^B00:00:14 >> John Haskell: Hello, everybody. Welcome to The Kluge Center here at The Library of Congress. The Kluge Center is right through those doors over here, where we have at The Kluge Center scholars in residence at both the postdoctoral level, as well as more established scholars, such as Ivan Krastev who is our Chairman of the panel here today. I'm John Haskell, the Director of The Kluge Center. This panel is part of a series that we do that we call Conversations on the State of Democracy, and we're very glad you're here. Avail yourself of the sodas and the water and snacks, and I think we're in for a very interesting panel. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how Ivan fits in here. As you can see from our materials, he's the Kissinger Chair in International Relations and Foreign Policy here at The Kluge Center. He is the seventeenth holder of that position. The Kissinger Program was originated by friends of Henry Kissinger back at the beginning of The Kluge Center in 2000 and they endowed a Chair for which we are grateful. If you don't have a sense, I know many of you are here because you do have a sense of Mr. Krastev and the other panelists, but I want to make it clear that whenever I talk about the fact that The Kluge Center has Ivan here for a couple of months this year and a couple more months next year people are impressed. He is known as perhaps the authority on populism and liberal democracy in Europe and Russia, so he's here, he's set-up this panel, and I'm just going to tell you a little bit more about him. He is the Chairman of the Center for Liberal Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria and the permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM, Vienna. Ivan is going to lead a conversation with the panelists and then there'll be an opportunity for questions from you. Take it away. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. One of the most beautiful things that Kissinger has ever said is he said when people say that they don't need introduction don't do this to them because they take part in these things for the pleasure of being introduced. So, of course, I'm not as kind of spectacular as this introduction was, but it was a really great privilege to be here and only somebody who has not been part of The Kluge Center doesn't know how beautiful it is. The people that you see on the panel and some of the people that you see in the room are part of a strange project that we started two or three years ago, and I'm basically going to introduce it in order to understand why we're here and what we are doing. There is a famous story saying that the actor, the Hollywood kind of megastar, Cary Grant, once was invited to a charity cocktail in Hollywood, but he has forgotten his invitation. And there was this very tough lady on the entrance, and he said I should enter, where is your invitation? He said, sorry, I have forgotten it, and she said, you cannot enter. And he said, but I am Cary Grant. And she looked at him and said, you don't look like Cary Grant. And he said, nobody looks like Cary Grant. Ah. And this is quite important because when we started one of the things that we can be very much interested in was there was all this talk about liberal order. The liberal order never looked in the way basically this course can be writing about it. Nobody looks like Cary Grant. But at the same time some years ago when basically all the talk about the crisis of liberal order started we figured out that this course on the hypocrisy of the West on the wild side, but also the Western discourse on the hypocrisy of others is becoming the very central discourse. And what is quite important is that attacking somebody for being hypocritical is the way basically to attack without offering an alternative. You are attacking all the time people for standing up to their own ideals or values so you don't need basically to do anything else. So then the Center for Liberal Strategy was a great support from the Robert Bush Foundation, we decided to do one of those projects that people are not doing anymore. To connect the very interesting group of people, a mixture of policymakers, policy intellectuals, academics, and we decided to visit four countries in which the discourse of hypocrisy is central to the way they comment on foreign policy. Russia, basically very much talking about the power revolutions and to the native expansion. Turkey, very much centering on the relations with the European Union. Iran, because of the nuclear deal. And also being interested in Greece because during the European crisis there was a lot of talk about the bailout plan and was basically Brussels hypocritical in the way it was treating these countries. On the other side, the West itself was very much kind of unhappy with the hypocrisies of the regimes which likes to talk like democracies, so liberal order but at the same time the deal was that they had been faking it all the time. So what we have been doing is was a lot of serious meetings, but I'm talking about meetings, 30, 40 people, and trying to cover the whole political spectrum, members of government, both Russia, Turkey around members of the opposition, academic think tanks. And then we came here because interestingly enough, nevertheless that people basically can be very critical to what is happening in the US when it comes to foreign policy there is one thing that the current administration cannot be accused of and this is being hypocritical. In a certain way you have a very strong talk about interests only, most of the policies are not justified on a value level, and for us the question was how much words matter. And our starting assumption is that policy is not simply what governments do, but also how they justify their policies. And even one and the same act of the government, being justified differently is a different policy. And this for us was a trite way basically to make sense