[EN] Francis Fukuyama: Democracia e populismo, EUA vs Europa, imigração e a revolução digital

Data: Wed, 03 Dec 2025 05:45:00 +0000  ·  Duração: 01:02:43

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Francis Fukuyama 00:00:00.00Olá, o meu nome é José Maria Pimentel e este é o
José Maria Pimentel 00:00:29.2845 graus. 00:00:29.28Este episódio é em inglês e tem um convidado muito especial, Francis Fukuyama. 00:00:36.54Fukuyama é professor de ciência política na Universidade de Stanford, nos Estados Unidos, e é hoje um dos intelectuais públicos mais influentes no espaço público, de resto, nas últimas décadas. 00:00:46.26Ele tornou-se conhecido com o livro O Fino da História e o Último Homem, publicado logo depois da queda da União Soviética e que se tornou numa das obras mais influentes do século XX. 00:00:55.46No livro, Fukuyama defendia que a democracia liberal podia ser o modelo final e mais estável de organização política. 00:01:00.28Uma tese que tem dado muito que falar desde então e que ele próprio veio a revisitar em livros seguintes. 00:01:05.54Embora ele seja ainda hoje conhecido sobretudo por este livro, a investigação académica de Fukuyama vai muito mais longe. 00:01:14.12Ele é um autor influente na literatura académica sobre a história dos sistemas políticos, democracia, qualidade da governação e é também hoje em dia um pensador ainda muito ativo em debates sobre populismo, tecnologia e a saúde das democracias. 00:01:29.40Esta conversa proporcionou-se porque conheci Fukuyama numa conferência organizada pelo Jornal de Negócios. 00:01:34.22Tenho de agradecer, porque esta conversa não se teria realizado de outra forma, a Diana Ramos, a diretora do Jornal de Negócios, que nos apresentou no final da conferência no passado dia 9 de novembro em Lisboa, da qual Fukuyama foi o orador principal. 00:01:48.54Valeu muito a pena, porque nesta conversa percorremos quase todos os grandes desafios atuais das democracias. 00:01:53.44Falámos sobre o chamado recuo das democracias, o democratic backsliding, que tem acontecido um pouco por todo o mundo, quer com o sucesso de figuras autoritárias, quer em resultado do crescimento do populismo. 00:02:04.14E falámos também sobre como isto é, em parte, pelo menos causado pelo facto de o Estado, em muitos países, ter perdido a capacidade de governar, a capacidade de fazer coisas. 00:02:13.72Falámos também sobre a diversidade que existe hoje dentro do populismo. 00:02:18.46Uns são caóticos, como Trump, outros autoritários, como Victor Orban, na Hungria. 00:02:23.84Outros revelam-se mais moderados, como Georgia Meloni, em Itália, e outros desafiam classificações, como é o caso de Javier Millet, na Argentina. 00:02:29.68Falámos ainda de um dos temas em que tenho pensado mais, como sabe quem tem ouvido o podcast, o facto de a polarização política atual que se vive em várias democracias não poder ser explicada sem o impacto disruptivo da internet e das redes sociais. 00:02:47.28Sendo este um dos desafios que Portugal tem enfrentado, perguntei também a Fukuyama sobre como lidar com o desafio da imigração e o que é que podemos aprender com outras democracias. 00:02:56.36No meio disto tudo, tivemos também tempo para falar sobre diferenças culturais entre os Estados Unidos e a Europa e o papel que podem ter novas ferramentas, desde a inteligência artificial às chamadas assembleias deliberativas, na reconstrução da confiança democrática e na melhoria do funcionamento das democracias. 00:03:10.84Foi um verdadeiro tour de force esta conversa com Francis Fukuyama. 00:03:15.98Espero que gostem e até o próximo episódio. 00:03:22.58Se gosta de ouvir podcasts, conheça a oferta que o Expresso tem para si. 00:03:22.58Da política à economia, ciência e cultura. 00:03:34.32Passando pelo desporto. 00:03:34.32Entrevistas marcantes, análises e perspetivas que fazem a diferença. 00:03:41.28Ouça em expresso.pt e nas principais plataformas de podcast. 00:03:41.28Expresso. 00:03:41.28Liberdade para pensar. 00:03:52.58Professor Fukuyama, thank you for being on 45 graus. 00:03:52.58It's great to have you here. 00:03:58.66Thank you for having me. 00:03:58.66I want to start with heavy stuff, as it were. 00:03:58.66So you are perhaps less well-known to the general audience for your influential work on governance and political institutions. 00:04:10.52And you've argued that the three pillars of political order are, if I'm not stating this wrong, state capacity, rule of law, and accountability. 00:04:16.08So state capacity is the ability of the state to do stuff, in a sense, to have the resources to do it. 00:04:21.18Rule of law is to what extent it is impartial in doing so, so absence of corruption and so on. 00:04:26.38And accountability is democracy. 00:04:30.94Now, if we look at the state of democracies in the world, we see a lower trust, we see democratic backsliding, we see rise of populists. 00:04:36.34From these three pillars, which one of them do you see as the biggest culprit for this trend in recent decades?
Francis Fukuyama 00:04:45.76I don't know that you can identify a single culprit, because they interact at many levels. 00:04:51.56So, for example, I think that the failure of states to actually deliver on goods for their citizens, like infrastructure, like housing, like security, which is a big issue, you know, in, for example, in Latin America, that has led to a lot of voter discontent that then gets reflected in elections that bring populists to power. 00:05:12.66And many of those populists claim to be strong men that can solve some of these problems by breaking through all of the constraints that are imposed by having a real rule of law. 00:05:23.54And I think that's, you know, one of the unhealthy dynamics that's going on right now.
José Maria Pimentel 00:05:29.38Why do you think that's happening? 00:05:29.38So why did suddenly states fail to deliver,
Francis Fukuyama 00:05:34.06or start failing to deliver? 00:05:34.06You know, it depends on what part of the world you're talking about. 00:05:39.64So in many developing countries, you never had a modern state to begin with. 00:05:39.64And I think this was one of the big failures in a lot of the theoretical literature on development, that it was all done by economists who didn't understand the importance of politics. 00:05:52.86If you don't have a capable impersonal bureaucracy, it's actually very hard to develop economically. 00:05:59.58I think that actually one of the big reasons that East Asia did as well as it has over the last, you know, 50, 60, 70 years, is that China and the countries that are in the Chinese cultural orbit, all had states well before they dealt with European colonialism, or, you know, foreign invasion, this sort of thing. 00:06:19.24That's the essence, I think, of Chinese culture is to have a state bureaucracy that's based on merit, and has a lot of capacity. 00:06:30.64And so that allowed Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and China itself to become these star developers. 00:06:30.64Once once they settled, you know, civil wars and foreign intervention, this sort of thing. 00:06:44.74They had a state before. 00:06:45.86They had a state. 00:06:45.86They had a longstanding state that was actually much older than any state in Europe.
José Maria Pimentel 00:06:51.26Yeah. 00:06:51.26And there's, there's a sort of an inconvenient truth in political history in that you, in many countries, you, the state was built before democracy, as it was.
Francis Fukuyama 00:07:00.36Oh, yeah. 00:07:00.36No, absolutely. 00:07:00.36I think that, in fact, it has to be built before democracy, because you need basic political order. 00:07:07.50Yeah. 00:07:07.50I mean, you have to have security. 00:07:07.50You know, if you have a society that's ravaged by a lot of militias or gangs, or, you know, whatever, where there's no central legitimate source of authority, you're never going to develop, and you're certainly not going to have a democracy.
