There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to stand up and be counted. On Friday, that moment arrived for Simon Anholt, a 53-year-old political consultant who lives on the Norfolk coast. Anholt’s stage was a TED conference in Amsterdam; he walked to the middle of it, and without undue fanfare, quietly launched a revolutionary political party.
Talking to me in the week before that event, Anholt, an eminently rational man who converses in rounded paragraphs, was full of the spirited energy of the evangelist. One plan tumbled over the next. He sees his new party, like all would-be political iconoclasts, as a definitive answer to the single most pressing issue of our times. That issue is not the budget deficit, or the terror threat, or immigration, or schools. It is, he says, without hesitation, “the question of how the human race finally organises itself to work together”.
Anholt is the world’s leading expert on “nation-branding” – a term that, for his sins, he coined in an academic paper he wrote in 1998. Since then he has travelled the planet – five times to the moon and back on BA alone – advising presidents and prime ministers in 53 countries from Austria to (tough call) Zimbabwe on how they might begin to change their national image. (Short answer: they probably can’t, at least not quickly, and then only by behaving extremely well.) He has built his career in part as a formidable cruncher of data. In advance of launching his party he has, therefore, inevitably looked at the numbers. Making coffee in his kitchen, he tells me, with understated excitement, that at a conservative estimate his new party has a natural constituency of about 700 million people, one tenth of the planet’s total population, scattered pretty uniformly across it. He calls these people, (his people!) “new cosmopolitans”.
New cosmopolitans are, Anholt suggests, true citizens of the globalised world. That is to say they are people who have lost faith in the insularities of the nation state, who are interested in innovative policies, not redundant ideologies (“they buy tracks, not albums” he says), people who through social networks often feel they have more in common with a Facebook friend or blogger in Cape Town or Kathmandu than their next-door neighbours; people who, collectively, want to “upgrade humanity’s attitude to itself”. If the idea of linking all these people together sounds a little ambitious, Anholt is unconcerned. “There is a tendency, particularly among journalists, to do a calculation which reads: ‘simple plus ambitious means naive,’” he says, looking at me squarely. “Occasionally, simple plus ambitious just means good.”
I suggest he sounds a little like a data-driven Russell Brand. I get the sense it’s not precisely what he wants to hear.
Anholt’s party is called the Good Country Party. It has, so far, no logo or headquarters or manifesto beyond a website which will make its debut this weekend. It is based on a simple premise. Globalisation, the great shaping idea of our time, has so far, Anholt argues, been driven entirely by corporations and technology. Popular politics has failed to create super-national spaces or structures to balance and counter those forces, or find solutions to the problems they create. The Good Country Party will be, he hopes, the first such place.
“There is,” Anholt says, with certainty of the aphorist, “only one global superpower these days: the public opinion of 7 billion people. The question is how to marshal that power. In my experience of dealing with governments they still, at heart, whatever they profess, pursue this 19th-century model of ‘compete or die’. It is ludicrous.” When Anholt looked around to see who might lead a movement away from such narrowness of vision, who might create the first globalised super-party, he couldn’t – cometh the hour! – honestly see anyone better qualified than himself.
The boast — that he is well-placed to set this grand idea in motion — is not an idle one, though. On his sofa, he makes it with some tongue-in-cheek awareness of its potential for hubris. But he also sees his one-man United Nations as a natural progression from the work he has been doing for most of his adult life.
The most visible part of this work has been a series of indexes that attempt to measure exactly what countries think of each other. In 2005 Anholt created the Nation Brands Index, an enormous annual global survey (which now has 200bn data points) that ranks 50 countries in order of how positively they are perceived by a representative sample of people on the planet. Earlier this year he launched the Good Country Index, which refined that question to ask which is the “goodest” (not better or best) country in the world? Which nation, against a complex series of seven objective metrics, devised by Anholt, looks outward, fulfils its international obligations, innovates and spreads the most per capita positivity? (Ireland, since you ask).