of the transformation of the world. So what we are going to do, we're not going to present what is interesting about this project, we're going to end up with a report with much more interesting was to keep the diversity of views. When we talk about the crisis of liberal order we are going to present four different points of view based on the four different types of a crisis. In a certain way everybody talks about the crisis of liberal order on institutional level, value levels, but for every person this is also the crisis of certain contacts that you know best. So I'm going to start with Robert Cooper, which is probably one of the most legendary European diplomats and author, he wrote one of the classical books of the self-understanding of the way the European Union was working throughout the banking of nations. He has been the Foreign Policy Advisor to Tommy Blair and that he left because he was not supporting the war in Iraq and he was the Foreign Policy Advisor to Javier Salona [assumed spelling] and then to Crattie Ashton [assumed spelling]. And from this point of view he and his view of BREXIT is going to be the first thing of the way we are trying to introduce how there is the kind of a local crisis we are experiencing, what is changing. Robert? >> Robert Cooper: Right. Thank you. So I'm going to say a few words about where BREXIT came from, about the referendum campaign and about the consequence of the UK leaving the European Union for the International Order. First of all, where did it come from? Well, I'd be quite honest because I'm not paid by anybody so I say what I like. It came from the Conservative Party. Conservative Party had a problem, it had a problem for a long time with the European Union, and it became quite serious for David Cameron [assumed spelling] and he decided to go above the Party by having a referendum. Actually, Harold Wilson did the same thing back in the 1970s with a different result. And so the Conservative Party is a kind of institution in long-term decline. It used to have three million members and now it's somewhere below 100,000, so it's actually a increasingly pathetic organization, but it's one of the two increasingly pathetic organizations that runs our country in Britain. And David Cameron used to go around saying, the people of Britain are demanding a say on Europe. Actually, the people of Britain didn't care that much, they were interested in education, in housing, they were wondering why their salaries would remain static whereas those of the bankers who had ruined the country were racing ahead. They were wondering about all those normal things, they weren't that problemed with the European Union, however, they then held the referendum campaign and everybody became bothered with it and have never ceased to be bothered with it ever since. ^M00:09:47 It's the way in which you may be friends when you start a war with a country, but by the end of the war it's guaranteed that you've got enemies. And so the referendum created the problem, it didn't solve the problem for the Conservative Party, but it transferred the problem to a higher level. And instead of ruining the Conservative Party they decided to ruin the whole country. That's the kind of proximate cause of the referendum was the problem in the Conservative Party. The longer run cause was a general failure of the government and all responsible people to explain the European Union properly. Now it's very difficult, it has become increasingly visible because this is a very complicated gigantic in a way enterprise and institution, and actually what's happening now it makes clear that almost nobody understands it completely. I worked there for 10 years and I discover new things every day that I didn't know about it. About like, for example, that if Britain leaves without an agreement the airports will close because no planes will have air worthiness because they come from the European Union. Thousands of things like that will stop. It's a sort of, it's hidden, but it's much more important than anyone understands. So it was out of the Conservative Party's problem and general ignorance. And then the referendum campaign made extraordinarily good use of the ignorance, indeed, it used the ignorance by telling an enormous amount of people wanted to leave, telling an enormous amount of lies. Very direct, visible, traceable lies, but they got away with them. Even government ministers demonstrated that they didn't know about the European Union, and people didn't know sort of as usual there was an immigration element, what role is foreigner, particularly what role is European foreigners doing here? And people thought several things about the European immigrants, and Britain is full of them, this makes London much more colorful. They thought that these people were responsible for the decline in the social services because they were arriving and making use of the social services, which they hadn't paid for. It's not true, actually the immigrants were mostly young people, they were healthy, they didn't use the healthcare system, they were not contributors to the social services, so that wasn't true. Another bit of ignorance, you ask people in Britain where does foreign investment come from in Britain? And they'll tell you, well, about they say I think, they normally guess that about 30% comes from the EU, that's a mistake, it's actually 63% comes from the EU. They think about 30% probably comes from the USA, that's wrong, it's actually 17%. They think that -- no, sorry, it's 23% -- they think that 17% comes from China, the answer is it's less than 1% comes from China. Overwhelmingly investment in Britain that's foreign comes from the EU, and that means that supply chains go across national boundaries, having no customs controls and things like that, having completely open market for the EU is absolutely essential for the British economy. So the campaign was full of lies. And the