On January 31st, Marietje Schaake gave a lecture at Central European University on the rule of law and multilateralism in the online world as part of the CEU's Presidential Lecture Serieus.
Please find a short interview here:
the full speech and Q&A with Michael Ignatieff here:
And the text of the speech below:
Check against delivery.
Ladies and Gentlemen
It is a true honour and pleasure to be here, at Central European University.
Exchanging views with students is always a source of inspiration for me and I welcome your perspectives. Being here, in Budapest, at an institution that teaches critical thinking, and the pursuit of truth and accuracy, feels especially urgent today.
I am so very sorry that you are forced to move to Vienna, and I wish European political leaders had fought harder to prevent it.
At a time when there is not much room for optimism, you challenged me to speak about hope for Europe.
‘The kind hope that I often think about... I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world´. said Vaclav Havel.
In that spirit, let me share a few reflections on the state of freedom, on where we have come from as Europeans, and how the frontier of the struggle for freedom has moved to new places, also online. For only when we know what it at stake, can we take action to protect principles that need to be cherished.
´The veneer of civilization is paper thin´, Tom Lantos always said, and coincidentally my mother also used to tell my brother, sister and I the exact same when we were young.
Born not long after the liberation from Nazi´s and World War II, she grew up witnessing the painstaking work of restoring that veneer, after it was scratched off, brutally broken and forever damaged by the holocaust, hate and hunger.
Jan Wolkers, the Dutch author and artist, created a beautiful monument, a set of mirrors, on the ground, reflecting in them the skies. The mirrors are broken, accompanied by the words 'the skies will never be the same, Never Again Auschwitz'.
Such reflections instilled in my parents´ generation a deep appreciation for what freedom is, and of what exclusion, scapegoating and fascism can lead to. They instilled in me a great sense of responsibility never to forget that freedom requires defending, every day, not only at home, but wherever in the world people need support in their struggle for human rights.
The scars of WWII ignited over half a century of rebuilding: of homes, lives and societies. But also, the crafting of world order. Mechanisms for peaceful conflict resolution, international and economic cooperation and more importantly, of establishing minimum thresholds to safeguard human life and dignity. Buffers against a return of history.
The Geneva convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN, WorldBank and the European Union. More freedoms for more people went hand in hand with more prosperity.
At least, in Western Europe. Many in Europe were liberated much more recently, of Soviet repression, and of the wars in the former Yugoslav republics. Those scars are more fresh and the veneer may not have fully recovered of the trauma.
Newly out of University, when I was your age, I did a fellowship at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In assessing the evidence of war crimes, I learned the fragility of civilization first hand. War and barbarism had emerged seemingly overnight. Reading testimony of a man describing his torturer in great detail, 187 CM, brown hair and a small scar on his chin, I wondered how many years after being imprisoned in a concentration camp-like facility, the victim remembered such details. ´How do I know?´, his testimony continued; we played on the same soccer team before it all started.
Neighbours turning against each other, a two-hour flight from Amsterdam, on the other side of the border from here. In Europe.
Usually violence does not emerge overnight, but it is built up with years of grievances, polarizing, dehumanizing, and eroding rights and freedoms. We are still dealing with the unhealed wounds of that war, with the lack of a forceful European determination to end ethnic cleansing and violence. Of tribalism being weaponized.
It is the return of tribalism that concerns me.
Now, I understand the desire for comfort in familiar and safe communities, as events on the other side of the world may reach into our lives. Yet I reject political promises of purity, nostalgic pictures of a romanticized past, and the downright exclusion of the unknown and the dismissing of others. As we have learned from history, such thinking can lead to group rhetoric that mislabels individuals, and traps them in broad categories devoid of their own convictions and identities.
For liberals, resisting tribalism also means to be intellectually rigorous in trying to understand the times we live in. It has become popular to identify the exact historic era that our days mirror. 'History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes' as Mark Twain said. People may seek security in historic comparisons, as events are confusing, but tuning the instruments of our time to a misplaced historic chord will lead to false relations. It leads to an unfounded sense of certainty, of inevitability, that risk preventing us from making the choices we can, and taking the actions we must.
By comparing today to the 1930's for example, and labelling opponents as populists or fascists too easily, we are not only intellectually lazy, but also strategically weak. Such frames allow political opponents, especially the ones who have not held political office, to deepen a narrative of exclusion and victimhood. It darkens the lines between 'us' and 'them', and even suggests there are 'good' and 'bad' people.
