Twelve years ago: The setting is the Bella Center, a conference facility in the suburbs of Copenhagen. It’s a freezing December evening. And the 2009 United Nations summit on climate change is just about to spectacularly collapse. 

The gathering that night was not even supposed to take place: With a snowstorm approaching, the Indian prime minister had already announced he was departing for the airport. But there he still was, deep in conversation with the leaders of China, Brazil and South Africa. U.S. President Barack Obama peeped in and popped an innocent question: “Are you ready for me?” There was no space at the table, recounted a Financial Times reporter, so Brazil’s president “squeezed round allowing Mr. Obama to pull up a chair and sit down.”

Whatever the five leaders talked about, it did not save the hyped meeting (which was dubbed “Hopenhagen” at the time) from miserable failure. The summit, known as COP15, collapsed under the weight of irreconcilably different opinions on how or whether to build a legally binding global framework on carbon emissions. “Copenhagen” has since become a byword for global climate discord.

As we approach the COP26 summit in Glasgow, key representatives of major emitters like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping have already snubbed the summit. However, Denmark has a different story to tell, one of a remarkable comeback that highlights the needs and possibilities of an unruly world.

After that disgraced climate summit, most governments would have probably lain low for a while. But over the past decade, Denmark’s climate policies have been ambitious and successful. The country first reached its targets of a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and 30% share of renewable energy in 2020, and is now aiming for a 40% reduction in emissions and 55% share of renewables by the end of this decade. A broad cross-party coalition has ensured progress toward the goal of phasing out all fossil fuel production by mid-century. And Copenhagen aims to become the first carbon-neutral capital in the world by 2025. Officials have no qualms in admitting that meeting these objectives is taking heavy public investment.

Where it gets interesting is in the means necessary to support these policies. There are the familiar things, such as improving efficiency and extending financial incentives for investment in renewable energy technology. But Denmark is also seeking ways to stimulate innovation and to make green investments attractive for companies. Together with South Korea and Mexico, in 2011 Denmark launched the Global Green Growth Forum (3GF) to marry bottom-up ideas from corporate and research actors with top-down government support. Companies such as Samsung, Siemens and General Electric joined forces with the likes of UC Berkeley, aided by governments that pledge to create a stable environment for green investments. Civil society, businesses and the media were part of the endeavor.

Since 2018, the 3GF has become the P4G (Partnering for Green Growth and the Global Goals 2030), which has 12 partner countries, six international organizational partners and over 240 business and civil society partners, all working on more than 50 concrete partnerships aimed at “pioneering market-based partnerships to build sustainable and resilient economies” on everything from Africa’s renewable energy markets to cutting food waste. 

Rather than giving up or holding back after the failed Copenhagen summit, Denmark decided to double down. In doing so, it has designed a concrete and precise roadmap to navigate global governance during the climate crisis.

For one, Denmark systematically broadened the type of actors involved beyond governments. Cooperative, complex endeavors require a broad range of participants as well as a sense of purpose. Initiatives such as P4G illustrate that grouping private, public and civic actors can work as a substitute for unwieldy global institutions. This is what is also called a transnational regime, for which climate policies offer a paradigmatic case.

For another, Denmark chose to concentrate on narrow objectives where the interests of diverse actors could coalesce. It opted for an informed, meticulous search for consensus “made of practical steps fulfilling multiple purposes,” as one of the architects of the country’s climate policy told me. 

Underpinning the Danish approach is a ruthless and quintessential Nordic pragmatism. The strategy may be rooted in a dream to save the planet from deliberate self-destruction, but the goal of creating “market-based partnerships” allows little time for starry-eyed idealism. Values matter only as a solid foundation and purpose for concrete deeds.

We are used to referring to Scandinavia as the place where democratic governance has delivered some of its most impressive feats in terms of solidarity, good governance and happiness. So paradigmatic are the Nordic achievements that the political scientist Francis Fukuyama even coined the phrase “getting to Denmark” as the metonymy for ideally governed nations. Copenhagen’s climate debacle and its remarkable comeback point at a different way to get to Denmark: inclusiveness, connectivity and purpose as we navigate the complexities of transnational governance during the climate crisis.