campaign also took place at a rather unlucky moment because of complaints about immigration, which were mostly not justified, but this took place at the moment when there was a vast migration crisis going on in the eastern Mediterranean as a consequence of the Syrian war. Migration crisis was nowhere near Europe, but it was all over the TV screens, so that was another bit of bad luck. And then there was a bit of sloppiness on the part of the government in the way in which the referendum was organized, but I leave that aside. Now what about the consequences of BREXIT? Assuming if it's going to happen, I assume that it's going to happen, although I'm not absolutely certain because I had never seen such chaos in Britain before. Anything is possible at the moment, but the likely result is that the UK leaves, that will leave the UK isolated, weakened, impoverished, but actually is bad for the liberal order because the UK is a liberal country and it's played a useful role in what I think of as the liberal order, which is essentially NATO and the European Union and then you've got one or two slightly less important add-ons, like the IMF and the WPO and the UN, which doesn't function that well, but basically the West is the liberal order. And the UK isolated, angry, quarreling with its neighbors is not a good thing for liberal order. And then a final remark on what is the liberal order? I think another definition for the liberal order is it's what's brought us peace for 70 years in all kinds of different forms. NATO, and when I think of NATO bringing peace I'm thinking of the cold war, but not just of the cold war, peace between East and West, I'm thinking of peace within Europe. The fact that before NATO every country in Europe looked at their military and compared it with the military of their neighbor, and Britain used to run something called the two Navy standard. We wanted to have a Navy that was equal to the next two countries. Sometime the end of the 19th Century we stopped counting the USA because we knew we couldn't compete, but so everybody compared themselves to their neighbors. Under NATO nobody does that unless they complain about the Germans not spending enough on defense. So NATO is a powerful part of what has brought peace for 70 years and the European Union. There are two ways of making, of having peace. One is to be very powerful, balance of power to the left. The other is to have good political relations with your neighbors. And the European Union is intended and systematically does that. Now people will tell you today, well, peace, who cares, that's all old hat. Now I was sort of brought up with Joan Baez, so I take this more seriously, but actually what people in Britain forget is that we had a low intensity war which went on for 20 years or more in Ireland and we do have a land border. We think we're an island, but we don't, we have a land border with the Republic of Ireland. And a condition of the peace settlement in Ireland is called the Good Friday Agreement by most of us and in Northern Ireland called the Belfast Agreement, always a bad sign that when they have different names for the same thing. But the background condition of that was membership of the European Union, that you didn't need to have, on the one hand that you didn't need to have a border in Ireland so that those who wished to could live in the united Ireland as, indeed, in morph if you wished to you could have a Republic of Ireland passport, but that's very important. And I can develop a scenario in which if you recreate the border you can recreate what they called the troubles, but which was actually a low intensity war. It's perfectly possible. the second way in which the European Union helped end the war in Ireland was it put Dublin and London for the first time in a community together where they cooperated and dealt with each other not as a former colonial power, the former colonial victim, but as equals and that was also essential in the Irish peace. So when people tell you the European Union is a peace project it's not nonsense, and the weird thing is that Britain, which is a primary beneficiary of this, hasn't noticed it until now, they still don't understand it. They, I refer to my fellow countrymen, I should say. so that's, I'm sorry, there's much more to say and I've gone too far. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. I was listening, and if I remember rightly during the 20th Century there is only one year in which a British soldier has not been killed in a small or a big war outside of the territory of the United Kingdom. And, by the way, this year is 1968. But from Britain we are going to move to the United States. And for most of us coming here and we had a lot of meetings for the last three days, the biggest problem is you have two kinds of schools of thoughts in Europe today. There are people who are seeing the changes in the United States as kind of a car accident, something happened, there was a major kind of accident in 2016, but they are going to return back to the normal so we should wait for four, eight, I don't know, 12 years and then basically everything is going to be the way it was. ^M00:20:01 And there was a people who said, and I'm much closer to this school, is that the current President didn't create the wave, he's surfing on it. There was a major transformation, there was a certain type of a foreign policy consensus that did not fit to the public consensus there, there are certain changes that are going to survive, nevertheless, of who is going to come to power. And from this point of view for us one of the most interesting questions was what are these changes, what are the emerging consensuses of the way the United States now views the world, keeping close with the fact that it's not simply about American foreign policy but also about very much polarized domestic political space. And now I'll go to Rosa Brooks here basically to give her