Now, you will not hear me saying that there are no ideas, ideologies or political agenda's that do not deserve the strongest of rebuttals, or even outright dismissals. Yet disagreeing in the strongest terms should not mean confining people to the likes of a 'basket of deplorables'. Challenge ideologies, but listen to people and hear their concerns, especially those of political opponents, adversaries, without considering them enemies. We need leadership to overcome deep polarization and to strengthen the political centre. The place for cooperation and compromise needs to be recognized as valuable, instead of being hollowed out. Let us not be deterministic, or defeatist, while so much action is needed.
If you care about liberal democracy, as the best veneer of civilization: prevent the erosion of the space for dialogue, discussion, and truth-seeking.
That space is under pressure, in very specific ways, today.
Our public and political debate has moved beyond parliaments, newspapers, public squares or government buildings. People increasingly access information online, and debate ideas on social media platforms.
The digital world has become the new frontline for fundamental freedoms. Not just here in Europe, but across the world. The question is what digitization does to fundamental rights and freedoms, what is does for democracy. And sadly, democracy has not gone viral yet.
Instead, social media have put polarization on steroids and demagoguery appears in timelines and search results. The selling of advertisements is considered more important, than assessing the impact of profit models and opaque algorithms on democracy.
Systematically, nuanced or fact-based clips and links are demoted by algorithms, while conspiracy theories rise. A few weeks ago, people searching for information on Ruth Bader Ginsberg, found conspiracies about the Supreme Court Justice´s health situation prevailing in the first ten links on YouTube. And months after Euronews journalists debunked a misinformed video about Guy Verhofstadt last year, it still ranks highest on the platform's search results, with 8 million views... and counting. Not only falsehoods, but confusion as such, about which information can and cannot be trusted, risks that people 'check out'. How many of you have heard people saying ´I don´t watch the news anymore...´ ?!
Such lack of engagement and an erosion of trust in liberal democracy makes our political systems vulnerable to leaders who can mobilize small and vocal minorities, while pretending that those represent all 'the people'.
So who is in charge of placing advertisements and coding algorithms, and who should be in charge of the effects of tech and social media companies on our democracy? From foreign actors gaming or manipulating the system, to sensation selling and micro-targeted messages reaching vulnerable people: It is remarkable how the freedoms and rights that have been fought for so bitterly, are privatized and forsaken. Democracy must never be for sale.
This is not science fiction. A week ago, the political consultant who has constructed the narrative of George Soros as a Jewish enemy. George Birnbaum spoke for the first time in an interview with Buzzfeed. He was born in the US, where his family moved after fleeing Nazi Germany. His grandfather was shot by the Nazis in front of his son. But for the sake of delivering electoral victories for his company's clients, including Viktor Orban, he used anti-Semitic themes in his campaign. Birnbaum said about his strategy to depict Soros as a Jewish puppetmaster:
“It wasn’t an emotional thing.” It was simply a means to an end. He said, and I quote: “Soros was a perfect enemy. It was so obvious. It was the simplest of all products, you just had to pack it and market it.”
In a world where more money can buy more screentime, who defends the public interest, and the quality of the public debate?
Not only cynical political campaigners, but the technologies themselves present new frontiers in the fight for democracy and freedom. We need to decide now, what we do not want to see disrupted, and which principles must stand the test of time and innovation. To avoid technology from being used for profit and repression.
The rule of law needs to apply in the online world, just as it does offline.
Since the end of World War II, the European Union and the United States have been the guardians and advocates of a rules-based system. They are best positioned to credibly and effectively develop global rules for the open internet, based on the rule of law. However, there is still a wide gap to be bridged between promise and practice. And it starts at home.
Both European and American companies continue to export highly sophisticated surveillance systems to dictatorships. I learned about the impact of digital arms on people's rights and liberties from victims themselves.
In Iran, it was German-Finnish Nokia-Siemens networks that came under fire after monitoring had been used to track demonstrators and drag them to prisons. They then sold off the monitoring capacity over their mobile networks to a separate company.
The monitoring capacity, so-called lawful intercept, may have been built with the right intentions: for German, Finish or other police to monitor criminals and only after obtaining a court order. Yet they were used, or I should say abused, to spy on human rights defenders in a country where rights are not a given, and courts are not independent. Once a backdoor in technology is built, it can be opened regardless of the context in which that happens. Later companies like the Italian Hacking Team and Area Spa sold their systems to dictatorships worldwide.
