Bangalore Four

From Visegrad Four to Bangalore Four. From eurocentrism to techno-optimism.

Bangalore Four is a sci-fi scenario where Belgrade, Bratislava, Budapest and Bangalore will gradually replace what is today known as the Visegrad Four – Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia.

Over the last two decades I have been many times to the MFEA conference room in Bratislava, and recently saw that the Ministry changed the design at the podium from Good Idea Slovakia to “sovEUreignty” - a play on words combining “sovereignty” and “the EU” - a small country trying to emancipate from the Blob, a bit.

But, there is no sovereignty without techno-optimism. Hungary is the champion of the red tribe of conservatives. But its fate was sealed when it banned Uber long time ago. In 2023 the US has sanctioned International Investment Bank based in Budapest, a COMECON relict from the Cold War era. Hungary immediately withdrew from the organization.

RUSI asked if Czechia and Slovakia are the new radical center of the EU, back in 2022. During her Lennart Meri lecture in 2023, Fiona Hill spoke about the passing of pax Americana as the Rest rebels against the West.   

But we don’t live in a unipolar, bipolar or multipolar world. We live in exactly a tripolar world, writes Balaji Srinivasan. He summarizes it as NYT vs CCP vs BTC. Or the US vs China vs the Internet. Plus, countries like India, El Salvador, Singapore or UAE – places Balaji calls international intermediates that embrace global commerce and decentralized technologies.

When you are Google, you go all in on open source to compete with Apple and Microsoft. India is the most populous country, and the third most powerful country and a country with the third highest number of tech unicorns, after the US and China. Therefore it can become a safe haven for decentralized and open technologies – like AI, Crypto and Social – in the same way as India has built its generic medicine industry.

Bitcoin has become the flag of technology, in the era when great protocol politics is replacing great power competition. “The 21st century doesn’t belong to China, the United States, or Silicon Valley. It belongs to the internet.”, writes Balaji.  

We move from Western values to Internet values – global and open protocols bring the promise of free speech, free commerce and free computation – right at the time when the West is turning authoritarian.

When Google wanted to compete with Apple and Microsoft, it embraced open-source software. Small countries like Slovakia and large blocs like the EU need to embrace Internet (free and open AI, Crypto, Social tech) and India to survive in the tripolar world.

‘The backward will be beaten’ is a Chinese saying similar in spirit to Andy Grove’s “only the paranoid survive”.  We live in a world of Red Queen dynamics – where you must keep running as fast as you can, just to stay in the same place. We have to constantly innovate, adapt and evolve to keep our relative position and way of life.

Former Yugoslavia and India were once major players in NAM - The Non-Aligned Movement - reacting the bipolar world during the Cold War and trying to preserve their independence.

The techno-optimistic Bangalore Four can give birth to a larger “network-aligned movement” a new kind of NAM, that combines the ideas such as the network state by Balaji Srinivasan and the civilization state by Bruno Maçães with today’s sovereignists or populists, who often just reflect the priorities of the local median voter, as Dominic Cummings puts it.

But masses don’t change regimes and don’t bring about emancipation and sovereignty. Only empowered counter-elites do. Populism, conservativism, classical liberalism or libertarianism all need a great doze of pragmatism, pragmatic antagonism and techno-optimism to succeed in today’s world.

Both MAGA and Biden’s Build Back Better are envisioning a return to some lost prosperous era, like the US in the 1950s. But it was a highly unusual time, when most of the world was destroyed by WWII and communism and when a high school graduate and a manual worker in the US could support a middle class family life with one paycheck only.

But now we are experiencing a reversal to the mean - to a long era when Asia dominated the world economy for millennia. Both India and China had a terrible 20th century with imported ideologies of Socialism and communism, lots of conflict and division.

India is the largest democracy and a torch-bearer of Western values. If small countries like Slovakia want a bit of sovereignty in our tripolar world, they need to bet on India and techno-optimism.

Less V4 and more B4 is the way. Bangalore Four, ftw.