José Maria Pimentel 00:07:24.16Yeah, but the implications of what you're arguing is that if you are in a situation in which you have sort of a democracy, but no functional state, the only way to solve it is to sort of go back to a dictatorship, solve the state, and then reinstate the democracy. 00:07:36.18Which might be true. 00:07:36.18I want you to
Francis Fukuyama 00:07:41.64speak freely. 00:07:41.64No, I don't. 00:07:41.64It's an unpopular opinion. 00:07:41.64I guess there's a couple things to say. 00:07:41.64You can both build a state and build democracy simultaneously. 00:07:47.18So they're not necessarily at odds. 00:07:47.18I would say, say, however, historically, the state building part has come before democratization. 00:07:54.34You know, in Europe, most countries weren't democratic until the 20th century. 00:07:59.80It took, you know, a long time, but they actually had developed modern states. 00:08:06.04And again, one unfortunate truth is that most of them develop modern states under autocratic conditions, like the famous Prussian bureaucracy, or, you know, the French bureaucracy that was built, you know, under the old regime, but then by Napoleon. 00:08:20.00And if they didn't have the necessity of fighting wars, they never would have developed centralized taxation,
José Maria Pimentel 00:08:31.50capable bureaucrats, you know, and the like. 00:08:34.48So going back to the first point, let's focus just on what is already a very broad umbrella, Europe, North America, and the Latin America. 00:08:39.88Are these governments performing worse than it were 20 or 30 years ago? 00:08:45.08Or are people suddenly more demanding? 00:08:45.08Or is it more visible? 00:08:45.08So at the structural level, what's happening? 00:08:50.30Because 20 or 30 years ago, we didn't have this backlash. 00:08:50.30And suddenly we have it. 00:08:54.18Is it that the states got worse?
Francis Fukuyama 00:08:57.50Well, I think you have to disaggregate because you have different remedies for different countries. 00:09:03.02I think the state in the United States has definitely gotten worse. 00:09:03.02If you think about just building things, you know, the United States beginning in the progressive era at the end of the 19th century, and then through the depression, they built things like the Golden Gate Bridge and the, you know, the Tennessee Valley Authority. 00:09:18.18They mobilized for the Second World War very effectively. 00:09:23.68They won that war. 00:09:23.68And then they promised to put a man on the moon in 10 years. 00:09:23.68And they did that. 00:09:28.82And I don't think any of those things could happen under current circumstances, because I think the American state, in a sense, has ossified. 00:09:32.90It's become too rigid. 00:09:32.90There are too many conditions and rules that are placed on it that prevent it from acting effectively. 00:09:39.24In other areas in the developing world, you know, you started out with much weaker states where you really needed to build state capacity. 00:09:51.00I think that that was partly successful. 00:09:51.00So for example, the debt crisis in Latin America was really caused by incompetent central banks, finance ministries, and so forth. 00:09:57.36And so there's a big effort after the debt crisis to build the capacity in those areas. 00:10:04.74And today, with the exception of Venezuela and, you know, a couple of other countries, inflation has not been a big problem. 00:10:15.66You're not going to get into the kind of crisis that you had in the 1970s and 80s. 00:10:15.66But it's still not an area in which you have competent kind of European or East Asian bureaucracies that are full of technocrats, you know, highly skilled professionals, you still have a lot of patronage and clientelism where, you know, people are appointed because they're political allies of whoever is the president or prime minister, not because they have the skills and the background to actually do things
José Maria Pimentel 00:10:47.86competently. 00:10:47.86Focusing on the U.S., which you know best, of course, how has the quality of state bureaucracy decreased? 00:10:52.86I don't know if you agree with this conceptualization, but we can sort of look at politics and look at democracy as the input side and governance as the output side, right? 00:10:57.32So the input side is to what extent our wishes as citizens reflected in the government's policies, and the output side is to what extent are those policies effective, right? 00:11:07.26So the input side is very broken. 00:11:07.26So it's much more polarized than it was in the past than it was in the 60s. 00:11:12.74But on the output side, always been curious about that because there's a big debate in the U.S. about to what extent, you know, the whole thing about the deep state and so on. 00:11:21.70So is the public bureaucracy really worse than it was in the golden years of the 1960s? 00:11:27.54And if so, why? 00:11:27.54I mean, what happened suddenly? 00:11:27.54Because it's not like it's not those countries in that they were where they started just hiring people for reasons, I think, or maybe it is.
Francis Fukuyama 00:11:38.78No, I think that there's a clear pattern to the deterioration of the American state, which just has to do with the accumulation of too many rules. 00:11:45.42Americans never trusted the government. 00:11:45.42This is one of the deep characteristics that distinguishes the United States from most European countries. 00:11:57.12And because of this distrust, Congress has always been very eager to place controls, you know, to hold hearings, to write rules, very detailed rules for how the American bureaucracy is supposed to operate. 00:12:06.12And so you have a procurement scandal in which there's some corruption. 00:12:13.92And so Congress writes all these detailed rules about, you know, how you can procure office furniture in the future to make sure that there's not a trace of corruption, you know, in that transaction. 00:12:26.68And these things accumulate. 00:12:26.68The other thing is that the progressive wing that had built the American state during the New Deal in the 1930s, up through the 1960s, turned against the state in a certain sense, because they began to feel that the state had been captured by big corporations, by, you know, various malign forces in American society. 00:12:46.42And actually, the state, instead of becoming an instrument of progress, had become the enemy of progress. 00:12:53.96This corresponded with the rise of the environmental movement, with the rise of civil rights. 00:13:00.50And lo and behold, it turned out the federal government, when it did things, you know, hurt the environment. 00:13:06.74You know, they sprayed DDT, you know, on fields in the Midwest and poisoned people. 00:13:11.58It turned out that, you know, the state was not hiring African Americans and women. 00:13:17.74And so you create this, in a way, a whole progressive, several generations of young people that think that the state is actually the problem, that it's no longer capable of doing things that promote human welfare and happiness, but it really is harming that. 00:13:17.74And therefore, you've got to constrain the state. 00:13:17.74And there's a perfect meeting of minds between the left and the right. 00:13:45.78Because the right never liked the state in the first place. 00:13:45.78They believe that they're making all sorts of decisions, you know, that are left wing and, you know, out of touch with the American people. 00:13:45.78And people on the left think that the state is too captured by, you know, capitalist forces and various malign. 00:13:45.78And together, I think they lead to a bureaucracy that is hugely burdened by too many rules.
José Maria Pimentel 00:14:10.54To what extent do you buy Robert Putnam's thesis of, which actually goes in a sense the other way. 00:14:10.54So it goes to the basis of the whole process. 00:14:10.54And what he argues is that social capital has been decreasing in the US. 00:14:10.54So interpersonal trust, to what extent people are able to build associations, to build, I don't know, it can be something like the next door sports club or a political party or political movement. 00:14:35.88And he argues, I mean, as you know, he argues that has been going down substantially in the last decades. 00:14:35.88And that's sort of the ultimate cause of this. 00:14:35.88Do you agree with that?
Francis Fukuyama 00:14:45.42Well, yeah, I was involved in that debate over his Bowling Alone book at the time. 00:14:45.42And I think there's some big problems with the argument. 00:14:45.42I actually don't think that American social capital, if it's simply the ability of Americans to work together in voluntary organizations, I don't think that's changed. 00:14:45.42Americans are still really good at it. 00:15:06.06But the problem is different, which is that there isn't what Putnam called bridging social capital that actually allows people with differing points of view to work together. 00:15:18.66American civil society today is highly organized. 00:15:18.66Every single interest has a professionalized association to defend those interests. 00:15:30.46You know, every disease has an advocacy organization. 00:15:30.46Every, you know, Indian tribe or ethnic minority is organized, you know, to represent its interests. 00:15:39.84But what you don't have is, I think, a common sense of Americanness. 00:15:39.84And then you overlay the polarization that's taken place in American politics on top of that. 00:15:51.64And it turns out that these highly organized groups hate each other. 00:15:51.64And so every time they're able to organize, but within themselves, not within themselves. 00:15:58.28Yeah. 00:15:58.28And I think what you're lacking is a kind of sense of any kind of common purpose that would allow these highly polarized groups to say, "Well, we're all part of the same society. 00:15:58.28We need to get things done. 00:15:58.28Therefore, we need to compromise our positions and work with people that we disagree with." And that's the thing that I think has changed.
