Cooperation as a Source of Power

KEVIN MALONEY: Today's episode of Values & Interests was recorded on the last day of the high-level week for the UN General Assembly (UNGA) here in New York, and I was lucky enough to be joined by Velislava Petrova, who serves as Foreign Affairs Minister for the Republic of Bulgaria. We had a wide-ranging conversation on the role of morality in foreign policy, the future of the multilateral system, the nature of power, and security concerns that are top of mind for foreign policy professionals. Hope you enjoy the episode. Let's get right to it.

Velislava Petrova, thank you so much for coming to Carnegie Council. It is great to have you here.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: Great to be here. I am excited to speak with you.

KEVIN MALONEY: We are here in New York during the United Nations General Assembly. There is a lot of traffic. There are a lot of discussions around multilateralism, the future of international cooperation, and balancing state sovereignty with being part of a collective community.

We are going to talk about all that, but as we do on the Values & Interests podcast I always want to hear from the person I am sitting across from and give my listeners a sense of who they are, what their value system is, and how that informs their current work. Maybe you could give your values resume or the values CV and talk about that.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: That is an interesting question. We rarely get asked about our personal values rather than our politics.

Growing up, I was always somebody who strived for excellence. I always wanted to go to the best academic institutions, always compared myself to the best, and always believed that excellence is the most important thing I need to try to achieve. Certainly that high achievement and commitment to excellence was the beginning.

Then, over time, I saw that academic performance was not necessarily the only pillar of a successful, fruitful, or valuable life, and I started thinking a lot more about where I could be useful and what was it that I had that made me useful in certain parts of life at that moment in time. That is how I transitioned from academia to international organizations. I realized that science alone cannot deliver for people, and I really felt strongly about the sense of doing work that delivers for people. Then I realized there was politics and international development, topics that I did not know that much about at the time. That was the second phase.

What is also there for me is the sense of being very cautious and appreciative of the luxury of opportunity. One thing that I realize is that to have the choice of education, to have the choice of choosing your profession, is a huge privilege, and depending on when and where you were born you might have a much more restricted set of choices.

Being born as a person in a free, democratic country, and having the privilege of a good education—and that is where I am right now—I feel the need to give back in the sense of living a life where I feel that my knowledge, experience, and contribution will also affect others in a positive way. That is my own personal sense of giving back to the privilege I was born with by living in a free country and having access to health and education.

KEVIN MALONEY: I want to pull on a thread that you quickly mentioned for the listeners, your background in academia. You were focused on the hard sciences and infectious diseases while you were at Cambridge, and then you made this pivot. You talked about the need to have an implied impact in the world.

At Carnegie Council we struggle with this because we think about ethics and draw from philosophy and we draw from international relations scholars, but it always has to be applicable in the world, how you are inserting morality into foreign policy. Maybe we can expand on your journey and realization that you wanted to do that.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: As I said, the academic path was purely this excellence. I wanted to apply myself to topics that I thought would make a difference for people.

I actually left academia at the time when I was at the peak of my career, if you wish. I had published my biggest paper, which had huge media interest and was in the Altmetric Top 100 of the most read and sought-after papers, but I left because at that time I had the opportunity to work on a project in Sierra Leone just after the Ebola outbreak, and we worked on remote diagnostics with the view that we would find a solution to allow people to test themselves and protect themselves from diseases in remote areas.

We were so excited, this group of scientists, that we could deliver all the right technologies on the ground that they needed, and we realized at the time that people just needed air conditioning and access to clean water. It was completely different from what we thought it was. It was not the extremes of scientific achievement that they needed at that time; it was just the basic infrastructure they needed to be there—stable electricity, clean water, and air-conditioned laboratories. I realized that my understanding of where I could contribute was a lot different from the reality.

Secondly, I did realize at the time that the role that institutions like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance; and the World Health Organization (WHO)—those that worked on the ground—actually do to make a difference for people there, and that is what probably dictated that transition. I wanted to see what the organizations that had a very strong local presence and thus ability to learn from the ground rather than instruct had to offer, and that dictated my transition to the United Nations and to multilateral organizations.