take and how she sees it. >> Rosa Brooks: Goodness, that's a tough task, explaining American politics and foreign policy. So, as Ivan said, this project is about hypocrisy and the role, negative and maybe positive, that hypocrisy plays in the discourse about the liberal international order. And maybe I should just start by saying that not only is Donald Trump not a hypocrite, he may be many things, right, he may be lying, he may be corrupt, he may care only about his own interests, but partly for all of those reasons it's hard to call him a hypocrite. He doesn't pretend to be anything other than what he is. I think the American people and American policymakers are also really hypocritical insofar as hypocrisy implies, charges of hypocrisy imply a level of self-awareness and a willingness to blink your eye at contradictions and self-serving behavior. I think that the flaw in American foreign policy and, indeed, American internal politics is that we are entirely capable of fully believing multiple contradictory things at once and we tend to truly believe all the contradictory things. I think that when it comes to both the liberal international order, itself, and when it comes to Americans' understandings of our own country and our own politics there are these central contradictions in it that we have never resolved and we have lived for 70 plus years telling ourselves that perhaps we don't have to resolve them and trying to pretend that they don't exist. And here's what they are, let me start with the so-called liberal international order, right? Think about the contradictions that are at the heart of the UN charter system that emerges after World War II. We have on the one hand a profound and quite revolutionary commitment to the idea of universal rights, universal rights possessed by individuals, not by virtue of their belonging to a particular state or group, but simply by virtue of being human. And from that notion of individual human rights, universal human rights that everyone possesses simply because they're human we get the notion of self-determination, which is of course an extension of the deeply American commitment to democratic governance, that individuals, that governments have legitimacy only insofar as they rest upon the consent of the individuals that they are governing. So we have this commitment to individual rights, which leads us to commitment to self-determination and arguably to democratic forms of governance and yet at the same time of course the UN charter, itself, enshrines a commitment to maintaining the status quo, the post-World War II status quo in all kinds of ways, including maintaining the states that emerge out of that, maintaining the power structure that emerges out of World War II, specifically looking at the permanent members of the UN Security Council with their veto power and so forth, and a commitment to non-interference, to non-intervention that says states do not get to and are prohibited from intervening in the internal affairs of one another. So that's, and the trouble is of course those two things don't actually fit very well together. If you posit that individuals have rights to self-determination and to free expression and to all sorts of other things and you posit that states and international organizations, such as the United Nations, have a responsibility to protect and defend the rights of individuals and the aspirations of peoples, and then you also say, oh, but by the way you can't interfere in the status quo and by the way a system which says that five states have permanent veto power in the Security Council not because a democracy chose those states, not because they have the majority of the people, but simply because, because, just because. You can't sustain that, there's no possible way to square those things completely, and so you have to either pretend the contradiction doesn't exist, or in contrast to hypocrisy I think, as I said, the American failing is to manage to maintain a very high level of cognitive dissonance in which you just have two separate little boxes in your head. You have one box that says commitment to individual rights and self-determination and democracy, and another box that is a much more realist kind of box, you know, in international relations terms that box says leave well enough alone, power matters, historical structure matters, sorry stability trumps individual rights and universalist aspirations all the time and you have to keep those in two separate boxes. And so when you're talking about one you mean it, and when you're talking about the other you mean it, and if you're American you keep those boxes so separate that you don't actually have to be confronted with the difference. If you're not American you're far more inclined to say, hey, wait a second, you know, hold on, how can you believe both of those things at once? To which the answer is that again unless you're very good at cognitive dissonance you can't, and I think the roots that tension gives rise around the globe to a tremendous amount of anger, to charges of hypocrisy and so on. When it comes to American internal politics in many ways we remain a country that ourselves are sort of torn between those two impulses, the impulse towards saying every individual matters, it's individual rights that matter, and the impulse to say, no, it's power and concentrations of power that matter more and stability matters more. And I think that in some ways when we look at the election of 2016, when we look at what's going on in the US right now we're very much seeing a conflict between a vision of America that is very much about the protection of rights and universalist principles versus a discourse that says, nope, nope, it's about power, it's about stability, it's about protecting the prerogatives of those who either hold power and want to keep it or used to hold power, have recently lost it and would like to have it back. And I do