José Maria Pimentel 00:16:16.84When you travel through Europe on that level, what are the main differences you find?
Francis Fukuyama 00:16:21.28Well, Europe never had this kind of deep distrust of the state that America did. 00:16:21.28I think that's just a feature of American political culture that comes from America's history as a revolt against the English monarchy and parliament.
José Maria Pimentel 00:16:35.96And you built the state from bottom up in the U.S.
Francis Fukuyama 00:16:38.68Yeah. 00:16:38.68And, but it was much later. 00:16:38.68You know, the big reform movements in Germany and France and Britain all took place, you know, much earlier than in the United States. 00:16:48.04It only really happened in the U.S. in the late 19th century and was never fully completed. 00:16:53.80And I think that Europeans and Asians just have a different attitude. 00:16:53.80You know, they, many of them think, well, the state is there to protect us. 00:17:02.32You know, it protects us from corporations, from market forces, from terrorists, from all sorts of malign actors that are going to harm, you know, our collective well-being. 00:17:13.36And Americans tend to think that the state is a big threat to their well-being because… 00:17:18.12They trust more of the other people. 00:17:19.12Yeah, that's right. 00:17:19.12You know, so, for example, in Europe, you know, there's a deep distrust of corporations like these big tech companies that are running, you know, the internet platforms. 00:17:30.12In the United States, it's the other way around. 00:17:30.12You know, that people actually like the private sector and they distrust government regulation. 00:17:37.12And so that's why there's more regulation in Europe than there is in the U.S.
José Maria Pimentel 00:17:41.88What I feel, correct me if you disagree with this, but what I feel is that in both geographies or in both places, there's mistrust of both, of both the government and corporations. 00:17:53.88Just the balance between those mistrust is different, right? 00:17:56.64Yeah, that's right. 00:17:56.64Because in the U.S. you also have mistrust of the corporations. 00:17:58.64Yeah, yeah, definitely. 00:17:59.52It's just lower than the mistrust you have on government. 00:18:02.80And here's the same thing. 00:18:02.80If you go on the street and ask people about government, they'll tell you the worst things. 00:18:07.00Yeah. 00:18:07.58But then they will want the government still to regulate those corporations because ultimately they think it's a better solution.
Francis Fukuyama 00:18:14.24Well, it also differs from one European country to another. 00:18:18.08So if you go to Northern Europe, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, you know, Britain to some extent, they've got a much older tradition of, you know, pretty high quality government. 00:18:27.96Whereas if you go to Southern Europe, you know, Italy, Greece, so forth, for various complicated historical reasons, the state was never, you know, as dominant. 00:18:37.94And the quality of the state was always, you know, in terms of levels of corruption and patronage was always much higher in Southern Europe than it was in Northern Europe. 00:18:46.52And so the performance of the state, you know, has also varied. 00:18:49.92I was a visiting professor in a Danish university, and as an American, it was really quite jarring to hear Danes say, well, I don't mind paying high taxes. 00:19:00.30And this was in the days when their tax rate was much, much higher than the American tax rate because they said, you know, I get a lot back. 00:19:07.90I get education. 00:19:07.90I get health care. 00:19:07.90I get a pension. 00:19:10.84And the state does this very competently. 00:19:12.66You'd never hear an American say anything remotely like that.
José Maria Pimentel 00:19:15.44But Denmark is like Denmark and Sweden, I think, are the pinnacle of state effectiveness. 00:19:19.92That's right. 00:19:20.50If you go to other countries, it's still a bit different. 00:19:23.06And since we are talking about culture, there's a, I can't resist asking you this. 00:19:27.12While on other levels, there's a big heterogeneity among European countries, there's one dimension on which you can clearly make a comparison between Europe and the U.S. almost as a whole. 00:19:38.32And you can see this in the World's Value Survey data set, which is in, to what extent do you believe your position in life is a result of your own actions or either trust or your social background or something like that? 00:19:51.74And in Europe, most people believe that it's the latter. 00:19:54.56Yes. 00:19:54.96So either like or your social background, whereas in the U.S. people believe it's the result of their own effort. 00:20:00.00Why do I think this is interesting? 00:20:01.20I think this has all sort of implications on the political level, too, right?
Francis Fukuyama 00:20:04.20Yeah, definitely. 00:20:05.04No, this is a longstanding debate about why no socialism in the United States, right? 00:20:10.42Every European country has had a socialist party that wanted the state to take care of people. 00:20:15.46And I think the fundamental explanation for this still remains the case. 00:20:19.84It's that in Europe, you had feudalism in which you had a protective state that, you know, had a relationship with people in the United States. 00:20:29.46You start out as a settler colony where you have individuals that basically have to look out for themselves and they see the state as a, you know, a threat to that kind of individualistic independence. 00:20:41.42And I think that that explains a lot of the difference between Europe and the United States. 00:20:45.94In America, we've had this myth that every individual is responsible for their situation in life. 00:20:51.94And if you're poor, it's your damn fault, you know, because you didn't work hard enough. 00:20:56.62You had the opportunity and you messed up. 00:20:57.96That's a reverse side of the coin, right? 00:20:59.28Yeah. 00:20:59.86Whereas in Europe, I think if you're poor, you'll say, well, I was born into a, you know, working class family. 00:21:05.04I wasn't given opportunities and that's why I'm poor.
José Maria Pimentel 00:21:08.02Yeah. 00:21:08.42And there's a paradox there, which is, I'm not sure you agree with it. 00:21:10.96I think you agree with this. 00:21:12.14I think Europeans are right on this one, right? 00:21:14.02Mostly our, what we end up doing is more an effect of our background than of our intrinsic value. 00:21:20.76But on the other hand, if we believe that our outcome in life is the effect of our intrinsic value, we'll work much harder. 00:21:27.56Yeah. 00:21:27.70And the country as a whole will be better. 00:21:29.56So it's a sort of a paradox here where, where maybe the truth is not the most conducive to collective well-being. 00:21:36.14Well, because then you have the poor, for which these might be completely disastrous, right, as you were saying.
Francis Fukuyama 00:21:42.36So one of my great mentors was Seymour Martin-Lipset, a great sociologist and political scientist. 00:21:49.18And his last book was called American Exceptionalism. 00:21:52.90By that, he didn't mean that America was exceptionally good. 00:21:56.16He said that it was both exceptionally good and exceptionally bad, and the two things were related to each other. 00:22:02.50And so, for example, this American Individualism means that we don't have a strong welfare state. 00:22:08.64We don't believe in taking care of less fortunate Americans. 00:22:12.46But we also have a higher level of entrepreneurship, of risk-taking, of, you know, much more vigorous market culture, because we believe that individuals, you know, should have the opportunity to enrich themselves and, you know, build new things. 00:22:27.32So it's both good and bad, you know, it's also the lack of respect for authority is what makes the United States have a much higher crime rate than most European countries. 00:22:39.40On the other hand, that willingness to break rules is what led to Apple computers and, you know, all these innovative companies that didn't simply want to go along in the same path that, you know, everybody else was following. 00:22:51.80So that's why it's a double-edged sword. 00:22:54.04It has a good side and a bad side.
José Maria Pimentel 00:22:56.62And are there American states on which this square has sort of been circled? 00:23:02.58So in a sense, on which you get the best of both worlds, of individualism and stability, as it were. 00:23:09.40Well, this is an interesting question.