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“I actually feel pretty comfortable in New York. I get scared, like, in Sweden,” mumbled Lou Reed, the legendary frontman of the Velvet Underground, while playing the disheveled city-dweller in the 1995 movie “Blue in the Face.” “It’s kind of empty, they’re all drunk, everything works. If you stop at a traffic light and don’t turn your engine off, people come over and talk to you about it. You go to the medicine cabinet and open it up, and there’ll be a little poster saying: ‘In case of suicide, call …’ You turn on the TV, there’s an ear operation. These things scare me. New York? No.”

This droll monologue hints at how Nordic societies are different — or at least how they are perceived by outsiders to be different. They are distinctive in ways that border on the inhuman, or perhaps the post-human. Some years ago, two Swedish authors even wrote a book asking the disturbing question: “Are the Swedes humans?”

At the same time, when it comes to the Nordic countries themselves, the casual observer is instinctively drawn to their commonalities. A historical, cultural and, in some cases, even a linguistic proximity — as well as similar material conditions such as healthcare, demographics, state capacity and political stability — make these lands often indistinguishable to outsiders.

So, when a cataclysmic crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic struck, one might assume that each of the Nordic countries would be equally well prepared to respond effectively. On this latter count, however, the evidence so far is confounding: Neighbors such as Sweden and Denmark took drastically different approaches to their coronavirus responses, with a quest for herd immunity in the former case and draconian lockdowns in the latter case. Supposedly very close in their underlying social and political structures, and making decisions on the basis of evidence, science and rigorous public management, Sweden and Denmark nonetheless adopted wildly divergent responses.

We rightly deplore the incompetence and arrogance that has characterized COVID crisis management in authoritarian or populist-run states like Brazil, India and the United States. Erratic leadership, improvisation and hundreds of thousands of deaths present damning indictments of the failures of these regimes.

But the performance of supposedly ideally governed countries such as the Nordics has hardly been uniformly strong. By ratcheting up the pressure for rapid response, the pandemic put their well-honed governance mechanisms under stress. It revealed inconsistencies and laid bare some of the most blatant contradictions of democratic governance, in ways not far from those described by Lou Reed.

The Pioneers & The Pandemic

The five Nordic countries — Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland — are often identified as the countries where democratic governance has delivered its most impressive feats. The region is a geographical frontier, defined by unforgiving weather and dark winters. But it is also a kind of existential frontier: a welfare paradise, blessed with universal healthcare and free education — the El Dorado of Bernie Sanders’s “democratic socialism.” Northern European states consistently top all sorts of global rankings: from competitiveness to equality, transparency and happiness. For political scientists of a liberal-democratic bent, these countries are a metonymy for the virtuous society, polities that anticipate trends and that many would like to imitate. The holy grail of governance, as Francis Fukuyama famously put it, is “getting to Denmark.”

Nevertheless, the Nordic states experienced very different approaches and outcomes to the COVID-19 pandemic. Consider the cases of Denmark and Sweden. The Danish government, not unlike Finland and Norway, was among the first to impose drastic coronavirus-related restrictions. This was not a total lockdown as in the case of Italy or Spain; for months after the virus struck, visitors might have been perplexed by the absence of facemasks in most public places.

At the same time, Copenhagen introduced some of the most radical border closures and travel restrictions. I was returning from Germany in May, for example, and agents at the Danish border demanded detailed evidence for why I wanted to enter the country that I had called home for the better part of the past two decades. So far-reaching were the measures of Copenhagen’s government that the director-general of the Danish Health Authority, Søren Brostrøm, felt compelled to dissociate himself from the travel ban, declaring it a political, rather than scientific, measure.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s justification left little to interpretation: “If we have to wait for evidence-based knowledge in relation to the coronavirus, we will quite simply come too late.” The Danish approach involved the imposition of restrictions and the expansion of state authority in ways more reminiscent of places like Taiwan or Singapore that helped flatten the curve of the contagion by means of mass surveillance, contact tracing and stringent quarantine enforcements.

When the exit from lockdown was eventually rolled out, most European countries settled on a gradual reopening of industrial activities, aiming to restart disrupted supply chains. Denmark’s Social Democrat-led government chose a different tack, reopening kindergartens and elementary schools before anything else, referencing those who could not afford private childcare.