In Egypt, activists raided a police station, and found prints of their own communications, snooped and stored, message by message, email by email. They then realized it was not only human rights defenders, who were empowered by their mobile phones, but also the regimes they were challenging.
Ben Ali used Tunisia as a sandbox of experimenting with surveillance systems, with authorities not only spying on activists, but also changing their emails in mid-air, to compromise them.
Sometimes millions are spent on hacking the device of a single person like that of journalist Ahmed Mansour in the United Arab Emirates. And without sophisticated hacking software made in the West, Jamal Khassoghi may not have been framed and murdered and Saudi women's rights activists not imprisoned.
The Arab uprisings may be over; but European, American and Israeli companies continue to sell surveillance systems to dictators and their intelligence services.
We are perhaps not surprised that dictators repress their populations, but we should be outraged it is companies from our free societies selling them the tools to do so.
Meanwhile, authoritarian governments are also developing their own ways to control people with the help of technology.
A search for Tianamen Square on a search engine in Beijing renders zero results. A combination of Artificial Intelligence and human censors scan social media constantly, to adjust banned words and memes, also in private messages.
One of the main victims was Winnie the Pooh... The yellow bear, is referenced by people in China instead of the name of their President to avoid censored. It didn’t take long for Winnie to get banned from the Chinese internet. As funny as this may sound, the implications of China's firewalls, are dead serious.
With an integration of data collection and the latest technologies, the communist party has created a social credit system. Artificial intelligence and facial recognition software are at a breakthrough moment, after which it will be nearly impossible to assume anonymity ever again.
In China, black mirror has become a reality. Already, people are traced in their everyday moves, earning social credit for desired behaviour, while losing in the rankings when they cross a red light, or fail to pay a loan on time. The score amassed is not a game but has real world consequences. People with lower scores cannot travel as easily, or have trouble qualifying to buy a house or to take a loan. In the territories where the Uyghur minorities live, an integrated surveillance system is keeping an estimated million people in modern slave labour camps.
Any illusion of choice is replaced by nudging and social steering through the millions of data points collected on people. Even the idea of democracy and freedom could soon be an illusion.
We are witnessing a global systems competition between open and closed, democratic and authoritarian governance, with the help of technology. It is essential that Europeans understand what is happening, and develop ways to protect the quality of life of people, as more and more elements of life have a digital component.
European lawmakers are beginning to push several initiatives to preserve the rule of law online. Netneutrality and the GDPR are cases in point. But we are really only scratching the surface.
Considering how technology has changed the struggle for human rights globally, we need to verify that expression is free and anchored in law, and limitations are justified, not profit driven. If political actors want to reach internet users on social media platforms, let it be transparent that it is a politician, not a friend bringing an issue to your attention. Transparency and oversight are needed to ensure checks and balances. It is high time a democratic governance model steers technology, and not the other way around. I say this especially with the European elections next May in mind. We cannot be vigilant enough, to avoid that the use and abuse of technologies, also robs Europeans of their democratic rights.
The stories I have shared with you today may seem to paint a bleak picture. But I am hopeful that we can turn the tide. To know what to fight for, it is good to be aware of what we stand to lose. If hope as a state of mind is to have the power to change the state of the world, we must take action.
Political actors may try to polarize and divide, and repressive regimes around the world may try to curtail the freedoms of many, be they online or offline. Such actions place a responsibility on us in Europe, and in democracies at large, to cherish the freedoms we have built up, and may never take for granted. We must now make sure they are also defended as technology disrupts everything, from the way we go on holiday, to how we move around and date, to how we discuss politics and current affairs.
The open internet, and the protection of people's rights on it, in many ways can be seen as an extension of the layer of veneer that determines the resilience of our civilization. By applying the rule of law online, we can make it more robust, and begin to reign in abuse of power, whether commercial or authoritarian.
It is vital that today's arena's where deliberation, dialogue, debate and disagreement take place, are not captured or manipulated. For without a pluralist debate, and with deeper polarization, with filter bubbles full of conspiracies, people risk standing with their backs against eachother.
This is not the 1930's, but precisely because 2019 presents unique challenges, let us find hope in inspiration in knowing that events are not inevitable, and each of us can rise to shape the world around us.
Thank you.