After the COVID-19 outbreak and the pandemic, the topic of infectious diseases was everywhere. Everybody was a specialist. Those of us who studied that all through our lives realized what we knew, that the impact when you disturb health is seen way beyond healthcare systems and can affect the economy, people’s wellbeing, mental health, and so on. That penetrating power of the pandemic and the effect that it had was not a surprise for us but at the same brought healthcare closer to politics for me as well because then, as you know, we had a lot of discussions on how we do public procurement, who gets vaccines first, what are the right policies to contain the disease, do countries cooperate with each other, etc.

Again, there was the scientific dimension of what should be done in theory to contain a pandemic. There was also a political dimension of what are the measures that are actually acceptable for different societies that politicians are able to stand behind. That was for me a natural transition to the politics of trying to deliver impact. Whether it is global health or international development, all of these topics in the end reach a very tangible political dimension and in the end are down to the decisions of politicians who are guided by the needs and desires of their constituents. That is what closed the circle for me.

I was asked to join the then-government at that time and to be responsible for multilateral affairs in the Foreign Ministry. It was a call to action in a way, but it fit with this idea that I could be useful to my country, and so I jumped. I think I am quite fearless in those moments, which helps maybe.

KEVIN MALONEY: Opportunity knocks, or you bust the door open.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: I think we go back to the fact that I see opportunity as a big luxury, and I do not take it lightly. I feel that I have experienced in my academic career and afterward working on the ground that people sometimes can have very limited opportunities and we complain about the difficulty of choice and about the fact that there are too many options, but it is still much, much better than not having options and wanting to do better in your life. I always have this in the back of my mind and keep it strongly with me that when opportunity comes and I can serve my country I make sure I take it, but I also do it from the perspective of whether I think it is in an environment in which I can make a difference and can be given the freedom to act and use the skills I have. That is how I feel now.

KEVIN MALONEY: There is a lot of wisdom there. Two things I want to underline for our listeners. First, when you are talking about opportunity as a luxury, going to this idea of universality, which is baked in to the United Nations, but the idea is not enough. You talk about your work with Gavi and WHO, where you were trying to meet basic needs in order for universality to mean something, for “equal moral worth” to mean something, so it is very interesting to hear you talk through that.

The other point I loved is that as a healthcare researcher you talked about these ethical questions in terms of vaccine access, development, etc., and the two poles you laid out were medical and political, and in the middle are what we would see at Carnegie Council as actually moral questions that then expand, touch, and the concentric circles overlap, so it was very interesting to hear you laying out what we would call the ethical questions but from the poles of both medicine and politics.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: Ultimately, access to health is a right that people have. Ensuring this human right, depending on the situation where there are barriers to health, which in this case was with the pandemic, does require knowledge of the medical aspects of when should vaccines be administered and how are they effective as measures, purely a more theoretical aspect, but the political is also an issue: How do we make sure they are accessible to those who are most vulnerable? One thing I think everybody learned is that nobody is safe until everybody is safe. That is interesting because pandemics require ultimate equality, and when there is no equality in access they expand more, and we saw that.

I always feel stronger when I can participate in initiatives with the World Health Organization that try to deliver for those who are more in need than others and have less access than others because that is what WHO did and what Gavi did. Basically Gavi is an organization that delivers vaccines to countries that cannot afford them. So it felt I was doing something useful at that time.

KEVIN MALONEY: For the listeners, the literal name of Gavi underneath is “the Vaccine Alliance,” so you cannot get more literal in terms of delivery in a multilateral way than that.

You keep touching on the vaccine health issue, and I think we could talk about this forever, but it is time to pivot. I will mention that a number of a conversations I have been in during UNGA, in talking about what the future of the multilateral system needs to look like, the failure of the Global North to adequately support the Global South on the vaccine side has been something I have been hearing a lot in rooms as something that seems to be still front of mind for a lot of people. That is more of an anecdote to share, but it came up in a lot of rooms for me this week.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: We have discussed a lot about what effective multilateralism is and is multilateralism dead, as some have claimed, or not. I think if we want to make it more efficient, we need to have all of these international organizations, including the United Nations, strengthen their within-country presence. Ultimately you learn a lot more about the problems of any country if you have direct experience with them.