In contrast, Sweden’s approach could easily be mistaken for the populist denialism of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil or Donald Trump in the U.S. While it enacted a number of targeted closures, such as schools for over-16s, the government in Stockholm deliberately left social life to proceed as normally as possible. Following a mostly volunteer-based approach, the Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven declared: “We who are adults need to be exactly that: adults. Not spread panic or rumors. No one is alone in this crisis, but each person carries a heavy responsibility.”

With implicit reference to the controversial “herd immunity” approach, the Swedish government allowed bars, gyms, shops and restaurants to remain open, counting on a modern and efficient healthcare service to provide protection. At the same time, it relied on social and cultural habits: Even before the coronavirus contagion hit, an estimated two-thirds of the Swedish population already worked from home at least some of the time, and over half of Swedish households are occupied by one person. As former Prime Minister Carl Bildt joked: “Swedes, especially of the older generation, have a genetic disposition to social distancing.” Even so, some observers lambasted Sweden’s obstinacy as unconscionable.

The difference in results between the Danish and Swedish approaches has been stark. With nearly 600 COVID-19 deaths per million inhabitants (as of early October 2020), Sweden’s toll has been five times higher than Denmark and about 10 times higher than Norway or Finland. At the same time, in terms of preventing economic disruption, the results have been slightly worse in Sweden than in Denmark (Sweden’s economy contracted by 8.6% and Denmark’s by 7.4% in the second quarter of 2020) and worse than in either Norway or Finland. Declines in consumer spending have also been similar in Sweden and Denmark (25% and 29% respectively).

While this might seem a damning indictment of the Swedish approach, by the fall of 2020, the rate of new infections in Sweden was similar to that of Denmark and some other European countries that imposed lockdowns. In the words of Anders Tegnell, the epidemiologist behind Sweden’s unusual approach: “In the end, we will see how much difference it will make to have a strategy that’s more sustainable, that you can keep in place for a long time, instead of the strategy that means that you lock down, open up and lock down over and over again.”

The plethora of “known unknowns” and “black swans” that COVID-19 has unleashed might seem to counsel against drawing premature conclusions. But nine months since the start of the pandemic in Europe, it is hard to remain agnostic in the face of data such as the Swedish death rate, which is comparable to countries such as Brazil or the U.S., whose COVID crisis management has been universally derided.

More than that, it is eye-opening to see how Swedish government officials justify these results, with one explaining that staying open was necessary in order for people to be able to continue living a “normal life.” One needn’t be a cynic to conclude that the Swedish government resolved that thousands of mostly elderly casualties were a price worth paying in order to spare the rest of the population from the disruption and uncertainties of a lockdown.

This tale of these two Nordic approaches to COVID-19 shows how similar countries can make dramatically different choices about how to balance the tradeoff between liberty and security. In a paradoxical way, however, the radically different approaches taken by the Swedish and Danish governments reflect a deeper underlying similarity: These are countries whose populations are among the most trusting in the world. They display an unusual confidence in the state and its institutions. Social cohesion and trust run so deep that the Swedish and Danish governments might well have swapped their very different COVID strategies and still retained public support. Their respective publics would have debated the uses and abuses of scientific evidence, the health costs and the economic consequences, but in the end, the citizens would likely accept any choice their government made.

The government’s measures did cause complaints and objections, especially in Sweden, but there was nothing like the angry protests and rejections of government advice — for example, over the use of personal protective equipment — that over the last half-year has roiled countries from Germany to the U.S. Citizens and political parties alike largely respected governmental decisions that seemed congruent with technocratic decision-making practices.

Put another way, the COVID-19 pandemic has both revealed what makes the Nordic model tick and, at the same time, has laid bare its darker side.

The Nordic Middle & Nordic Noir

The Nordic countries had their own Alexis de Tocqueville. In the 1930s, a young American correspondent (and later Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist) named Marquis Childs undertook a journey to Sweden to examine the bold new experiment being pursued there in offering a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Not unlike the nineteenth century French diplomat whose “Democracy in America” captured the spirit of the nascent U.S., Childs’s account of the emergent Nordic “social model” produced a classic entitled “Sweden: The Middle Way” (1936). Against the background of a looming struggle between fascism and democracy, capitalism and communism, this short book chronicled the “practical” ways in which effective social democratic governance could overcome ideological confrontation and deliver results. The subtitle of the book would become a cliché of centrist politics.