think that a lot of the support for the election of President Trump has come from that sort of second, that latter group, who are saying it's about power and who keeps it and whether those who lost it recently can get it back again. There, too, you know I don't think it's so much about hypocrisy, but it's about these competing visions which most of us would deny that we have, and we deny that we have them, we deny that they're competing. But I do think that they -- I'm not terribly optimistic I should say about either the US politics -- Ivan, you asked whether will we revert to normal here in the United States, will this moment be a blip, you know and in two years or in six years we say, oh, well, that was kind of strange but that's over now, we go back to usual both in the United States and in terms of the UK figures out the whole BREXIT thing, we all revert to normal? I doubt it, I think it's not impossible that that could happen, that everyone could just agree let's just delete the last four years, six years, eight years, whatever it will have been by then. I think unfortunately somewhat more likely, not inevitable but more likely is that both the international liberal order and the American, the particularly American experiment in late empire democracy both essentially crumble due to their own internal contradictions. What comes after if the American experiment in the liberal international order crumble? I don't think it's anything very good, right? I don't see anybody kind of waiting in the wings saying, hey, we've got the next great idea. I think that we are probably due, unfortunately both in this country and globally, for one of those periods that could last three or four years and could last decades or even centuries of back to power politics, back to power and force as primary means of resolving disputes, and it's not going to be, it's not an era I feel good about leaving to my children and my grandchildren, but that's I think the direction in which we're heading. ^M00:29:50 >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. And, of course, Rosa knows something about this contradiction because she's a famous, also humorized professor, who served in the Pentagon, so she knows both worlds. But one of the things which for us was quite interesting was that people automatically believed that the return to great power politics is a return to realism, and this is something that I'm personally questioning and this is what not you're seeing. This is in a way identity type of a great power politics. And Steven Walt [assumed spelling], one of the famous realists, was part of the group. It is one thing with this type of a highly politicized and kind of changing the way nation interest is defined. This very rational realism view of foreign policy in such a way it does not look very convincing. But Thomas Baggett [assumed spelling], who is the Foreign Policy Advisor to the German President and who is probably one of the best known public intellectuals in Germany when it comes to foreign policy, recently he said the end of history was an American idea, but European reality and particularly German reality. And I'm going to say why for Europeans this talk about the change of language appeared to be much more important than to anybody else. For the United States, for Russia, for China, for Turkey moving for a much more liberal values colored justification of government acts. It is a problem of choice. European Union cannot easily shift to the national interest type of justification of its policies. It's not a nation state. And, by the way, if you see the nation states some of these nation states are very small. I can easily understand what it means for China or for the United States becoming protection is nationalistic, but you try to explain to me how Bulgaria is going to benefit from the world in which everybody goes this way. And from this point of view in a certain way the German dilemma and the problem that Germany is facing as a leading member state in my view is one of the most interesting, but also one of the most challenging. So, Thomas? >> Thomas Bagger: Yes, thank you, Ivan, and thank you to all of you for coming. I think, you know, when I look back at the last 25, 30 years since the end of the fall of, since the fall of the wall, the end of the cold war, which happened sort of at half point in my life, this was the most surprising, the most unthinkable event that I could possibly remember. And I was in a US university computer lab in College Park, not very far from here, and did my Masters Degree there and this was sort of before laptop time. So we sat at this computer lab and there were American students coming in and they're saying, telling and sort of saying they're taking the wall down, they're taking the wall down. And I thought they must have gotten something wrong, which wall are they talking about? Because even with all the runup to November 9, 1989 it was out of my imagination as a 24 year old that this could actually happen and be true. So it was, really it was basically unthinkable. I had grown-up with it, it was impossible. The most disruptive event that I can think of in my lifetime. But when I think back over these last 30 years and what has happened since it struck me that from this most nonlinear event that you can imagine most Germans have derived a thoroughly linear expectation of what was to follow, and I don't think there's another country where Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the end of history after 1989 was as popular as in Germany because it somehow fit our own expectations and our hopes in many ways. You know, after having been on the wrong side of history twice in the 20th Century the country finally found itself on the right side of history of stable democracy, a market economy, and to say that this is actually the final destination of history and now everybody else would have to change and essentially become