Beyond Westlessness
A Readout from the Munich Security Conference Special Edition 2021
World leaders, including new US President Joe Biden, used the MSC Special Edition, broadcast live from Munich on February 19, 2021, to send a strong signal of transatlantic renewal and to present their ideas on how to deal with some of the most pressing issues, including the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change. A special Munich Security Brief summarizes the event’s key takeaways and outlines what lies ahead for transatlantic relations.
The MSC Special Edition, a three-hour program featuring, among others, heads of state and government from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as the heads of the EU, NATO, the UN, and the WHO took place on what was supposed to be the opening day of the Munich Security Conference 2021, postponed due to the pandemic.
Broadcast from the Hotel Bayerischer Hof, the traditional venue of the MSC, it provided key leaders an opportunity to demonstrate their shared commitment to renew, rebuild, and reform the transatlantic partnership and multilateral cooperation and move beyond a state of "Westlessness," building on the term coined by the Munich Security Report 2020.
President Biden's message to America’s allies – "America is back, the transatlantic alliance is back"– was met with relief. Yet, the speakers at the MSC Special Edition were clear that the world’s liberal democracies find themselves at an important juncture: Many put a particular emphasis on the challenges facing liberal democracies from within and from without and called for an effort to renew cooperation among democracies in the systemic competition with authoritarian great powers.
The special publication in the MSC’s new Munich Security Brief format argues that while the event demonstrated a new transatlantic momentum, it was only a start for a true renewal of the partnership that still lies at the core of West. Even the brief speeches showed that a lot of work remains to translate a shared commitment to developing a common strategy on major issues into an actionable program that can overcome transatlantic differences and deliver results. The MSC will try to support this process with a series of events, the "Road to Munich" campaign, leading up to an in-person Munich Security Conference, which will take place as soon as conditions permit.
Munich Security Briefs
With its Munich Security Briefs, the MSC aims at contributing to ongoing debates on a particular issue within the broad field of international security. A much more concise format than the Munich Security Report, the briefs are meant to provide an overview of an issue or a read-out of a particular MSC event as well as a succinct analysis of its policy implications and strategic consequences. They generally express the opinion of their author(s) rather than any position of the Munich Security Conference.
MSC Special Edition 2021
A recording of the MSC Special Edition 2021 as well as its agenda can be found here.
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