul Monk] (32:35 - 35:58)
I think the first thing I would say, given your reference to your cohort here, is that to be able to attend a school like this at a university of this nature from all around the world and discuss the making of public policy in theory and practice is an enormous privilege and opportunity. And to have people from 62 different countries, as you said, is a fantastic opportunity for networking, for talking with one another about how differently the world looks depending on where you're standing, right, where you're coming from. The different challenges people give most priority to, the different lenses that they think maybe they're acquiring through studying things they haven't studied before, changing one's opinions rather than just seeking to reinforce them, learning from others, not simply from the lecturers, but from these people that you're meeting from around the world.
This is a wonderful opportunity. It's what a good university really should be about. So that would be point one.
The second would be that people strive for all sorts of things in life. And you and I were talking before we began this recording about the way in which in the early 1920s a group of, you know, extraordinary, quite remarkable Englishmen, mostly, decided to try and climb Mount Everest. Nobody had done it before.
When they got to Tibet on their way in, the Dalai Lama was hospitable to them, but he couldn't, they said, figure out why anybody would want to do this, why do you want to climb this massive heap of rock and ice, what purpose does it serve? And that's an interesting existential question to ask in itself, you know, why would somebody do that rather than something more concrete or humanitarian? The answer, I think, is that after the First World War, they were seeking transcendence because the horror of what they'd all lived through and almost died, many of them, was so profound that they wanted to rise to a different realm, and this was symbolic, and many people cheered them on because this was seen as an enterprise of transcendence.
But if you're going to climb something like Everest in the 1920s, when nobody's done it before, you don't have the kit that people have now, you don't even know how it's done, you've got to be very bold, very imaginative, very tenacious. They failed the first time, they failed the second time, the third time, George Mallory, the leader of the expedition, and an assistant, Sandy O'Vine, almost got there and then fell to their deaths. Now, here's the question.
Why is it that we admire these people when, first of all, Sadat and al-Masidullah are climbing this ridiculous mass of rock and ice, and secondly, they failed in the attempt? And I submit that it's because they sought to go beyond, to do what nobody else had done, and they didn't accept defeat the first time or the second time, they kept trying. Those of us who seek to transform the world have a lot of climbing to do.
This is not a trivial undertaking, and many have died over time in seeking that kind of transformation. They're the people that we normally refer to or look to as heroes, hero suffragettes, for example, the pioneers of emancipation, to end slavery, to enfranchise women, to liberate and accept gays and so forth, the heroes who have led free speech movements and so forth. They were each in their own way climbing Everest or attempting to, and many paid heavy price or felt perhaps that they had failed.
That's the mission, and there's a great deal to achieve in the 21st century, and I say go for it, guys, go for it.
[Nick Fabbri] (35:59 - 36:54)
Wonderful, I really appreciate that, Paul, and it'd be great to keep talking, unpacking those final thoughts, but we are getting kicked out of the room, so we’d better go and have that lunch at the Ashmolean, but thank you so much for your time today, you’re a very dear friend of mine. It's just a real pleasure to be able to share your thoughts and insights and your character, I suppose, with my broader cohort, and also the Oxford PolicyPod community, so I don't have a formal outro recorded, so I might sort of ad lib one, but yeah, thank you very much, everyone. You could like and subscribe to us at all major podcast platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Google Podcasts, I believe is being phased out.
We have an Instagram account called at Oxford PolicyPod underscore, and you can find us there, and we look forward to continuing the conversation around the school, but yeah, thank you very much for a wonderful talk today, Paul.
[Paul Monk] (36:54 - 36:57)
You're most welcome. Good luck to all of your cohort. Cheers.