Francis Fukuyama 00:23:14.72I think that culture is very important. 00:23:17.56And a lot of, there's a lot of variation within the United States. 00:23:21.38If you look at states within the United States, there's different mixtures of this. 00:23:25.92The areas that were settled by Scandinavians like Minnesota and many parts of the Midwest actually get that balance pretty well. 00:23:33.38They do manage to take care of people, but there's also a fair amount of innovation. 00:23:38.00Other states, you know, look much worse. 00:23:40.78So if you go into the Deep South, you have this, first of all, you have the legacy of slavery. 00:23:45.44You have a very hierarchical society in which, you know, people at the bottom are not given, you know, many opportunities. 00:23:52.76And so there's a huge, you know, variation within the United States and in the way that that balance has struck. 00:23:59.38Yeah.
José Maria Pimentel 00:23:59.84Let's go back to the topic we left a while ago, populism, and the whole democratic backsliding. 00:24:05.32There's a paradox on which there has been a lot of discussion, and I'm sure you've thought of it, which is that on the one hand, we depart from the premise that indeed the state is performing worse. 00:24:17.14So there are reasons for people to complain, but then the responses by the populists and the way they behave once they are in power are even worse. 00:24:24.92So their responses are simple, and whenever they are in power, or maybe not whenever, but most times when they achieve power, they tend to be not effective at all. 00:24:35.04But people still voting for populists, politicians around the world, which creates a paradox here. 00:24:40.30Because if, again, going back to the premise, if people are unhappy about government, and if there's another party which gets power and does even worse, then people should sack that politician and vote someone else in. 00:24:50.60So there's a paradox here. 00:24:52.10What's your view?
Francis Fukuyama 00:24:53.04That's correct. 00:24:53.74I think that you see this going on in the United States where people are unhappy with the government. 00:24:59.36They don't trust it. 00:25:00.82And many Americans are just ignorant about what the government does. 00:25:03.78And they think that, you know, it consists of a bunch of bureaucrats sitting around in front of their computers playing computer games and, you know, basically having a nice vacation at taxpayers' expense. 00:25:15.58And so they are perfectly willing to do like Elon Musk did and simply fire people arbitrarily. 00:25:22.22And they don't really understand that the government actually does important things. 00:25:26.24It keeps their Social Security checks coming. 00:25:28.84It makes sure that airplanes aren't colliding with each other in airports. 00:25:32.48It makes sure that the streets are paved, you know, at all sorts of levels. 00:25:36.24And I think it's a deep misunderstanding about the importance of government in people's lives. 00:25:42.44And you're right that when populist politicians actually do come to power, well, they can go in one of two ways. 00:25:48.04They can actually wake up to the fact that if you don't get the garbage collected, you're not going to win the next election and actually start improving government. 00:25:57.06Or they fail to perform and then, you know, they're out. 00:26:01.32Now, what's an interesting case is something like Hungary, where I think there has been a deterioration under a populist, you know, pretty authoritarian party and leader. 00:26:11.78There, I think there's a great irony that they've been bailed out by the EU itself because something like 4% of Hungarian GDP is due to the subsidies that they get from the EU. 00:26:23.74And so, in that particular case, the populist doesn't have to bear the consequences of bad government.
José Maria Pimentel 00:26:30.46Although, to be fair, that happens to the populists and also to other governments with bad policies in other countries. 00:26:36.92Yeah, that's true. 00:26:37.66And it's not only the case of Hungary. 00:26:39.84Although there's an interesting aspect of populism is that if we were, if we have this conversation, I don't know, four or five years ago, the picture would be mostly bleak than the one I presented before. 00:26:50.72But nowadays, we have some interesting cases which have gone a bit differently. 00:26:54.72And you mentioned them in the conference this morning. 00:26:56.60So, you have Italy with Georgia Meloni, where she seemed to have diverted from the typical populist path. 00:27:04.32And then you have some wild cards, like in Argentina, like Millet, who is a populist, but is also kind of an ultra-libertarian. 00:27:12.16So, it's not clear what he's doing in terms of policies. 00:27:15.96Some of them are quite radical, but others are, of course, ideological, but what many economists would recommend. 00:27:21.44So, the picture is more diverse now than it was a few years ago, right?
Francis Fukuyama 00:27:25.52No, I think that's right. 00:27:26.48I mean, Georgia Meloni actually turned out, you know, there's certain core issues like immigration that she still cares very much about. 00:27:33.60And her policies diverge from the liberal norm, much more, you know, wanting to close Italy's borders. 00:27:40.34But she's a supporter of Ukraine. 00:27:42.56She's a supporter of NATO. 00:27:44.34She's actually been, you know, reasonably good for an Italian politician in managing the macroeconomy in Italy. 00:27:51.76So, she's definitely a different sort. 00:27:53.72But Millet is a really complicated case. 00:27:56.66I think you have to understand the context of Argentina, where you've had successive governments that have just spent way too much money. 00:28:06.90You know, there's a joke that's told among development economists. 00:28:10.52There are four types of countries in the world. 00:28:12.86There are rich countries, there are poor countries, there's Japan, and there's Argentina. 00:28:17.46So, Japan can't get inflation going, even if they try really hard. 00:28:22.50And Argentina can't prevent inflation from happening, no matter what government is in power. 00:28:28.66And Millet is really the first, you know, leader that has actually tried a strong enough medicine to get that under control, you know, in terms of his kind of libertarian policies. 00:28:39.66But, you know, the Argentine state was out of control. 00:28:42.72They had many, too many civil servants. 00:28:45.60They really needed to reduce the size of the state. 00:28:48.36And the kind of medicine that Elon Musk was trying to impose on the United States actually would have been more appropriate in Argentina because they did have a very big, you know, inefficient bureaucracy. 00:29:00.82But he's also adopted, Millet has personally adopted a lot of the anti-elite rhetoric of Trump and these other populists.
José Maria Pimentel 00:29:08.92And even the conservative parts. 00:29:10.64In the beginning, he was a kind of anarcho-capitalist, ultra-libertarian, but he's also anti-abortion, anti-I don't know. 00:29:17.66Yeah, that's right. 00:29:18.92So it's not, for me, it's not easy to figure out at all. 00:29:22.60So whether he's just another populist or whether he's sort of a Margaret Thatcher, if you will.
Francis Fukuyama 00:29:29.62Well, he's not a populist in the sense of doing things that are popular and easy but bad in the long run. 00:29:36.52He's actually made... 00:29:38.08He's actually been the other way around, in a sense, right? 00:29:39.94Yeah, I mean, he's put Argentina through a really hard period, making, I think, the justified argument that if we don't do this, we're just going to be in the same inflationary spiral that we've been in for the last hundred years. 00:29:53.48So in that sense, you know, he's been an anti-populist and doing unpopular things.
José Maria Pimentel 00:29:57.72Yeah, he has the populist rhetoric, but not the populist policies, right? 00:30:02.04Right, right. 00:30:02.70But it's difficult for me to figure him out. 00:30:05.22You mentioned immigration, and that's, of course, a big topic everywhere, but especially in Europe. 00:30:10.52And it wasn't so some years ago, but nowadays it's a very big topic here in Portugal, because we've had a big influx of immigrants, and that's created all sort of tensions and backlash, which are, to some extent, normal, but also, as elsewhere, fueled up by populist rhetoric. 00:30:31.28Do you have any advice there? 00:30:32.86So we know that whenever there's fast immigration, there's some reaction from the electorate, and we also know that populist leaders tend to fly that, to surf that wave. 00:30:43.84Based on other countries, is there something we can learn in terms of dealing with this issue in an effective way?