The disconnect that some countries, including European countries, that we have had from traditional partners in Africa, Asia, and other countries is that we should have stronger bilateral ties and a stronger presence to understand where pain points are. It is very hard to understand somebody else’s pain point if you are not present there. That for me is what multilateral organizations can give us through their offices on the ground. That should be stronger and more expanded. They should give their knowledge and ability to act as a mediator between individual countries that end up being caught in their own political turmoil and own domestic issues. It is very hard to sell multilateralism when a country feels in crisis, whether it is military, economic, or any other form.

There is a moral aspect to it and you could say, well, it is a failure of morals to not think of others who are in need, but it is also I think a result of that tendency when people feel stretched and start to act in terms of self-preservation, and unless they have the personal experience or can have access to information that is also credible—because we need to think about the credibility and truth of the information that we get rather than the propaganda that we get—people can be easily be swayed in ways in which they become over-protectionist, and that is not something any multilateral system or organization can survive, including the United Nations.

KEVIN MALONEY: At the local level it is not some caricature of selfishness. It is often thinking about your family or community first.

This is another thing. From the ethics perspective here we are constantly thinking about duties, duties to oneself and duties to others, and you build out these concentric circles that ultimately you want a pluralistic society but there are trade-offs within that society.

That is a good bridge to talk about Bulgaria’s foreign policy, your current role, and how you think about these trade-offs in relation to values that you and the state hold dear and sacrosanct but also what is required in the world today from a national interest perspective. You are a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country and a European Union member. How do you think about this equation?

VELISLAVA PETROVA: First, for me values and interests are not in opposition in any way. They are complimentary. Values create the basics of what you are willing to fight for, what you are willing to defend. They create the basis of what you struggle with if you do not have it, if you are deprived of it.

Within that, for Bulgaria as a country that is a member of the European Union and an ally in NATO, of course these are the frameworks through which we shape our foreign policy. They are strategic choices that we have made and they are the best guarantee for our economic stability and for our deterrence and defense. I think that is the basics of our own system.

We as a country, if you look back at our mentality, tend to be quite self-critical, and in being self-critical we also are often critical of the unions and alliances we are part of. That is not out of disrespect in any way or lack of being constructive. It is the sense of almost like a family unit where you want to be a bit more critical with your family because you expect more from them than you expect from others. We do expect our partners to understand us in the same way they expect us to understand them.

Within that perhaps we are a country that, certainly within the alliances we are a part of, wants to be an active voice that is happy to discuss our vulnerabilities, happy to be constructive in working toward solutions, and, most importantly, do not want to see a disconnect in our societies between the importance of these core alliances we are part of and them not seeing where our national interests are in those. In that void, in that vacuum, a lot of propaganda can get in, and that is self-protectionism, as I said.

For a country like ours, it is absolutely clear, it is a matter of fact, that we are stronger being part of the United Nations, and a stronger European Union makes a stronger Bulgaria, and a stronger NATO is a stronger Bulgaria, but we don’t want for it to be tested, that is, for us to be attacked or for us to struggle financially to have to prove that. We have our 20-year anniversary as a member of the European Union next year, and what is top of my mind is how we show our citizens first what it means for our own life stories to be members of the European Union, and importantly to think a bit counterfactually: What would have happened if we were not in the European Union?

That is something unfortunately we do very rarely, and that is a problem because we start taking what we have for granted. I have an acute awareness of not taking things for granted, and I always try to remind myself, but it is also part of the way I lead our foreign policy that we need to have national pride, not take for granted where we are at, but at the same time use it wisely and not just let it be there.

Within the European Union part of the biggest goal of our foreign policy right now is to show that our presence only in the Union is not enough, that we need to be an active part of them that contributes. That is why it relates back to my own thinking of how I contribute. To know how to contribute you need to know where your strengths are, and for us our main strength is geography and ability to be very adaptable as well. How do we best use these, both in NATO and in the European Union, is something that is a top priority for us, and we have already started to work in that direction.