like us, but we had already arrived at the destination, was very appealing as a thought. And so I think this assumption of a grand convergence that would happen, first with the transformation of central and eastern Europe, then with a wave of democratization elsewhere, but eventually everywhere, that was actually, that was good and we would be at the center of it again. I think also that for a country that had been burned so badly by sort of charismatic idea of leadership the notion that personal agency didn't really matter that much because it, you know leaders would basically just administer the inevitable on a broader flow of history that would lead in a predetermined direction, also had something that was deeply appealing to Germans much more so than, I don't know, French or Americans or others. And, finally, what happened since where I grew-up in West Germany, we were sort of a frontline state in the cold war, highly militarized, including lots of American troops, nuclear weapons and the same on the other side from the Soviets, with all of that disappearing in the 1990s and the notion that for the first time in Germany's history the country was surrounded only by friends, it basically drove threat perception down to zero. If we wouldn't meddle in other people's affairs nobody would meddle in ours, and so essentially what was left was a trading state, right? So the limitations that had been imposed in Germany one way or another after World War II suddenly seemed to transform us into an avant-garde of history, we were at the front of it and if we considered the European Union to be the avant-garde of integration globally Germany was seen as the avant-garde within Europe. And I think, you know this is sort of somewhat simplified and not everybody shared that, but I think it was a pretty broad sentiment, including in the foreign policy, security policy community. And it took us awhile because in a way what this view of the international order did, of which we were a product as the Federal Republic of Germany created in 1949, what it did was it took our own peculiar German history and allowed us to universalize it. We took our own lessons from history, never again the holocaust and, therefore, a strong focus on human rights, moving away from power, moving towards what you could call a judicialization of international politics. So you move away from power to sort of rule of law system, also in the international order, through international institutions, through the creation of an international court, international criminal court in 1998 that would have jurisdiction not just for war crimes, but crimes against humanity, state aggression and these things. But this was a path that sort of perfectly conformed to our preferences, but also to our historical lessons. And so we could universalize the rather difficult, peculiar German history. And this feeling, this sense of being in sync with history started to crumble I think really in 2014, and there was, if you go back now you can see the signs on the wall earlier, of course, but the real, the actual that it hit home I think the invasion and annexation of Crimea and the Russian aggression in Eastern Ukraine and the Donbas was the sign that the happy days of post-wall Europe and international order were really over. And then suddenly once you realized that you also realized that Russia had already years before begun to define its own future, actually more in opposition to the West, and no longer in cooperation or on a path of convergence. And at the same it was actually also true for China under the new President Xi Jinping who would still modernize, still grow, but not open, rather close and become more repressive. And there's sort of a far more competitive element in the international system than we'd like to believe. But these were still all outside pressures and datapoints that signaled the problem. I think 2016, first with the BREXIT and then with the election of the US President, represented a different dimension. I mean the BREXIT decision ran directly counter to the notion that the process of integration in Europe had something that was irreversible, that was sort of necessary, that it conformed to a historical pattern of ever deeper integration. ^M00:40:11 And the British said, oh, we can actually turn-off and go off in the opposite direction, which is a serious blow for Europe but also a serious blow to the way we Germans looked at Europe and Europe's future. And with the election of an American President who would go out in public, he and his top advisors, and say there is no such thing as an international community, everybody is out there for him or herself, to look after him or herself, that ran directly counter to the second grand German lesson of never alone. So, as Ivan said, there are other countries who can go back to a more national conception of their own country in the international system. You know, the French have their goalist tradition of France and the world that looks after itself, but for Germany that doesn't really exist anymore because all these more national conceptions have all been contaminated in the Nazi years and they now basically belong to the political fringes in Germany's political system for all the mainstream parties, all those centrous parties. There is nothing but a multilateralist foreign policy that looks at Germany's future always linked to its neighbors, but limited but also legitimized in organizations that include partners. And that is why I would say there's no other country that I could think of that is as challenged by the world view as it is articulated by the current US President as is Germany, that in itself looks at itself so much as an American post-war creation. And this conceptual challenge now to imagine the world and our role in the world at a moment when our own lessons of history and the course of the international political system sort of diverge after we