Francis Fukuyama 00:30:51.22Well, I think that the thing that people really object to is not immigration per se, but uncontrolled immigration. 00:30:58.86If you look at Australia and Canada, they actually have higher percentages of foreign-born people than the United States or, you know, many European countries. 00:31:11.90But they only let in people that they deliberately want to let in. 00:31:16.26They have skill requirements and, you know, this sort of thing. 00:31:20.34The problem in the United States, if you look at the poll data, is people aren't, except for this very hardcore nativist people, most Americans, you know, they're descended from immigrants, and they appreciate the role that immigrants play. 00:31:33.32What they didn't like was that people were coming in without anybody, even knowing that they were in the country, there's no way of controlling the numbers. 00:31:43.64I think that numbers are important because, really, immigration helps if they can be integrated into the larger society, adopt the language, the norms, you know, the customs of the people that have been living there for longer. 00:31:57.38And it's harder to do that when the numbers rise to, you know, very large percentages because… 00:32:03.34If it happens very fast. 00:32:04.28Yeah. 00:32:04.66And they'll live in neighborhoods where they only speak their language and they don't, you know, learn the language of everybody else and this sort of thing. 00:32:11.84And that's what I think really people are worried about. 00:32:14.38And I think it's a legitimate thing to be concerned over. 00:32:17.74So, I think it's really the control over the process that's really the key. 00:32:21.56Yeah.
José Maria Pimentel 00:32:22.18And that point you bring up is a very good one, that most people are not really nativists. 00:32:28.58And actually, this touches another big discussion with which you are surely familiar, which is that while we have seen the rise of right-wing populism over recent decades, especially a decade and a half, at the same time, if we look at people's values around the world, they are becoming more progressive, as it were. 00:32:47.20I'm not sure this is the right word, but they are becoming more open towards diversity in general, which creates another paradox. 00:32:54.12So, while people are becoming, at least the way they respond to surveys, they seem to be becoming more open and progressive, they are voting, they as a whole are voting for populist leaders, which creates an apparent contradiction here.
Francis Fukuyama 00:33:08.52Yeah, I don't think it's an apparent contradiction. 00:33:10.82I really do think it's related to numbers and control, as I was saying, that you can appreciate the contribution that immigrants make, especially in many advanced countries where populations are declining, where you don't have enough labor to run your hotels or, you know, your kitchens or your factories. 00:33:32.68And you need more people for everybody's benefit. 00:33:35.60There's no way you're going to fund Social Security in the long run if you don't have enough, you know, younger workers. 00:33:41.60But if that process, you know, moves too quickly and if the numbers are too great and if it doesn't look like those people are being well integrated into the society, that's when I think you get this, you know, very severe backlash. 00:33:54.88Joe Biden, I think, made a very big mistake in not trying to control, you know, people seeking asylum over the southern border. 00:34:02.94He could have done that. 00:34:04.12I think both Obama and Trump actually had much tougher immigration control policies. 00:34:10.62So why do you think he didn't do it? 00:34:12.18Well, it's a combination of things. 00:34:14.00I think he didn't take the issue seriously enough. 00:34:17.06There is a wing, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that's very pro-immigration, that they think that really there shouldn't be, you know, constraints and restrictions on numbers. 00:34:28.42And he, I think, was unfortunately listening to that wing of his own party than, you know, the more centrist people that were more in touch with, I think, ordinary people's opinions.
José Maria Pimentel 00:34:39.18The problem here is that, in hindsight, it's easy to say where he should have drawn the line. 00:34:45.28But if we were there, it's a much tougher decision because what you are balancing out is political stability on the one hand and humanitarian concerns on the other. 00:34:55.74Because if you don't let people in, these are actual people that you are leaving at the border. 00:35:00.78So for that decision to make sense, it needs to be something that would have a really bad effect in terms of political stability, which it did. 00:35:10.24So we now, in hindsight, can say that with some confidence that policies were too lenient, perhaps. 00:35:16.80But it's very, and I guess, I think this is probably the biggest challenge for mainstream political parties in dealing with these issues, that where do we draw the line? 00:35:26.56Do we completely close up borders? 00:35:28.88This not to mention the economic impact, which, of course, is another relevant one. 00:35:33.42But on the humanitarian front, where do we do it? 00:35:36.16Like, why not close up the country altogether, right?
Francis Fukuyama 00:35:39.14Well, yeah, it's very hard. 00:35:40.80I think that one of the problems is that a lot of the migrants themselves have gamed the system and they've realized that they have a much better chance of getting into a given country, into a rich country, if they claim persecution. 00:35:54.32Now, there's plenty of persecution in the world and there are plenty of people with perfectly legitimate asylum claims. 00:36:00.28But first of all, you have this problem of numbers. 00:36:02.70So, you know, a million Syrians came into Europe and particularly into Germany, you know, during the Syrian civil war. 00:36:10.12And that, I think, would have been destabilizing under any conditions. 00:36:14.40But those people actually had a real reason to fear for their lives if they stayed in Syria. 00:36:19.88In the American case, it's more complicated. 00:36:23.48Most of the migrants that come across the border, some of them are fleeing, you know, violence and persecution. 00:36:29.34A lot of them simply see better economic opportunities. 00:36:33.36And they discovered that if they claim that they were refugees rather than simply people seeking to emigrate, that the law would be different and they couldn't be kicked out. 00:36:44.28They had to be given a judicial process and so forth. 00:36:47.86And those numbers just, the law was really designed to deal with the Jews in fleeing Nazi Europe, where you had a few thousand people that were seeking asylum. 00:36:57.32Today, you literally have millions of people that have claimed asylum. 00:37:01.58And I think that that's what overwhelmed the system and ultimately sank Joe Biden's election campaign.
José Maria Pimentel 00:37:09.04It's an instance of Goodhart's law. 00:37:10.76I don't know if you've heard of this concept, where you define a metric which makes sense in the beginning, but then it's bound to be played with because it creates perverse incentives. 00:37:19.18That's right. 00:37:19.82Might this be an instance of where we started our conversation, in which you were saying that, and this is something that happens in Europe as well, politicians and lawmakers try so much to constrain the state and the ability of the public bureaucracy to work, that they create rules and don't give them autonomy. 00:37:38.50And then in the end, it might both create a sort of a stalemate and paralysis, but also some unintended consequences here, right? 00:37:45.30Because what you're saying is that there was a law, there were rules that were created and they are not working. 00:37:50.76An alternative would be to give that part of the public bureaucracy autonomy to deal with the issue in the way that they see fit within a broad principle, right?
Francis Fukuyama 00:37:58.28Yeah, you know, quite frankly, that was one of the reasons why people voted for Brexit in Britain. 00:38:04.08So you had a lot of people claiming asylum status in Britain and a lot of immigration. 00:38:10.96And it wasn't actually British law. 00:38:13.54It was European human rights law, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice, that made these very detailed rules about how you can treat immigrants. 00:38:24.02And in particular, you couldn't send them back to their country of origin, that the moment they physically set foot in the country, you know, they had certain rights. 00:38:33.64And I think that what people... 00:38:34.90European Union is good at that. 00:38:35.90Yeah. 00:38:37.14When, you know, that's really what caused Brexit to happen is that, you know, government said that they were going to control the rate of immigration, but nothing happened. 00:38:48.54Things weren't changing. 00:38:50.12And I think people blame that on the fact that they were part of the EU that was... 00:38:54.42I remember David Cameron at one point, you know, being very angry that he couldn't send, you know, a Syrian that had been accused of murder in Britain couldn't be sent back to Syria because of European law. 00:39:06.22And so this created this big prejudice against the European Union for having set all these rules that were undermining, you know, national sovereignty. 00:39:17.14And frankly, I think a lot of that was a specious argument. 00:39:20.22And there are other reasons why those laws weren't being enforced. 00:39:23.84But, you know, it certainly fueled this kind of populist backlash.
José Maria Pimentel 00:39:27.80Yeah. 00:39:28.30Which was already almost 10 years ago. 00:39:31.10That's how long this discussion has been.
Francis Fukuyama 00:39:32.24Well, you know, the other thing that's very curious, and one of the reasons why Nigel Farage's new party is doing so well... 00:39:38.54What is it, the reform? 00:39:39.74Reform UK, I think. 00:39:40.60Reform UK is that under all these conservative governments, after the Brexit vote that promised to control immigration, number of immigrants in Britain has continued to rise, you know. 00:39:52.58So it's like it doesn't matter what people vote for. 00:39:55.46You're still going to have this problem. 00:39:57.38And I think that's why you still have a populist party that is now threatening the conservatives.