KEVIN MALONEY: We come at applied ethics here in the political realm in a lot of different ways. There are different camps, different issues, and different thinkers.

Going back to Aristotle, you think about what are the virtues. I have heard you in your commentary talk about pragmatism. I find that when I am talking to students or to people here at the Council people can gravitate toward values because it is personal to them, they can gravitate toward virtue because it feels like something. Could you talk about your approach to pragmatism as a virtue in the job you are doing right now and how you think about that, and maybe there are some other ones that supersede that?

VELISLAVA PETROVA: I think of pragmatism from the perspective of being solutions-oriented. You have the value as a core goal. These values maintained is the goal for me, whether it is equality in access or whether it is being able to support democracy or human rights or international law. These for me are the non-negotiables.

What we as a country from our perspective can do to do that is the question for me. Is it enough to make a public statement? Is it enough to be present in every debate about those values? Is it enough to support a written declaration in support of those values? These are very viable political means to demonstrate your support.

A big part for me and something shared by our prime minister is that you need to then think, okay, what does it mean if countries do not have access to electricity and energy, what can we do there? Can we build the right infrastructure to deliver that? If our citizens do not have access to the latest technology, which would put them in an unfavorable position because they would not have access to the same information and work opportunities or they choose to leave the country and make us less able to have the strength and resilience of a country to still support those values, then what can we do to change that?

I see these as the toolkit you need to show pragmatically and practically that you are willing to work and not only to stand for those values. In some cases, you might need to go and fight. We know that it is very hard. It is easier to say, “We stand for peace.” It is harder to send people to the battlefield to fight for peace. That is why I guess for me the pragmatism puts one layer more of an ask and a requirement for politicians and for us to do more than just say.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is the responsibility of leaders, to be pragmatic, to think in the longer term, etc. We think about it here as “pragmatic idealism,” and it would be morally reflective but politically viable at the end of the day.

From a U.S. perspective, a lot of our current DNA here at the Council is informed by this question of power to what end. The United States arises after World War II and is based on liberal values within its Constitution and within its Declaration of Independence, but you have never had a country wield this level of power with that baked into its origins. The United Kingdom was there, but it was not baked into the origins of the United Kingdom.

A lot of the thinkers here who have worked over the last decades have asked that question, power to what end. Could you respond to the question, “Power, to what end?” How do you think about that in this moment?

VELISLAVA PETROVA: It is interesting to think of power and distribution of power. It is much more consolidated to individual states. I think of power as leverage. It of course gives more cards to play to some and more responsibility too.

The problem for me is when power gets put into an election cycle because there is a natural tendency to overuse it to demonstrate political viability, and then power becomes something bigger and perhaps quite toxic if not applied in a constructive manner. For small countries like ours, we see power through the leverage of the small but quite significant contributions we could make, but I see more broadly power as something that is a big test for politicians, value systems, and for morality, if you want, and many fail it.

What I am worried about is that power becomes something that people expect to see exercised to an extreme in order for them to consider it a successful political platform. People do not seem to like when power is present but is not used, so any demonstration of excessive power gains more political popularity than not.

I am by no means naïve to think that power can be distributed completely equally in the world. I think no one really believes so. It would be good if it was better distributed, but there will always have asymmetries. The question is, are those who are in a position of power able to create politically viable platforms without abusing it or using it to an extreme? I think that is the real test for political will and political vision.

Unfortunately, I think the conflicts that we are seeing show that more often than not politicians choose to exercise it to demonstrate their ability to be strong, and that is something worrisome but is the reality we live in right now.

KEVIN MALONEY: From a normative perspective this is something we are very concerned about at the Council in terms of power being equated with kinetic power and not with cooperation. If you go back to the French root of “power,” it is this thing in the ether. It does not have that definition that is tied to it often. For us, moral progress is reflected in political outcomes, and it is disturbing in terms of the ease of use that power is being deployed kinetically right now as a choice, so you have transactionalism instead of reciprocity and you have military instead of diplomacy.

I don’t have the data in front of me, but it seems that from a normative perspective we are seeing a bit of a shift on the global stage right now. How are you viewing that, especially being so close to the war in Ukraine?

