M100 Special Talk “The Totalitarian Temptation” with Can Dündar, Claudia Major and Saad Mohseni

Saad Mohseni, Afghan-Australian media entrepreneur, Co-Founder and Chairman of MOBY Group, Dr Claudia Major, Head of the International Security Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), and Dr Can Dündar, Turkish top journalist and editor-in-chief of Özgurüz, discuss the state of democracy and reasons for rising totalitarianism in the world at the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium in Potsdam.

The discussion will be moderated by the renowned international TV presenter Ali Aslan.

The Special Talk will take place on Wednesday, 6 October at 5.30 pm (CET) in the Palace Theatre of the Neues Palais in Potsdam. The event will be streamed live at www.m100potsdam.org/en.

THE TOPIC
The (military) withdrawal of the West from Afghanistan is the dramatic culmination of a series of failed attempts at nation-building in recent decades, especially by Islamic states. In countries such as Somalia, Liberia, Congo, Mali and Iraq, the involvement of Western states has brought neither peace nor freedom, but has mostly increased poverty, conflict and terror. The national-authoritarian backlash that Central and Eastern European countries such as Poland and Hungary have experienced is proof that the rule of law, so-called “Western values” and the path to liberal democracy are not self-sustaining in Europe either. According to a study by the National Endowment for Democracy, democratic countries are more susceptible to authoritarian tendencies today “than at any other time in the post-Cold War era”.

For all the differences: Where are the parallels between these different experiences? What makes people and governments so susceptible to autocratic forms of rule? Does globalisation ultimately lead not to a spread of democracy but to the globalisation of authoritarianism? And what can be done to counter the totalitarian temptation?

Dr Can Dündar has been working as a journalist for the last 40 years, for several newspapers and magazines. He produced many TV documentaries and worked as an anchorman for several news channels.
After he was sentenced 5 years and 10 months of imprisonment due to his story on the Turkish Intelligence Service’s involvement in the Syrian war, he went into exile in Germany in June 2016. Here he founded the news website #Özgürüz and works as a columnist for German media. In 2017, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is the author of more than 40 books.

Dr Claudia Major is head of the International Security Division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin (SWP). Her research, advisory work and publications focus on security and defense policy in Europe and in a transatlantic context (NATO, EU, Germany, UK, France). Recent publications deal with Germany’s security and defense policy, NATO’s strategic adaptation and future development, European defense, strategic autonomy, and Franco-German relations in defense. Previously, Claudia held positions at the Center for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, the German Council on Foreign Relations (Berlin), the EU Institute for Security Studies (Paris), the German Foreign Office (NATO desk) and Sciences Po Paris.

Saad Mohseni is an Afghan-Australian entrepreneur and chairman of MOBY Group, Afghanistan’s largest independent media company. The company has brought world-class news and media content to emerging and frontier markets over the past two decades and has become a symbol of freedom in Afghanistan. For the work Mohseni’s news and television networks have done in Afghanistan to strengthen civil society and defend women’s rights, he was in the BBC’s 2015 ranking of “10 Men Global Championing Gender Equality”. Mohseni is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Crisis Group and the International Advisor Council for the Middle East Institute (MEI). He was a member of the board of the International Center for Journalists for two years.

The discussion will be followed by the presentation of the M100 Media Award to the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and his foundation FBK (Anti-Corruption Foundation). The award for Navalny, who has been in prison since January, will be accepted by his closest associate and confidant Leonid Volkov.
The laudation will be delivered by Christian Lindner, the Federal Chairman of the FDP, who has been campaigning for Navalny’s release for months.

Beforehand, at the M100 Sanssouci Colloquium under the title “From Crisis in Perpetuity to Democratic Resilience”, around 100 media makers and opinion leaders from Europe and the USA will discuss in a hybrid format the resilience of our democracy to crises, (post-) coronavirus leadership, the relationship between politics, science and the media, the reasons for an increase in anti-democratic, autocratic forms of rule as well as the responsibility and current challenges faced by the media under these complex and difficult circumstances.

A current overview of the participants can be found here.

The agenda can be found here.