José Maria Pimentel 00:40:03.00But also these populist leaders, they don't need to contend with the difficulties of the decision itself. 00:40:08.82No, absolutely not. 00:40:09.82Because the reason immigration is rising, I guess, and it's certainly the case for Portugal, is because you need immigrants for the economy. 00:40:17.56Right? 00:40:18.36So if you didn't have immigrants, maybe people would be more pleased with that side. 00:40:24.20But their standard of life would be lower too, right? 00:40:28.12Yeah, yeah. 00:40:28.86That's a decision you need to make. 00:40:30.52So it's not only that I don't like having immigrants in, you have to balance that out against your standard of living, right?
Francis Fukuyama 00:40:38.70No, that's right. 00:40:39.70Well, we're seeing that in the United States now. 00:40:41.64Trump's campaign to expel immigrants has led to big labor shortages in construction and agriculture, many different sectors. 00:40:50.46And the economy is paying the price for that.
José Maria Pimentel 00:40:52.78I think it will be the same here. 00:40:54.52There's one question I've asked many people. 00:40:56.68I haven't yet got a satisfactory answer. 00:41:00.10I'm very curious to know your view. 00:41:01.66If we look at the last 10, 15 years, we've seen on the rise both populism and authoritarianism, sometimes together like Orban, but not always together. 00:41:12.88So while we have seen populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, you know, all the political figures in Europe we know about, we've also seen pure authoritarianism growing elsewhere. 00:41:22.60So we've seen Putin, we've seen Xi. 00:41:24.82So he's a very different figure from his predecessors, right? 00:41:28.34So he threw away the term's limitation. 00:41:31.22He has a much more authoritarian stance. 00:41:33.38And the same thing for other political leaders. 00:41:35.30But whereas for Orban, we can clearly say that his authoritarianism was bred from populism, is an output of populism. 00:41:44.38That's not the case of Putin, of Xi and other authoritarian leaders. 00:41:47.40Do you see these two phenomenon as related at all, or is it just a coincidence that they're happening at the same time? 00:41:53.88So populism in democracies and authoritarianism in...
Francis Fukuyama 00:41:56.72Yeah, I think that they have rather different historical origins, that both China and Russia have these very deep authoritarian historical traditions. 00:42:06.96You know, China was always, since the moment it was unified, you know, 2,500 years ago, been ruled by a centralized authoritarian bureaucracy. 00:42:16.04And so democracy and ideas of democracy are very late additions. 00:42:20.52I think that in the 19th century, you know, even back then, Russia was a little bit of a pariah in Europe, because it was recognized as such a, you know, authoritarian society. 00:42:31.78It had serfdom. 00:42:32.86It had all these authoritarian practices. 00:42:36.08And so there's kind of a continuation of those historical traditions, but ideologically, there's also a difference that, you know, the European populists all pretend that they believe in liberal democracy of some sort. 00:42:49.92And so ideologically, they don't have a complaint about the basic ideas. 00:42:53.56Yeah, at least electoral democracy. 00:42:55.84Yeah, that's right. 00:42:57.16But I think with Russia and China, you know, you have kind of overtly authoritarian ideas that are dominating them. 00:43:05.30And that's why their authoritarianism goes much deeper.
José Maria Pimentel 00:43:08.76So you think it's a coincidence that the two things, the two phenomena are happening at the same time?
Francis Fukuyama 00:43:13.48Well, not entirely. 00:43:14.96I think there's also a mutual self-interest. 00:43:18.22Putin has been helping European populists wherever he can, you know. 00:43:22.30And then they in turn help him? 00:43:23.74Yeah, that's right. 00:43:24.56So, you know, Robert Fizzo in Slovakia, he's given Hungary gas and oil because, you know, he wants to keep Orbán's regime alive. 00:43:36.06And conversely, they play an important role for him because they block Europe from supporting Ukraine the way that, you know, it might.
José Maria Pimentel 00:43:44.00Yeah, and of course, this democratic backslide we've been talking about has been, to a large extent, caused by what you can call diverse types of diversity. 00:43:53.98So you have immigration, but you also have other types of, you have identity politics and you have polarization and other types of cultural diversity within democracy.
Francis Fukuyama 00:44:04.12Yeah, but I would say that there's also something in common, which is that a lot of it is really due to technology. 00:44:09.74I really don't think that you would have this kind of extreme polarization without the Internet.
José Maria Pimentel 00:44:15.34Okay, I wanted to go there, yeah. 00:44:17.40Because I get this feeling sometimes, I don't know if you do as well, that we tend to focus on economic, social, political causes. 00:44:24.70While perhaps the main cause of all of this has not to do with any of that, but really, of course, those are relevant causes, but the big one might just be that the informational landscape was completely disrupted.
Francis Fukuyama 00:44:36.80Yeah, I think that really explains the nature and the timing of the rise of populism much better than any of the other facts. 00:44:43.90You know, if you look at the world empirically, it's not a bad situation, you know. 00:44:48.78Most countries are richer than they've ever been. 00:44:50.98There's a huge amount of individual freedom. 00:44:53.86You know, you had governments that produced stable societies for many, many years. 00:44:58.28And so why all of a sudden do you get these people standing up and saying, oh, we face an existential threat that our way of life is going to disappear? 00:45:06.42And I think that you can only believe that in an information universe where you can have these completely phantasmagorical narratives being told by people. 00:45:17.58And because it's the Internet, anyone can say anything. 00:45:20.12There is no real regulator of the truth of the things that people say. 00:45:25.14And I think that's really one of the big drivers of this, both the polarization and the populism.
José Maria Pimentel 00:45:30.26Yeah, I completely agree with that. 00:45:32.80Actually, I wrote recently an essay which was defending exactly that point. 00:45:36.40If we are witnessing that now at this precise moment and not before, and if we are witnessing that almost everywhere among democracies, the cause, it must be something that is happening everywhere at the same time and only now, right? 00:45:49.82And it creates a big challenge. 00:45:51.38Although at the same time, in the short run, it's clearly creating a big disruption and facilitating the dissemination of disinformation, creating polarization and whatnot. 00:46:00.86But at the same time, there's something good which is happening. 00:46:03.56I don't know if you share this view because we've both amplified the role of politics, I think, in many people's lives. 00:46:09.54So people have more access to information. 00:46:11.54And we've broadened the public space in a way that I think parallels the Gutenberg revolution. 00:46:17.28You have more people participating in the political debate. 00:46:20.82And this should be good, right? 00:46:22.02It should be good, yeah.
Francis Fukuyama 00:46:23.32And also, I mean, the Internet is really useful for teaching people not just about politics but about all sorts of things. 00:46:30.32You know, it allows a greater level of association. 00:46:33.92People can gather together and share ideas in a way that they couldn't before. 00:46:39.36So the good things, you know, go together with the bad things. 00:46:42.78One of the things that I think is a good thing that's happened in many countries over the past couple of generations, levels of education have gone up. 00:46:51.60Levels of critical thinking have gone up. 00:46:53.82It's not possible to hide bad behavior in a way that it once was. 00:46:58.40So, you know, we've had in recent years all these, you know, sex scandals in the Catholic Church. 00:47:04.10Now, is it the case that the Catholic Church is actually becoming more corrupt than it was previously? 00:47:09.36I really doubt it. 00:47:11.10I agree with you. 00:47:11.66I mean, if you think about what it was like in the Middle Ages when there was no transparency, you know, it was much, much worse. 00:47:19.28But because we live in a much more open, information-rich world, we see these abuses much more clearly. 00:47:26.90And I think that's part of what's driving this feeling that things are getting worse. 00:47:31.02I've argued that point.