There is no overt ideological battle in the 21^st century. Yet, in the West, citizens increasingly turn to populist forces to seek an easy respite to the frustration caused by the failures of democracy. Other models, such as China’s “political capitalism,” rest on technocratic command-and-control methods, whose global appeal is growing mostly due to their perceived ability to “deliver the goods.” 

No matter where and how they are practiced, these alternatives seem to offer only partial and unsatisfactory answers to increasingly complex questions of governance. The evidence from COVID-19 and the contrasting Nordic responses to it suggests rigid rule-making imparted from above or populist over-simplifications brewed from below can only represent the extremes of a more sophisticated palette of governing processes.

The Nordic “middle way” of the 21^st century is not a place in between opposing worldviews, nor is it about finding a common ground between different ideological inclinations. It is about practicing flexible governance formats, a pragmatic operation of political bricolage, where actors inspired by somewhat conflicting priorities come together.

Then as now, the glue is in the culture of consensus, a mindset of compromise and an appreciation for orderliness. I come from Italy, where compromise is a shorthand for weakness, a synonym for flip-flopping or selling out. If you compromise, it’s because you’ve lost a little bit of dignity.

In the Nordic region, by contrast, the search for compromise is seen as overwhelmingly positive. “Maybe we won’t meet in the middle,” Danish historian Bo Lidegaard once told me. “Maybe it is 30% you and 70% me” — but the result is acceptable for both. The Swedish language even has a word for this, “lagom,”which encapsulates their philosophy of a life that refuses excesses, that searches for the right measure between what is too much and what is too little. Nordics tend to be realistic about their expectations and find balance in moderation.

There is, however, a dark side to this tale of consensus and compromise, perhaps best epitomized by the blockbuster Nordic genre of crime novels known as Nordic noir, made most famous outside the region by novels like “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” by the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson. The tensions within Nordic noir novels emerge from the contrast between the apparently bland, conformist social surfaces of the Nordic societies in which they are set and the horrific accounts of murder, misogyny or racism they depict as lurking beneath those surfaces.

Some have wondered why a region characterized by such supposed social harmony would produce such dark fictional tales. But this is exactly the point: One reason why Nordic noir fiction is so popular is because of how it reveals contradictions, how the seemingly idyllic and even boring context masks a hidden reality of heinous crimes and moral depravity. In societies that rightly boast of their high standards of gender equality, it’s not a coincidence that Larsson’s novel was originally entitled, in Swedish, “Män Som Hatar Kvinnor” — “Men Who Hate Women.”

Nordic governance in the face of COVID-19 embodies this Nordic noir paradox: Sweden is generally considered among the best-governed countries in the world, and yet it intentionally imposed on its people a trade-off that few other nations would have willingly accepted. In the 1970s, British journalist Roland Huntford went as far as decrying the Nordics as “the new totalitarians.” Citizens accept order and control in ways and to extents uneasily akin to subservience. Comparing Sweden to Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” Huntford painted a picture of a distorted and deranged political machine in which people willingly surrender personal freedom to an omnipresent Leviathan and entrust it to determine the fate of each individual.

For some observers, this surrender is the ultimate manifestation of collective conflict avoidance. Swedes call it conflictophobia; after a trip to Sweden in the 1960s, cultural critic Susan Sontag defined it as being “uncompetitive without being genuinely cooperative.” She thought that the premise to achieve such compromise is not a desire to resolve disagreements but to sweep them under the rug. Worse still, conflicts are preempted by a preordained and unquestionable value set. In other words, it is not civility that is at the heart of Nordic good governance, but rather conformism, which defines the social preconditions necessary to be accepted in society.

There is consensus, yes, but it is “engineered consensus.” Choices are in fact limited, and policies are imbued with a messianic purpose, leading sometimes to abominable excesses. The state knows what’s best, rarely makes mistakes and, as the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal once put it, “protects people against themselves.” And even when the state does make mistakes, the people do not question its essential competence and benevolence.