VELISLAVA PETROVA: A shift in what way?

KEVIN MALONEY: A shift of leaders using the choice to wield power on the world stage kinetically instead of a long-term attempt to do the Paris Agreement or Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). I know that is very flawed, but I just want to get your sense of where the winds are right now in terms of power being used responsibly or irresponsibly on the world stage.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: In physics there is potential energy and kinetic energy, and it is good to think a lot more about power being used as potential energy. The problem is that it is easier to unite people against something than it is to unite them for something. The Paris Agreement is for something, the SDGs are for something or toward something, and because it is not a tangible, urgent need that people feel on a daily basis, it is not something that is easy to maintain and not something that can survive change in political cycles. That is why I mentioned the political cycle terms around a frame to power.

I think of this as the result of that need for political survival and the fact that using force and also demonstrating force being a much safer route to aligning people behind you and collectively creating that force against something. For me, peace is something that we should put above everything. I do not see any war that has any point and use to people. We are not even waging wars anymore that much about territories. There is political influence over certain regions, okay, but most of it is a demonstration of inability to find a different solution that is harder to reach.

But if we think of peace as that potential energy, that ability to still have redistribution of power that is not equal but to find a solution that works for all sides, then I think we have to go above the political personalities and toward the collective, and I hope that in society we do not have to face something bigger than us, whether it is a natural disaster, another pandemic, or so on, in order to start thinking again about the luxury of peace that we could have. Certainly, the single-sentence answer is that that shift is caused by the political need to show strength and unite people against rather than for.

KEVIN MALONEY: I hope Andrew Carnegie is looking down and appreciating this discussion. He founded Carnegie Council in 1914, and it was literally named the Church Peace Union. It was the last thing that he founded because he saw World War I coming. He had been in the trenches around industrialization. He wrote that it would be insane to go to war with these new industrial capabilities and we just have to stop it. He built the Peace Palace in The Hague and formed the Church Peace Union.

It is always an interesting framing for me, working here and this being a hundred-year-old institution, because he tries to do all this—he is writing letters to the Kaiser, he is pushing for it—and then World War I happens and he dies a few years later. In his life, he could see this as an abject failure, but then you look at the longer term, the strategic that we talked about because of this commitment to peace, and it has paid massive dividends. It informed the UN system. It is very interesting to think about these things strategically and in terms of future generations and whether we want a world that is peaceful or this winner-take-all power to what end, and the answer is power.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: I think that is why we go back to the more primitive instincts of human nature, which is about our own survival, whether it is political or natural, physical survival. It is similar.

I do unfortunately think that it will get worse before it gets better, so we have to feel more acutely the lack of peace, and we have started to feel it. That is why I mentioned the counterfactual thinking. I do think that unless we are lacking something we do not really appreciate it. I have seen it more from the perspective of lacking humanitarian support and lacking basic health needs, but I see it also from the perspective of results, the humanitarian consequences of conflict that we see across the world.

Carnegie should be proud of what he did. As a politician and a human being who has a strong commitment to impact, it is very humbling to think that you may not see the results in your own lifetime, but others might see them later.

There is something that is timeless about values and morals. That is for me the biggest difference in pragmatism. They are important for the time being. Of course, infrastructure building can also be very important in the longer term, but you still have a need to have others with the same values who still maintain it because anything physical needs to be maintained in order to survive, and that is where you need that constant maintenance of values and moral systems to be in place.

KEVIN MALONEY: We will pivot to close out on current geopolitical affairs, but it is interesting. We are very concerned here too about the cyclical nature of human behavior combined with the lack of proximity to the last time in the United States specifically that a group had to sacrifice on a massive scale. I am 37 years old. I grew up with both my grandparents—they died when I was a teenager—who both served in World War II and one landed on D-Day. I learned about that from them. People who are ten years younger than me do not have that proximity at all.