José Maria Pimentel 00:47:31.86They're not getting worse, but they are much more conspicuous. 00:47:35.30So there's much more transparency. 00:47:37.38Yes. 00:47:37.84The change was so fast that we were not, our senses, as it were, were not prepared for that. 00:47:42.76Right? 00:47:43.28That's right. 00:47:44.12I've been thinking a lot about how the new equilibrium, so the future informational mediatic landscape might look like. 00:47:54.06So will we need to regulate these platforms? 00:47:56.78Will people's psychology adapt to this new situation? 00:47:59.86Will we need to create a new media environment? 00:48:03.30Maybe different from the one we had before, based on, you know, newspapers, TV channels and whatnot. 00:48:07.42So have we thought about this? 00:48:09.02Do you have any view on what the, of course, this is a very hard exercise, but.
Francis Fukuyama 00:48:12.76Well, there are already big differences between Europe and the United States with regard to the Internet. 00:48:18.00So Europe has been much more willing to regulate. 00:48:21.12You've got GDPR. 00:48:22.82You've got the Digital Services Act. 00:48:25.62There's a much stronger attempt to, you know, certify the quality of information. 00:48:30.62In fact, I think some European countries have gone a little too far in terms of jailing people for tweets that they've, you know, they've posted and that sort of thing. 00:48:39.58But in the end, it's going to be very difficult to do this because I think that, you know, you can do it in Europe because there's still enough of an elite consensus about, you know, the nature of truth and the kinds of political views that are acceptable and not acceptable. 00:48:55.48In the United States, it's impossible, you know, we're so polarized that you can't have a government that can actually try to regulate the Internet that people can agree on because people, you know, literally don't agree on what's the truth. 00:49:09.32Yeah. 00:49:09.90You have a substantial amount of a number of Americans that believe that vaccines are more harmful than helpful, you know. 00:49:17.72And so how are you going to come up with a regulation of vaccine misinformation under those circumstances?
José Maria Pimentel 00:49:24.10And if you do it, it might even backfire electorally, right? 00:49:26.94Yeah, that's right. 00:49:27.64So it's not a good policy. 00:49:28.40But to be honest, it's true that the European Union has regulated, especially with the Digital Services Act. 00:49:36.48Maybe I'm being unfair here, but I don't see such a big impact on the way people use social media. 00:49:42.46Because in the end, it's very difficult, right? 00:49:44.02It's very difficult to regulate.
Francis Fukuyama 00:49:45.16That's a separate issue where I think you're right, that even if you try to regulate, it's a moving target. 00:49:51.62The regulators are not going to be able to catch up with the frontiers of technology. 00:49:56.82And it's just going to get worse with artificial intelligence because it's moving so quickly that it's very hard to identify what the harms are. 00:50:04.10And therefore, how are you going to mitigate them with regulation?
José Maria Pimentel 00:50:07.96What dangers do you see on AI there, on top of all of this?
Francis Fukuyama 00:50:11.48Well, the major danger is that it will empower bad people to do bad things. 00:50:18.44So all the bad things are things that are happening already. 00:50:22.24Money laundering, attacks on privacy, fraud, cyber attacks, ransomware. 00:50:30.18All of this stuff becomes much easier with AI. 00:50:33.50AI also is a way of defending against these kinds of bad actors. 00:50:37.96And so there's going to be an arms race where you have kind of offensive and defensive AI that are going to be fighting each other. 00:50:46.02But I think the bad people always have an advantage because they're going to move first. 00:50:50.26And, you know, they've got a big incentive to use the technology, you know, to enrich themselves.
José Maria Pimentel 00:50:56.16Because AI is a challenge on top of all of this, on the political level, right? 00:51:00.64So we have this disintermediation of information, which is breeding disinformation. 00:51:06.22We have the algorithms that breed polarization. 00:51:08.92And then on top of it, we have AI. 00:51:11.12Actually, I'm not sure the impact it will have on politics because all those impacts you mentioned are surely very dangerous. 00:51:16.74But they are not really in the political realm, like most of them. 00:51:20.06I mean, money laundering, I don't know, cyber attacks and whatnot.
Francis Fukuyama 00:51:22.46Well, I think AI also has a lot of strategic implications. 00:51:26.78You know, it's a weapon that can be used. 00:51:29.22It's certainly important in military affairs. 00:51:32.00And I think one additional reason why it's going to be hard to regulate the Internet is that, you know, in the realm of AI, you have this competition with China, where the United States doesn't want to fall behind China and vice versa. 00:51:46.16And so they're going to be very skeptical about any form of regulation that slows them down.
José Maria Pimentel 00:51:51.86This may be a naive question, but do you think, given the power of AI, do you think it has any role in solving the first problem we talked about, which is government effectiveness? 00:52:00.72Do you see it as a tool that can actually make governments more effective?
Francis Fukuyama 00:52:04.64No, it's got a million ways that it can help government. 00:52:08.68You know, there's a lot of kind of clerical work and filing of, you know, forms and this sort of thing where AI is actually going to speed things up tremendously. 00:52:18.54You know, just to give you one concrete example, in the United States, we have laws that require public notice of, you know, government bureaucrats that change rules. 00:52:30.68And recently, you know, you're getting millions of comments being made by ordinary citizens that can't be processed by human beings in any reasonable amount of time. 00:52:40.32But the AI can do it, you know, they can take a million comments and they can summarize, you know, what are the major concerns that people have and how can we deal with it in a kind of straightforward way? 00:52:51.40So, yeah, there's definitely...
José Maria Pimentel 00:52:52.78It's an interesting idea. 00:52:54.46It's a way to bring people closer to government, in a sense. 00:52:58.38And to make it more responsive. 00:52:59.90And to make it more responsive. 00:53:01.42It rhymes a bit with another idea, which I wanted to ask you about. 00:53:05.68In a sense, it's very different, but it has some connection, I think. 00:53:08.80It has been proposed by many people. 00:53:10.56It has been tried in some countries, which is the... 00:53:14.02I think they are called deliberative assemblies or something like that, which is that... 00:53:17.78So, the idea is that you... 00:53:18.84You know what I'm talking about, right? 00:53:20.16So, just to describe it quickly for the listeners. 00:53:21.64So, the idea is that you bring over sort of a random sample of the population, so of electors, of voters, and you bring them in, and they work as a sort of a parliament with the politicians. 00:53:33.46They understand the difficulties of making political decisions. 00:53:36.18The politicians understand people's worries and preoccupations. 00:53:39.28Then, in the end, it's a way to maybe solve some of these problems.
Francis Fukuyama 00:53:43.78Yeah, by the way, the success of that kind of deliberation depends on it not being electronically mediated. 00:53:51.02I think that, you know, the most successful cases are where people actually have to sit down in a room, with each other, and talk to each other, and actually debate. 00:54:02.20If you do it over the internet, you lose a lot of that civility that's necessary to keep a real deliberation going.
José Maria Pimentel 00:54:08.86I haven't read about this in a while. 00:54:10.50Are there role models here? 00:54:12.56So, are there countries which have been able to...
Francis Fukuyama 00:54:14.46Yeah, Denmark has used a lot of these things. 00:54:17.02We have a lab in our institute at Stanford, Deliberative Democracy Lab. 00:54:24.24And they've done these kinds of what they call deliberative polls all over the world. 00:54:28.70And, you know, the claim is that they actually work pretty well. 00:54:31.36You take a random selection of people, you put them in a hotel for three days, you give them a lot of information about the problem they're trying to solve, and you make them talk to each other. 00:54:43.12They can't, you know, go out and get on the internet and start complaining and, you know, this sort of thing. 00:54:47.92They have to actually deliberate, and it usually leads to a, you know, a consensus decision on even very difficult social issues.
José Maria Pimentel 00:54:56.48Interesting. 00:54:56.86And do you have other ideas that might work to put the system back in working, other than this and using AI? 00:55:05.46So, are there any ideas that should be, should have more, we should give more attention to?