When seen in this light, the seemingly libertarian Swedish strategy of managing COVID-19 assumes very different connotations. It is less about voluntarism, responsibility and no lockdowns than about the government, its bureaucracy and its chief epidemiologist deciding how to protect people from themselves. At the same time, the social trust and organizational capacity underpinning Nordic societies ensures that policies and decisions are the result of painstaking consensus. It is a method and a practice of governance that, almost irrespective of the results that it produces, settles for a middle way.

The Limits To Technocracy

Whether or not COVID-19 constitutes an existential threat to liberal democracy, it has offered a unique stress-test of the suitability of our institutions to adapt and withstand shocks. If there is one overarching lesson to draw from the Nordic COVID-19 tale, it is that operational capacity and social trust are crucial assets when addressing the complex challenges of our time.

The Nordics remind us that, while the “deep state” may be reviled in some places for its elitist pursuit of control without popular legitimacy, experts and civil servants with the confidence of the people are essential to ensure continuity to policymaking and to carry out bipartisan policies in a spirit of transparency and accountability. At the same time, in a pandemic, the end results of high-trust and well-governed countries are so divergent and controversial that it is warranted to speculate about the limits of technocracy in delivering effective policy outcomes.

Make no mistake: there is no moral equivalence between technocratic governance and its populist alternative. COVID-19 has confirmed that populists are causing havoc by pandering to our prejudices, mystifying facts and placing established certainties in a state of doubt. But in their attempt to cater to our pursuit of liberty and need for security, even some highly revered governments such as the Nordics have overreached and pushed their policy responses to idiosyncratic excesses.

When seen in this light, the defining trait of the Nordic mindset is not technocratic government or social trust; it is pragmatism, the spirit of the glass half-full. I have always suspected that this ability to find the middle way and focus on what there is, rather than what there is not, may just be the primary reason why the Nordics top global rankings of the world’s happiest nations.

The French poet Paul Valéry once wrote: “We hope vaguely, we dread precisely; our fears are infinitely more precise than our hopes.” The Nordic governments and its peoples seem to have found a way to hope precisely. There is something there for us all to learn.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this essay suggested that Taiwan responded to COVID-19 with a lockdown, but it did not.

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“The sea,” wrote the 16^th century Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius “since it is as incapable of being seized as the air, cannot be attached to the possessions of any particular nation.” This elementary precept seems to have been lost on President Donald Trump in his gambit to increase access to the Arctic Ocean by seeking to purchase Greenland from Denmark.

Aside from the legitimate considerations about the nature of this proposition (Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark’s, is not for sale) or about how diplomatic relations among allies are being conducted, this episode illuminates a challenging geopolitical paradox. As regional stakeholders publicly restate their commitment to peacefully resolve any dispute in the high north, some policymakers seem to conclude that the Arctic is descending into zero-sum competition.

Massive changes in the Arctic ecosystem are occurring due to global warming, opening up previously inaccessible opportunities. Greenland alone is estimated to hold almost a quarter of the world’s reserves of rare earths — minerals used in everything from magnets to electric car motors and wind turbines. The U.S. Geological Survey calculated in 2008 that the Arctic holds about 13 and 30 of the world’s undiscovered resources of oil and gas, respectively. The opening of the Northeast Passage may reduce the sailing distance from Asia to Europe by some 40 percent.

“The sea, since it is as incapable of being seized as the air, cannot be attached to the possessions of any particular nation.” — Hugo Grotius

Episodes like Trump’s stunt underscore a sense of urgency about how potential disputes arising from exploration and trade will be resolved. In fact, throughout the last decade, there have been repeated instances of militarization and sovereign overreach in the Arctic, such as the military trainings regularly carried out by Canada and the 2007 Russian scientific expedition that planted a flag on the North Pole’s seabed. As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the Arctic Council earlier this year: “Do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?”

So far, multilateral arrangements have helped avert escalation. Over the past two decades, the Arctic Council has grown into the premier venue for high politics and a vast array of policy issues in the region. Testifying to its global significance, 13 non-Arctic countries have gained observer status in it, including China, India, Japan and South Korea. Partly in response to Russia’s flag-planting exploit, Denmark initiated the 2008 Ilulissat Declaration, where the five Arctic littoral countries committed “to the orderly settlement of any possible overlapping claims” on contentious issues such as the delineation of the outer limits of the continental shelf. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea sets the legal framework to resolve such disputes: all Arctic countries are part of it, but the United States has not ratified it due to long-standing concerns among some of its senators about the consequences for U.S. sovereignty.

