The Grand Munich Security Narrative
As the Munich Security Conference kicks off on this weekend, the big question is how Chairman Christoph Heusgen and his team will make sense of Israel’s war in Gaza.
This weekend, the world—or some version of it—will descend upon the prestigious Hotel Bayerischer Hof for the 2024 Munich Security Conference. For the western security policy establishment, the conference is the indisputable high point of the year; the place to be and to be seen (or, at least, not entirely overlooked).
A sort of Met Gala, only for people with worry lines, speaking points, and extensive CVs.
The list of attendees includes presidents and prime ministers, secretaries-general and other generals, parliamentarians and civil society leaders from Europe, North America and, to some extent, the world beyond. António Guterres, will set the scene. Kamala Harris, John Kerry, Antony Blinken, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Olaf Scholz, and Ursula von der Leyen will all make an appearance. So will Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary-General of NATO, Mirjana Spoljaric, President of the ICRC, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and — controversially (for some) — Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel.
Officials from Russia and Iran are, perhaps not surprisingly, not invited.
Since its inception in 1963 under the name Internationale Wehrkunde-Begegnung, the Munich Security Conference (or “MSC”, as insiders call it) has been characterised in multiple ways: The Davos of defence, a transatlantic family meeting, or — as the organisers now prefer — “the world’s leading forum for debating international security policy”.
But more than anything, MSC is a grand narrative factory — a place where western leaders, in their efforts to comprehend the bewildering set of events known as “world politics”, can come together to find a sense of purpose. Over three days at the foot of the Bavarian alps, policymakers weave their storylines together, hoping that out of it all, a coherent, compelling and — for the doubtful — consoling tapestry of meaning will emerge.
Ever wondered how your foreign minister can speak with such confidence about what’s going on in the world? If you look closely enough, there’s a good chance that you’ll be able to trace her intercontinental zingers back to the proceedings of MSC.
While the conference is presented as a mere gathering, it has, much like its well-heeled big brother, the World Economic Forum, evolved over time into much more than a meeting place.
Within the circle of the world’s most influential individuals, MSC chooses which voices to platform, and which to silence. They decide which questions that merit debate, and which should never be asked. They select which issues to link, and which to keep apart.
Most importantly, they define, through their annual reports, the principal fault lines in world politics.
Under Christoph Heusgen’s chairmanship, MSC wields, in this way, the subtle power of the game-master. There is nothing inherently suspicious about this. World leaders need stories to make sense of the world, just like everybody else. But storytelling, of course, is not a neutral exercise. Stories are capable of producing feelings of security, and insecurity. To soothe, and to terrorise. To prevent wars, and to set them off.
Because of this, it is crucial not only to examine who funds and stands to benefit from MSC’s narrative — as Politico did last year, and Kjølv Egeland and Benoît Pelopidas did, in a study of the financial links between the arms industry and the foreign policy think tank community, the year before (the list of MSC sponsors include the weapon producers Lockheed Martin, Airbus and MBDA).
It is also crucial to engage critically with the stories that MSC is offering.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 — a “Zeitenwende”, as German Chancellor Scholz put it, after MSC coined the term — Heusgen’s team has spun a powerful, yet seductively simple narrative of the world:
A fellowship of the world’s “liberal democracies” — a group of “responsible”, “committed” and visionary defenders of international law and the “rules-based order” — are leading the charge in an epoch-making “contest for the future international order”, with Zelenskyy in the role of Frodo, the tormented ring-bearer.
The land of Mordor: Russia and China, chiefly; a brutal, dark and intimidating duo of “autocratic revisionists” ruthlessly pursuing their imperial fantasies in total disregard of human rights, humanitarian principles and even “the minimum standards of international law”.
The prize, to be claimed by whichever side emerges victorious from the titanic struggle? The trust and support of a large group of resentful, dissatisfied and vulnerable “fence-sitters”, lumped together under the catch-all term, “the global south”.
The problem with grand narratives, of course, is that they must correspond at some basic level with what is actually happening in the world—at least in so far as they purport to be something more than a fantasy novel.
While Zelenskyy’s fight against Putin provides for a good heroic poem, other recent events sit considerably more uneasily within the MSC narrative. The big question, when the conference kicks off in Munich, is how Israel’s war in Gaza will be framed.
Since Hamas breached the border into Israel on 7 October 2023 to kill 1,200 and abduct another 200 Israelis and foreign nationals, Israeli bombs have destroyed or damaged seventy per cent of homes in Gaza. More than 27,000 Palestinians, including more than 10,000 children, have been killed, and nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million population are internally displaced, prompting widespread accusations of war crimes, genocide other violations of international law.
The war, which threatens to escalate into a regional conflict in the Middle East, has dominated the news over the past four months. But who, in this conflict, are the principled defenders of international law and the “rules-based order”?
South Africa, with its successful request, made earlier this year, for International Court of Justice to introduce a range of “provisional measures” to halt Israel’s alleged violations of the Genocide Convention, appears as a more visionary defender of international law than a resentful “rule-taker”.
By contrast, the western liberal democracies in Europe and North America, by opposing South Africa’s attempt to bring the institutions of the Post-World War II order to bear on the war, resemble a group of conflicted “fence-sitters”. Russia and China—MSC’s dark lords—have both cast their votes in favour of a ceasefire to protect civilians and uphold legal humanitarian obligations and—no doubt deceptively—offered themselves up as peace brokers.
While the MSC agenda features a “scene-setting interview” with Mohammad Shtayyeh, the President of the State of Palestine, and a session on “Protecting International Humanitarian Law” with Tzipi Livni, former foreign minister of Israel, South Africa, which has spearheaded an effort to bring the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court to bear on the war in Gaza, has apparently not been invited to weigh in on the topic.
Moreover, MSC’s 2024 report, which was released earlier this week, does not make a single mention of international law. The report, entitled “Lose-Lose?”, frames world politics as on a trajectory towards a gloomy zero-sum game, in which governments are prioritising short-term relative gains in favour of the long-term absolute gains to be reaped from international cooperation.
The omission of international law is, in this context, unfortunate, as treaties and other sources of international law are the tools capable of transforming inter-state contests over relative gains into long-term strategies for international cooperation. Indeed, the entire system of international cooperation, including the UN, the World Trade Organization and — importantly for the MSC — NATO and other regional defense alliances, are based on international law.
Whatever one may think of the war in Gaza and the broader problems of world politics, it is clear that a sustainable way forward cannot be found if one overlooks the crucial role of international law. In contrast to the perplexing, polarised and often hypocritical world of politics, international law offers a place of greater integrity; a civilising perspective that allows leaders to look at the world as if behind a “veil of ignorance” and find long-term solutions that works for everyone.
It can be a painful mental exercise to realize that one’s actions no longer corresponds with one’s principles, as reactions to the ICJ’s recent ruling that Israel must take “all measures within its power” to prevent acts of genocide in the Gaza strip shows. But it is an absolutely necessary exercise nonetheless, if we hope to halt — and eventually reverse — the slippery slope towards a zero-sum war of all against all.