It was after the launch of that second “goodness” index at another TEDx talk in Germany that Anholt started to develop the idea of his borderless party. His talk was a surprising viral hit. It reached 1m internet views more quickly than any other TEDx talk. And not only that: it prompted hundreds and then thousands of comments and tweets, which Anholt, nothing if not obsessive, devoted days to responding to, one by one. A few things became clear from those comments. First, that Americans, particularly young American men, were often “incoherent with rage” that their nation did not feature in the top 10 of goodness; and second that people – cosmopolitans – from all parts of the world thought it a tremendous start, but what next?
“I didn’t want people to be too fixated on the index itself,” Anholt says. “I get dragged into long conversations about how I assembled the data and really it was a toe in the water to start a debate on how you make nations less selfish.”
The primary answer to that question in the first instance, he believes, the founding premise of the Good Country Party, is a culture change. “The habit I am trying to bring about,” Anholt says, “is a universal dual mandate, that says: ‘In this global age, anybody who has any power or responsibility over any group of people has responsibility not only for them but also for all the other people on the planet’. That might sound absurd but to a degree climate change has begun to teach us how to do that. If you go to your average meeting of Munich city council and they are talking about street lighting you would expect them to be referring constantly to the whole planet. What I am trying to do is to speed up the process whereby everyone speaks in those terms. It is not just energy and pollution, it is also poverty, it is also peace. In the way that we have learned not to have any conversation that might be even accidentally sexist or racist, so we need at every level of organisation, to be thinking globally, to be that instinctive.”
At the national level, he says, the role of the foreign minister becomes crucial. “Today, even in smart countries, basically he is the guy – and it nearly always is a guy – whose job is to keep the foreigners at bay,” he says. “And foreigners in his eyes are basically either customers or enemies. It is still: how are we going to make money out of them or how are we going to kill them? The idea that they might actually be of equal importance with our own citizens, collaborators and co-humans remains very far away… ”
It remains particularly far away, these days, I suggest, where we sit, facing Europe across the North Sea, a part of the country in which Ukip has lately rolled up its trousers, knotted a hankie on its head and planted its little union flag in the sand.
It would be fair to say that Anholt is not a lover of the Farage tendency. “Nationalism is a disgusting, repellent trait. We can love our families, or our village, or even our city, because to love your home is natural. But to love your country is really just to love its army. It is as pathological as fundamentalist religion. I love my God to the extent I will kill for Him. I love my nation to the extent that I will kill for it. There is no difference.”
He warms to this theme in a manner you don’t hear that often on the eastern margin of the nation. “The European Union is probably the noblest project that humanity has ever contrived. It is the first time in history that a bunch of grown-up nation states have had the wisdom and maturity to abandon some of their precious sovereignty for the greater good. The fact that we don’t want to participate in it is a sickening lack of imagination. The idea that unilateralism can possibly bring about any benefit for us or for anybody else in the longer term is just extraordinary.”
Anholt has not voted in a domestic election for 20 years, he confesses. Why does he have no faith in national democracy bringing about change? “The reason I don’t vote here is twofold,” he says. “Firstly I don’t like the idea of being branded. The idea of describing yourself as leftwing or rightwing or liberal or communist seems to me preposterous in the world we live in. Our politicians argue over pointless irrelevances and then you pick up a newspaper and find the planet is melting, and people are starving and killing each other. That is the only politics that matters – how we organise ourselves as a species. The rest is technocratic detail. I don’t want it mixed up with ideology and rabble-rousing by a bunch of overgrown schoolboys in parliament.”
As electoral turnouts prove, he is certainly not alone in that belief. He does not think that this trend shows us to be increasingly apolitical though, just that the current choices are irrelevant. “People much younger than me in this country are even further away from the idea of being brought up in a defining class or with a particular ideology they must submit to,” he says. “These citizens, mostly but not exclusively young, are very globally connected and they see what is going on in the world and that is the stuff that keeps them awake at night. Like me, the rest, party politics, 19th-century nationalism, leaves them cold.”