More broadly, the geopolitical and geo-economic constellation emerging around the Arctic is a complex environment with multiple stakeholders and different layers of policy action. National interests across policy sectors do not always align and often collide. But geography and the changing climate makes interdependence inevitable.

“Do we want the Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing territorial claims?” — Mike Pompeo

In this sense, the Arctic would appear to be “multi-perspectival,” as some scholars of international relations have called it. Smaller countries have a much keener urge to regulate such a framework than the larger ones. As argued by Per Stig Møller, the former Danish foreign minister who masterminded the Illulissat process: “If someone would take the law into their own hands outside of Greenland and say, ‘We will take this,’ and then, for example, drill for oil without asking for permission, what could we do?” He was surely thinking about Russia then, but the reflection is eerily applicable to Trump’s America too. Finding workable formulas that meet the national interests converging on the region may well represent a litmus test for transnational governance in the years to come.

Here the Greenland controversy adds another useful input: part of Trump’s invective was on defense spending, which in a majority of European states is currently below the 2 percent of GDP level pledged by NATO members (in the case of Denmark, as Trump pointedly tweeted, it is 1.35 percent). To be fair, the criticism of European nations getting a free ride on U.S. security guarantees has been a bipartisan lament in the United States, preoccupying even more well-disposed administrations such as that of Barack Obama. The European riposte typically centers on the generous European contributions to Afghanistan or Iraq, as well as to the experience gained in a comprehensive approach harmonizing civil and military crisis-management and post-conflict reconstruction, most prominently applied in the Balkans.

“There is much to gain from a regulated and peaceful Arctic region; the U.S. would be advised to pay attention.”

Denmark’s prided “active internationalism” is premised on a set of circumstances even more pertinent to the Arctic conundrum: the momentous events that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Together with other Nordic countries, Copenhagen realized that their best chance at defusing great-power competition was to concentrate on the Baltic Sea. They did so by shepherding the transition of the three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) from even before they declared independence from the Soviet Union 30 years ago, throughout their accession to NATO and the European Union in 2004.

Just as importantly, the Nordic countries persuaded all Baltic Sea states to tap into a genuinely transnational region-building process emerging from non-governmental actors around the region. This started out of functional imperatives — the need to clean up the heavily polluted Sea basin — and spilled over into other policy sectors, eventually fostering a joint ownership of the regional process. To this day, the Northern Dimension Environmental Partnership offers a paradigmatic model of multi-stakeholder, multilateral endeavor, actively involving Russia.

The mindset guiding Danish policy in the Arctic is closely following this script and experience that it gained in the Baltic Sea over the past three decades. There is much to gain from a regulated and peaceful Arctic region; the U.S. would be advised to pay attention. From the Viking explorations onwards, Nordic nations have proven time and again that geography is not destiny; to that we may now need to add that geography is not for sale either.

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FIESOLE, Italy — The summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that took place Monday in Helsinki was eagerly anticipated by many — except perhaps Silvio Berlusconi. In a Trumpian manner, the flamboyant former Italian prime minister claimed in his campaign for general election last February that he had singlehandedly “ended the Cold War” through his chummy relationship with Putin.

Today’s diverse cast of European populist politicians are likely to be humbler than Berlusconi but also more dangerous. From Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban and France’s Marine Le Pen to the United Kingdom’s Nigel Farage and Italy’s new interior minister Matteo Salvini, populists across the continent see Putin and Trump as the standard bearers on matters of protectionist, nationalist and anti-immigrant policies, ideology and style.

Indeed, the idea of “sovranismo” or “sovereignism” frequently used in Italy to describe the positions of the current governing coalition of the Five Star Movement and League party closely parallels Putin’s idea of “sovereign democracy” — in effect, another name for the illiberal democracy of nationalist majoritarian rule. All share a disdain for the practices and premises of European integration and appear determined to undermine them from within. They are eager to engage Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America as a way to legitimize their own political standing and as a counterweight to Europe’s weaknesses.