Francis Fukuyama 00:55:09.50Well, I think that basically reminding ourselves of the importance of impersonal government and the ideal that had been around for some time that, you know, civil, that public service should be something that's valuable and that it really should attempt to serve the interests of the whole public and not just the narrow interests of one politician. 00:55:33.34That's really the crisis we're having in the United States right now, because Donald Trump wants civil servants to be loyal to him, not to the Constitution, not to the general public, but personally loyal. 00:55:46.14And when that's soldiers that he's demanding this loyalty of, it becomes very dangerous because he basically wants his own, you know, private militia. 00:55:54.56Yeah. 00:55:54.80You know, in a way, that's the kind of America that we're working our way towards.
José Maria Pimentel 00:55:58.90There's a view I'm very sympathetic to, and you probably as well, which views the bureaucracy as a sort of a fourth power in the separation of powers, right? 00:56:06.46So, ideally, obviously, the role of bureaucracy is to implement policies defined by the government, but it also should be independent for the, to have some autonomy from the government and work as a sort of a check and balance on itself.
Francis Fukuyama 00:56:19.16You see that in central banks, you know, there's been a big move towards independent central banks over the last couple of generations, and that's done wonders for monetary policy, because you need to take those out of the control of politicians. 00:56:32.66You know, politicians will always want lower interest rates, but, you know, sometimes lower interest rates will lead to much higher inflation, and that's why you need independent technocrats to be making those kinds of decisions.
José Maria Pimentel 00:56:46.56Yeah, and now what you're seeing, it's exactly the opposite. 00:56:49.32And it's a, I was going to say a fun thing, not fun, but interesting implication is that what is happening in the U.S. is very much one of the main concern of the Founding Fathers. 00:56:58.58So, if you go back to the early literature, even George Washington, he was against political parties, right, as you know, because he felt that political parties would end up, well, actually, as they are right now. 00:57:08.84So, it worked for a long time, but now it's kind of a fracturing.
Francis Fukuyama 00:57:12.56Yeah, well, as a political scientist, I don't think you can do without political parties, but certainly they can get, you know, out of touch and ossified and so forth.
José Maria Pimentel 00:57:22.70Yeah. 00:57:23.18There's one thing I wanted to ask you before, and then I forgot. 00:57:26.00There's this political scientist, Yasha Monk. 00:57:29.28I'm not sure if he's the right way to pronounce it. 00:57:31.16He has an interesting thesis, I don't know if you agree with, that the reason we are facing this turmoil is that democracies are, societies are much more diverse than they were in the past. 00:57:40.18So, this is because of immigration, but not only immigration. 00:57:42.32In the U.S., you also have sort of a rebalancing of minorities, people reclaiming their rights and whatnot. 00:57:48.86And his point, although he's not a pessimist, I think, but his point is that if we look back at functional democracies, they were always culturally homogeneous, at least to a large extent. 00:57:59.58So, that seems to be sort of a prerequisite for democracy to work.
Francis Fukuyama 00:58:04.08Do you agree with that? 00:58:04.78Well, I don't think he ever stated it in terms that were that strong. 00:58:09.00Maybe, sorry. 00:58:09.64Maybe I'm not being generous to that. 00:58:10.96Yeah, I mean, I think that the way I would put it is it's much easier to have a democracy in a small, homogeneous country where you don't have a lot of ethnic divisions or racial divisions, big inequalities between different groups in the society. 00:58:26.16So, that's a much less difficult governance problem. 00:58:29.74When you do have a lot of diversity and heterogeneity, people don't speak the same language, they don't look like each other. 00:58:37.54You know, you can govern democratically in a society like that, but it's just harder. 00:58:42.42I think that's really the argument that he was making. 00:58:45.06And certainly, the conclusion from that is not that we should aim to get more homogeneous societies. 00:58:51.32No, no, it's not. 00:58:52.02Yeah, I know. 00:58:52.60It's really that, you know, we just have to recognize that, you know, governing a big, diverse country like India is very different from, you know, governing a small, pretty homogeneous country like Denmark.
José Maria Pimentel 00:59:04.56Yeah, and the same thing goes for the European Union. 00:59:07.26So, this is a big barrier to more European integration and build the European Union into something more akin to a state like the United States is cultural, and especially language barriers. 00:59:19.58I don't know, are you, from your standpoint, looking from the other side of the ocean, do you think there's any hope of the European Union? 00:59:27.68Because we actually need, we should do it if we are to take advantage of the internal market of the size of the economy.
Francis Fukuyama 00:59:34.24No, I think that you need stronger centralized institutions in Europe, and in particular, you need to move to some form of qualified majority voting so that every member of the EU does not have a veto over the collective action.
José Maria Pimentel 00:59:48.80That explains a lot of Orban's power within the EU, right? 00:59:51.70Yeah, that's right. 00:59:52.64Right, because that's, he has that power to veto whatever is happening. 00:59:55.94We've been talking about populism, and implicitly, we're talking about right-wing populists, but we were having this conversation 15 years ago, we would be talking more about left-wing policy. 01:00:06.22Yeah. 01:00:06.66One thing I'm wondering is, are we going to see a comeback of left-wing populists? 01:00:06.66Do you think so?
Francis Fukuyama 01:00:11.58Well, it never disappeared in certain parts of the world, like Latin America. 01:00:14.86Yeah, sure, but I mean... 01:00:15.78So, the Kirchners and AMLO, I mean, these were all left-wing populist politicians. 01:00:21.20And I don't think that trend has disappeared there. 01:00:25.18Whether it comes back in Europe or the United States, I think it's completely possible that, you know, there's, in fact, a kind of convergence between the extreme left and the extreme right in their distrust of existing elites. 01:00:40.12They distrust them for different reasons, but I think that, you know, there's also a ground for, you know, a left-wing kind of populism.
José Maria Pimentel 01:00:46.92Especially if you think, which is kind of a paradox here. 01:00:49.60So, one of the main trends of the last decades has been, especially in the U.S., rising inequality. 01:00:55.28And usually one would think that that would give fuel to left-wing populists, right? 01:01:00.22And yet, that's not what we are seeing. 01:01:02.36That's true. 01:01:03.10Even in Europe. 01:01:04.50Well, thank you. 01:01:05.28This has been a great conversation. 01:01:07.88I wanted to ask you just one final question for listeners that have been reading you for decades, since the end of history and the first man, which is, I think, the first book that brought you to fame, which was published in 1992. 01:01:21.24Was it probably around then? 01:01:23.16Yeah, that's right. 01:01:24.14Where would you say your views have changed the most over these last decades?
Francis Fukuyama 01:01:28.14Well, I really rewrote that book in my two-volume series on political order, which was based on a much broader understanding of historical development. 01:01:38.70And then the last two books I've written, the one on identity and the other one, liberalism and its discontents, really tried to take the events of the last few years and understand them in the framework that I set with the original end of history book. 01:01:54.28So, I guess those are the places I'd look.
José Maria Pimentel 01:01:56.64Okay, cool. 01:01:57.64Is there anything else you wanted to say, I didn't ask?
Francis Fukuyama 01:01:59.44I just would like to point out, if you want to keep up with what I think about a lot of current events, I have a blog called Frankly Fukuyama. 01:02:07.44I've got a YouTube channel with the same name. 01:02:09.48You do? 01:02:09.48Really? 01:02:10.08Yeah. 01:02:10.76So, if you want to keep up with what I'm thinking, you know, I would go to those places.
José Maria Pimentel 01:02:15.76So, a fellow YouTuber, as it were. 01:02:17.66Yeah. 01:02:18.54Okay. 01:02:19.38Professor Fukuyama, thank you. 01:02:20.82All right. 01:02:21.16Thank you very much. 01:02:22.20Thank you. 01:02:24.28Este episódio foi editado por Hugo Oliveira. 01:02:29.96Oiça e veja outros podcasts em expresso.pt e veja como seguir o 45 Graus em josemariapimentel.pt. 01:02:36.92Até ao próximo episódio.