14 -16 February 2020
14 February 2020 (Sliema, Malta) – The Munich Security Conference (MSC) was established in 1963 by Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, a former German army officer who participated in a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, with the aim of gathering leaders and diplomatic experts to discuss the state of NATO and relations between powers on either side of the Atlantic. Over the decades, the annual meeting has grown to include global security concerns, with Munich’s grand Bayerisch Hof hotel becoming a stage for searing political speeches.
A number of years ago I earned media credentials for both the World Economic Forum in Davos and MSC … a long process in both cases. But I wanted to attend because both events provide a tsunami of content you cannot get anywhere else (with invitations to collateral meetings throughout the year), plus some fascinating conversations that all seem interesting. Yes, sometimes you are simply not part of them and just overhear. But still, they became two of my “four-I-must-attend” events each year (the other two are the International Journalism Festival and Cannes Lions).
This year, as I wean myself off the conference circuit, I am letting the “kids” take over so Davos and Munich fell to their remit.
MSC is not really a forum to actually solve security issues. The conference is usually a backdrop for heated clashes over narratives. It was at MSC that, in 2007, Vladimir Putin excoriated the US for “overstepping its borders in all spheres”. This year the US-Iran crisis is very much an “agenda-setter” as Munich provides a platform for both the Iranians and anti-Iran hawks from the US and Israel to make their voices heard. Nobody expects that the US and Iran will actually use the conference to open backchannels.
I have learned some fascinating stuff at MSC, and it even opened the door to a full study of cyber war and cyber security via a MOOC program at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. It was years ago when both artificial intelligence and cybersecurity dominated these events, well before they hit the mainstream. It was two years ago that “Preparing for Malicious Uses of AI” was making the rounds, written by 26 researchers from several organizations including OpenAI, Oxford and Cambridge universities, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It performed a valuable … if scary … service in flagging the threats from the abuse of powerful technology by rogue states, criminals and terrorists: drones using facial recognition technology to hunt down and kill victims; information being manipulated to distort the social media feeds of targeted individuals; cleaning robots being hacked to bomb VIPs. Much of it we had been reading about through other sources but it was incredibly helpful to have that information contained in one publication.
And it was in Munich that I learned about technologies such as RumorLens, TwitterTrails, FactWatcher and News Tracer which are used by the intelligence services to track Russian intelligence activities. From my MWC 2018 report:
These “bot-not-bot”classification systems use more than 1,000 statistical features using available meta-data and information extracted from the social interactions and linguistic content generated by accounts. They group their classification features into six main classes. Network features capture various dimensions of information diffusion patterns. It builds networks based on retweets, mentions, and hashtag co-occurrence, and it pulls out their statistical features, such as degree distribution, clustering coefficient, and centrality measures. User features are based on Twitter meta-data and Facebook meta-data related to an account, including language, geographic locations, and account creation time.
MWC 2020
This year’s MWC is dedicated to the theme of “Westlessness.” No, that’s not the mindset of an antsy Elmer Fudd. It is the idea that “the West” – that is, a group of European and North American countries united by a common, if not always consistent, commitment to liberal democracy, free markets, and the post-war international institutions set up for global trade, finance, and security – is fraying. GZEROMEDIA in it’s pre-MWC220 report says that is happening for two reasons:
1. Internal divisions: Inequality and social polarization have fueled the rise of populist and “illiberal” parties within “the West.” They are skeptical of the traditional, US/European-led international institutions and instead put national interests first. This is the story of Brexit and of Donald Trump, but it’s also the rise of avowedly “illiberal” democracies like Poland and Hungary (which until 1989 were in the “East,” but don’t confuse the cartographer).
2. External rivals: Authoritarian China’s ambition to take center stage globally as the world’s largest economy – and to dominate 21st technologies like 5G and A.I. – presents some implicit challenges to the Western-led global order. Meanwhile, a revanchist Russia has challenged “Western” power in Ukraine and Syria, while working to exacerbate social polarization and undermine democracies in both Europe and the US.
Is this a problem? Well, for the Munich organizers, a fragmented “West” makes it more difficult to tackle a whole host of global problems like climate change, A.I. regulation, and the threat to democracies around the world. And, of course, from the perspective of the rising “non-West,” many of the global institutions developed in the West are outmoded and exclusionary.
There is one other big question to be discussed at Munich: what’s the global future, the importance of Europe? Alex Kliment of GZEROMEDIA puts it this waay:
Given the fragmentation of “the West,” and the emerging rivalry between the US and China, as well as Washington’s uncertain commitment to European security, is it time for the EU to play a larger global role on its own? Can it? We’ll likely hear about this from French President Emmanuel Macron, one of the high profile attendees, as well as from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
So, do you buy the idea of a coherent “West”? Do you think there is a risk of “Westlessness” in the world, or are there different perspectives you’d take? To get you started with some reading “fun” I recommend the Munich Security Report 2020 – “Westlessness” (they publish these weighty tomes for each conference, digital versions only) for some further thought. It is chock-a-block with data and insights. I tend to refer to it very often in my blog posts throughout the year. You can access it by clicking here.
I have two staffers at MWC this year. If they feed back anything of note, I will blog about it.