The familiar refrain is that in its pursuit of a quasi-federal union, Europe has left its people behind: from the perception of a diminished purchasing power to the insecurity in Europe’s degraded suburbia, populists have styled themselves as the sensible forces bringing sanity to an increasingly surreal talk of debt mutualization and a European army. That is not an opposition to Europe per se but to a Europe that is seen as out of touch. In Salvini’s own words: “If there are EU rules that hurt Italian families and companies, we will treat them as if they did not exist.”

Yet this worldview has serious limitations, as these rules are part of a compact of continental integration that alone can make Europe a cogent force in the world. The world order looks fundamentally different from Washington or Moscow than Brussels or any other European capital. For the time being at least, the United States and Russia can muster resources and clout to produce a transformative albeit reactionary effect on world affairs. America’s imposition of tariffs may well redesign the contours of global trade relations, much as Russia’s annexation of Crimea reopened questions of sovereignty and self-determination that were thought to be confined to the dustbin of 19^th-century Europe.

But while Washington and Moscow can arguably claim a high perch in an anarchical world arena inhabited by few competing power centers, Europe, much less its member states on their own, can afford no such luxury. Its populist movements and now increasingly its governments lack the weight to command attention, let alone an active role, beyond the confines of an increasingly inward-looking continent. Bandwagoning on Trump and Putin’s agendas may be tactically expedient for short-term political calculus at the national level. But since nativism and protectionism are by their very nature exclusionary, to expect Europe as a whole to reap any benefit in the long run from such an approach is a contradiction in terms.

Admittedly, the European Union’s initiatives in global politics have been too few and far between to put its mark on the world. With the exception of the Iran nuclear deal, whose fate is also increasingly shaky, the last act of Europe’s transformative power in foreign policy was the expansion toward Central and Eastern Europe over a decade ago. With the weakening of that process, notably toward Turkey, another rising illiberal champion, Europe has lost its promise to deliver tangible benefits beyond its borders.

Within Europe, a disconnect has emerged between the advocates of a single European foreign policy that promotes liberal values and the growing disaffection of the public with the narrative of openness and integration. European populists have successfully inserted themselves in this widening gap. But in doing so, they have also disingenuously corrupted the loop between domestic and foreign policies. By ascribing events such as the migrant crisis to the naivete of liberal elites, populists effectively advocate that voters can break the link between what happens inside national borders — managing the integration of migrants — with what happens outside in spiraling sectarian conflicts in the Middle East or North Africa.

Indeed, Europe’s half-baked response to the migrant crisis reinforces the decoupling of inner and outer security. The defensive approach adopted by the European political mainstream focuses the debate on the costs of interdependence. To be sure, the benefits of interdependence are not always immediate, yet the ripple effects in the long run can be massive. Interdependence in a market of half a billion consumers has turned the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, into a formidable antitrust regulator. It has enabled an estimated 9 million students to benefit from the Erasmus exchange scheme, which has become a constitutive identity marker for a generation of Europeans. Interdependence by means of ever deeper integration has turned Europe into a vast political space free of violence and governed by the rule of law.

For Europe or elsewhere, the anti-globalization backlash doesn’t change the fact that the traditional nation state has proven inadequate to contain the pervasive reach and depth of technology, trade, corporations, information and media. Paradoxically, an unwitting recognition of this assumption came from none other than Salvini, who recently advocated the need for a transnational alliance of populists. European populists seem to have both taken for granted the accomplishments of a Europe that has become more integrated precisely in order to face the challenges of global interdependence, while at the same time discrediting the institutions and practices necessary to meet that challenge.

They are European citizens in practice but not in politics, and they have adopted a transactional view of Europe. Yet, crucial developments such as the single market, the euro and the free movement of people were designed to be international goods in the public interest. What they achieved and where they failed should represent the beginning, not the end, of a conversation about the way societies and especially mature democracies organize and govern themselves.

The zero-sum transactional worldview of Trump or Putin may indeed radically transform the way America or Russia position themselves at home and abroad. But it is unlikely to benefit anybody else. Understanding and responding to the realities of transnational governance is an imperative, even in a populist Europe.

This was produced by The WorldPost, a partnership of the Berggruen Institute and The Washington Post.

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