Those people can of course join Greenpeace and have some influence on climate change, or give money to Amnesty and make some difference for political prisoners, but it is, Anholt argues, too fragmented. “For the real single issue, about how we organise ourselves to determine the fate of the species, there is nothing. There needs to be a place those people can go where they look for solutions.” You can see his logic. But how will the Good Country Party actually work?
One of his ideas for the party is that every individual member creates “mini-worlds. “Coming up with new ideas and solutions to problems is immensely difficult if people come from the same backgrounds,” Anholt says. “That is why immigration creates thriving economies. Once you start getting five or six people together from different backgrounds, different ages, different nationalities, religions, whatever, then you find that your inspiration is generally much more interesting.” Technology and globalisation put the tools of this mixing at everybody’s fingertips. “In many people’s social media groups there are maybe five or six people from very different backgrounds or countries,” he suggests. “I think people should start doing a deal with that group. Any time they are faced with a difficult challenge, they should promise to consult those five or six people about it. Create a mini-world and brainstorm.” In part, the Good Country Party would be an aggregator of such brainstorming; Anholt describes it, in his admittedly still forming plans, as the “Wikipedia for policy”.
To begin with though, it will loosely be an institute, the Anholt Institute in Copenhagen (with seed funding from the Danish government), which will, among other things, keep the Good Country Index data live, and a website that will share the data Anholt has collected and videos he has made. It will not ask for anything – money, or signatures – it will “only give”. “Quickly it will become an exchange,” he says with impressive certainty. “At the most basic level I am trying to introduce that cosmopolitan cohort to each other, because there has to be one place where they all meet. The Good Country Party is really a hymn in praise of what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘dapple’. Mixing up shit makes things work.”
Anholt’s own background is an example of that dapple. He grew up in The Hague until he was five and then in rural Surrey. His mother was an academic, a literary critic. His father was European market research director for an American company, and trilingual (his German was so good that during the war his work for British military intelligence included impersonating Nazi officers in Germany, a fact he only told his son when he was close to death). His mother at one stage worked for the British Council in Sweden, so she spoke that language and Finnish. They both spoke good French and Italian. “I was always surrounded by chattering in different tongues,” Anholt recalls. “I grew up believing that foreigners might be more interesting than the people where I was growing up.”
He went to boarding school and Oxford where he studied languages and anthropology. He did a year in Italy, felt more at home there than here, went back after graduating and married an Italian with whom he has three grown-up children. After university he took a job in advertising, “mainly because my father told me not to”. He became international creative co-ordinator for the global agency McCann Erickson, and they sent him around the planet trying to figure out whether they were doing global campaigns properly. They weren’t – because mostly what they were doing was just translating them from the English. Anholt left and started a company called World Writers, which instead of translating advertising campaigns into other languages, used native-language copywriters to culturally adapt them. He ran that business for 14 years and at the time he sold it in 2000, it had 45 people from 39 countries in an office in Soho. “Translation and mistranslation is how creativity starts,” he says.
By this time he had written his paper for the Journal of Brand management called “Nation Brands of the 21st Century” — and created something of a monster. “All I really meant was: countries have images, and in the age of globalisation your country can sell more products and exchange more culture if you have a positive image,” he says. “If you have a weak national image everything is difficult for you, everything is expensive. It was quite unfortunate because I picked the wrong term for it. Branding implied something you could spin.” Ad agencies and PR people saw it as an opportunity to sell their services to governments and provide a short cut to greater international standing. “They approached countries as you might approach rebranding Toilet Duck,” Anholt says. Cool Britannia comes to mind.
Sometimes the governments called for Anholt himself. Wasn’t he being brought in under false pretences?
“I often was,” he says. “I would disabuse them of the idea they had only an ‘image problem’ in the first meeting. The last thing you should do if you are concerned about your reputation is to obsess about your reputation. You have to figure out what you have been doing wrong and put it right. Reputation is reality with delay.”
