Editorial
Dear friends and colleagues,
Within an instance of his second tenure Donald Trump embodied a smashing backlash against the liberal, rules-based international order. What we may be watching now is the backlash to the backlash. The signals are real: Being the intellectual reference point for the new right, Viktor Orbán lost the election in Hungary. And the conflict in Iran is putting a wedge in the transatlantic alignment of national-populist movements. The far right shouting, as Pedro Sánchez put it in Barcelona, not because “it is winning but because it senses its time running out.” A response to the far-right remaking the world in their image is in the making. Recent progressive gatherings put this new counter-Trumpian internationalism front and centre but it will require decisive action to build on this momentum.
Barcelona reinvigorated the centre-left movement. The Global Progressive Mobilisation of 17-18 April in Barcelona co-hosted by Spain’s PM Pedro Sánchez and Brazil’s President Lula da Silva convened progressive leaders from more than forty countries in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The gathering revived a progressive internationalism in the tradition of Willy Brandt and Olof Palme along the lines of three motifs: North–South dialogue, redistribution, and the reform of multilateral institutions, improving workers’ rights and addressing the cost of living; identifying Trump and the tech oligarchy as the villains; and advancing an assertive political agenda driven by ambition and courage. Yet defining yourself against an opponent is not enough. It is merely reactive. The deeper task is an affirmative one: sovereignty understood not as walls but as agency – the capacity of states, societies and individuals to shape the conditions of their own lives. Lars Klingbeil put it in a recent Op-ed for the Guardian: “Sovereignty is not about building walls. It is about having the strength to keep them down.”
Toronto turned the movement into a model. The Global Progress Action Summit co-hosted by the Center for American Progress Action and Canada 2020 of 8-9 May in Toronto offered a blueprint for a governing agenda for progressives in times of this great rupture. And it exposed the limits of deliverism along the way. Delivery matters, but it corresponds only to the severe economic strains many feel at the moment, not to the crisis of meaning: the hunger for agency, control and belonging that the new right has been only too willing to fill. Mark Carney’s reply reads as a social-liberal version of “control” and “greatness” – a sovereign wealth fund that lets citizens share directly in what gets built, and a “variable geometry” of middle powers cooperating issue by issue. “Building for all,” as he put it, “is the new progressive politics.” His cohesion, though, rests heavily on a positive patriotism with an external foil. That raises the open question for us: Can a progressive European model draw on its own strengths of a European way of life and an Enlightenment against the new right’s “dark enlightenment”? And can this be the binding formula to bring more middle powers to the table and agree on a common agenda with shared beliefs?
Read together, the two summits are two poles of one project: Progressive internationalism to rebuild legitimacy through fairness, strategic liberalism to manage risk and keep openness alive. The narrative now exists. What comes next will depend on the domestic strength of progressive leaders that carry it and on an honest reckoning with the differences of geography, history and interest that run through this coalition. The translation from shared diagnosis into context-specific projects is the real work ahead. We would like to do it with you and, before too long, to bring these conversations to Berlin.
Warm regards,
Dominic Schwickert
Executive Director, Das Progressive Zentrum
Florian Ranft
Member of the Management Board, Head of Green New Deal & Progressive Governance, Das Progressive Zentrum
PS: On June 23, we will welcome a cross-sector gathering of political leaders, thinkers, practitioners, friends and partners to our Progressive Summer Party in Berlin. We would be especially delighted to see members of our international community there. If you happen to be in Germany that week and would like to join us, please get in touch via sommerfest@progressives-zentrum.org