I am not saying that my experience is the “right” one, but I think this is something generationally we are very concerned with here, especially when we have younger people come in. There is a lack of the knowledge of that era, and that was the last time there was a societal-level price asked of somebody in the United States. There is not necessarily a question there; it is just something we have been thinking about here.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: I think it needs to become very personal. My great-grandfather was in the Second World War, and I am a similar age as you, and I do remember his stories. The fact that we take peace for granted is because we are losing the generation that has personal experience with lack of peace, and that is a question across the board for many other topics. If you do not have a societal memory about a topic, then it is very hard to teach it. You can have historical sources, but it is hard to teach it.

I think we need to work through the personal stories. That is why I mentioned the importance of having somebody who can travel for 12 hours and see something that was happening 60 years ago is now happening in certain parts of the world too, and it is not just one case. It could be a quite typical instance.

I think people need to open up in terms of understanding, and not everybody leads the life that they do. We have a collective responsibility to inform ourselves and to think critically about what we see and what we consume.

I wish that people would think about their lives not only from the point of view of their own existence. It sounds idealistic, but it is not. For me, we are so deeply interconnected. One of the biggest things that defines us as humans is being social creatures. It is known that people survive better when they live with others, when they are not alone. So, even if you wish to be totally pragmatic, it is still better if you are surrounded by those you connect to.

In order to connect, you need to understand others, and that is true not only for your neighbors and family, but it is true also for other nations that you are in a fundamentally different position from. That I think is the problem with power. It creates a sense of entitlement that you do not need to know or see anybody else’s point of view because you can decide without their point of view. Realizing that there is value in any point of view and that can enrich you more to make you better able to make decisions is something that we need as a society, and hopefully we will not have to go through a big crisis to understand.

I think the way in any country to overcome that collective loss of memory over generations is to try to open channels of information to places and give examples very concretely of places that are very different from where we currently live. People I think still live within their cocoons of like-minded people, and that is why I always like to read writings from people with completely different opinions from mine. That is why I am always for dialogue, even when they are complete enemies. That is why we think diplomacy can play an important role, because if you build everything on confrontation, then it is a jungle and the strongest survive, but there is no question that this game of power comes with a lot of casualties, not just physically but of opportunity.

KEVIN MALONEY: As you said, the power and the use of it becomes an end and a means and you need to multiply the options, and at least dialogue allows for that possibility.

I want to close with the fact that again we are here in New York during the UN high-level week, and you are about to leave New York, get on a plane and go home. How are you feeling about your time here, specifically in terms of the state of the multilateral system and what the pragmatic future might look like in your view?

VELISLAVA PETROVA: I don’t think everybody is thinking of pragmatism. I am hopeful because I do believe in humanity, in human ability to adapt. I do think we are slow and that we can do things better, but I do believe in the ability of human beings to find solutions, so what I bring back is the fact that people come here and consider it important to be here is something that should not be taken for granted. We could easily see a world in which people just see no point in engaging in fora that are not transactional because this forum is not really that transactional in nature; it is much more about continuing the dialogue.

Some people, including myself, might wish for it to be a bit more solutions-oriented, but I think that ability to still maintain dialogue at times of polarity is the biggest achievement that we have right now. People can sit at one table and listen to each other, even if you don’t agree with each other, and this for me is important.

Something I also feel is that there is absolutely uneven distribution of power, and that is a fact. It is being tested through war and through military power. I hope in the future that we see distribution of power based on diplomatic abilities and on people and countries using their strategic positions to be key players and to use that, not only those who have more weapons or more funds, in topics.

There was a lot about how the reforms in the UN system should play out, and that for me is getting seats at the table for those who are not necessarily the biggest funders or the biggest military powers, but getting seats at the table for those who might sit in a position that could end up being at a critical crosspoint, whether that is Eastern European, which is important for us or certain parts of Africa as well. We need to understand values that are not only assessed and evaluated based on finance and military might. When we start giving the floor to those who have different kinds of power, we might start to change the value system about what is power and how do we use it wisely where we have a good balance between potential and kinetic.

KEVIN MALONEY: Values unattended tend to ossify over time. That is a very Carnegie Council way to end. Foreign Minister, thank you so much for joining us.

VELISLAVA PETROVA: It was a pleasure. Thank you for the conversation.