The thing about the image of nations in people’s minds, the data shows, is that people don’t think about most other countries that often, and when they do they don’t easily change their settled view. Most people don’t go to bed at night reassessing their idea of Finland. “What we do is ignore information that contradicts our view of a country until it becomes too insistent; government propaganda is never going to change international opinion,” he says. “Images of South Africa really did change because of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid. Or, for example, this year Germany is No 1 in the Nation Brands Index; it is the most admired country on earth. Seventy years is pretty quick to go from the bottom to the top. It started with the reliable products, then the political stability, the Europeanness. And then gradually the tourism and culture… The only thing that changes your national reputation is if you do real things to make the world more glad that you exist.”
Since the millennium year Anholt has delivered this message directly to the presidents – “I always deal with the boss” – in projects that have extended for months and years: “Mexico, Finland, Chile, Latvia, Austria, Greece, South Korea…” he could go on.
After a decade of doing this strange work, in 2012 he found himself sitting down and taking stock. One of his most proactive relationships, trying over a period of years to help Felipe Calderón, then president of Mexico, create policy – international leadership on climate change, for example — to counter the overwhelming negative news of drug wars, had come to an end. Looking at what he had achieved, Anholt had to conclude that, despite his efforts to make national governments more collaborative, in the end, “one way or another, what I was doing was helping these countries to shaft each other. To be competitive.”
He took a year off. And in that year began digging down into his personal data mine. “I was asking it a simple question,” he says. “What makes people like one country more than another?” He produced something he called the MARSS model; MARSS stands for Morality, Aesthetics, Relevance, Sophistication and Strength, the “five drivers of national reputation”. And when he examined the data he discovered — to his surprise, really – that of those five, by far the most significant one was the first: morality.
“I am not a cynic but I expected that people might admire Germany more than Poland, say, because Germany had more wealth,” he suggests, “or had a more beautiful landscape. Turns out that the most significant driver is: is this country a force for good? And when you think about it that is really motivated by self-interest. We admire countries that we don’t have to worry about.”
Having made this discovery Anholt realised he could not go back to what he had been doing. “It was not enough for me to be telling governments to ‘be good’ privately. They needed their populations to tell it to them publicly. We need crowds demanding that they live in a good country, a country that fulfils its obligations. We needed people with the confidence that they were not alone in demanding that.” Hence: the Good Country Party.
Does he have any qualms about setting himself up as its architect?
“I’m a little bit nervous about it,” he says. “I have a bit of experience of exposure. When the Nations Brand Index has discovered some controversial facts, for example that the country that is preferred by all Muslims across the world by a huge margin is the United States, I have got a lot of hate mail. Or when we included Israel for the first time and it ranked lower than Iran I was accused and threatened on the same day of being both a Zionist and an anti-Zionist. So I know how it might feel.”
He seems to believe that if he does not try this no one else will.
“I think there is a place for something positive,” he says. “It’s a little bit like the Occupy movement – experience teaches us that people don’t like to be in angry or outraged places for a long time. They want the means to work toward a solution.”
He is nothing if not an idealist (as I talk to him I find that line from Imagine, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one… ” looping in my head). How does he see the next few months shaping up?
“Well,” he says, smiling, “once we have the 700 million the question will be: ‘How do I keep them entertained?’ It’s like sending out a Facebook invitation and finding 2,000 people on your lawn. You need some snacks to offer them. And there will be a crunch point about money at some point quite soon.”
At the moment, beyond the seed money from Denmark, Anholt is providing the finance himself (“I’m mortgaged to the hilt for this” he says brightly). He is talking to one or two philanthropic organisations; he half imagines NGOs might want to pay a small stipend once he is up and running; but for the time being “people find it hard to believe in something before it exists”. Build it and they will come.
But what if only 700 people turn up?
He laughs at the very idea. “Well that just means changing the world might take a bit longer,” he says.
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