thought they would be, they would run in parallel forever hopefully, but certainly for longer than it did is a pretty painful situation in Germany and it's just starting a foreign policy debate of, well, what is then Germany's role and what should it do? And most of that points to Europe, invest in the European Union, invest in a network of multilaterally oriented nations, and that is where Ivan's point comes in. You can sort of a national political system can survive a populist challenge, maybe sometimes a populist government can even help to sort of correct or redefine the national political landscape, the issues that are important, and then sort of it moves on. It is quite difficult to imagine the same for the European Union because if you think of it it is made up of 28 and once the British have left 27 member states, and it's working around a table in Brussels where all these countries larger and smaller come together and basically hammer out a compromise that is, of course, always imperfect but that is based on the assumption that in the longer term and if you define national interests in a wider perspective it is beneficial to all of them. And if you narrow your definition of national interest and you shorten the time horizon then what you do is you basically close the space, the space shrinks for compromise around the Brussels table until it disappears entirely. Everyone is only looking after his or her own interests on this very day, on this very issue that is on the table and not considering that you may need the partners and their enlightened self-interests the next day, then there is no room for compromise or it shrinks to a degree where it makes the European Union actually look like a body that is not able to produce any meaningful solution for any real problem. So I think for me this is it's really a question of how you define national interests, there's a great expression in Tocqueville's Democracy in America where he talks of the self-interest rightly understood and I think you can define self-interest in very different ways. And the Germans have learned this lesson in a hard way that we're better off today and in this integrated Europe than at any point in our history before and it has something to do with trying to define our won self-interests in a way that actually includes the interests of neighbors and partners and others on the continent and in taking a longer view. And what puzzles us now is that not just here in the United States, but also elsewhere in the world national interest is defined in an increasingly narrow and short-term perspective and that leaves us in a situation where the solution we thought we had found to the German problem of being the biggest country in the center of the European Continent too big to be just one among many, but not big enough and strong enough to rule all others, that solution may not be as permanent as we had hoped. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. I do believe we are going to have time to discuss it, because some of the more radical Euro skeptics are going to ask questions like this. Yugoslavia did not manage to survive the end of the cold war because the very existence of the state was very much embedded in a certain type of international context, could European Union become the major victim, is it through disintegration of the EU, of the end of a liberal order as an international environment? And I do believe this is a fair question and this is why for us basically what Europeans are asking about this, this is in a way we're much more nervous than many others. But the interesting story about liberal order was that it was always about the relations between states, but also what is happening within the states. And when people have been very positive on the liberal order starting with the beginning of the 21st Century one of the critical countries was Turkey. Opening of Turkey was critical for something that is happening simply between states, but how the new relations between states is starting basically to change things. And we're going to have basically the view of what is happening, the Turkish perspective of these relations between the foreign and domestic politics and talking about one of the key countries that in a way also symbolizes something that can become problematic with the crisis of the liberal order. And Solly Roselle [assumed spelling] is the person to say this. >> Solly Roselle: Well, I prepared other notes, but if you want me to talk about those I'll talk. >> Ivan Krastev: This is the problem with Turkey, also as indicated, they always prepare other notes. >> Solly Roselle: Yes, okay. I mean Turkey's behavior today cannot be dissociated with what has gone in the past 30 years. It's interesting, in eight months' time it will be 30th anniversary of Francis Fukuyama's article published in national interest. And although Fukuyama wrote a lot more and recently kind of distanced himself from 30 years ago I guess he will always be remembered or damned because of the end of history article, which of course ended like his doctoral dissertation advisor Huntington's article with a question mark. And that question mark of course we dismiss. And in a way for both of those articles, that is end of history and the clash of civilizations, Turkey was a critical country because it actually was always and partially because of the geography on which it sat a Janus-faced country. And in a way Turkey also showed a lot of adaptability to the requirements of the new order that was emerging in 1989, wasted the 1990s, and then almost reinvented itself. ^M00:49:37 And I have to say that the Clinton Administration was, mainly thanks to the late Richard Holbrook, understood Turkey's role and actually pushed the country, pushed the European Union and pushed American foreign policy to encourage Turkey to actually play that, not the bridge role, bridge in my judgment is really the wrong metaphor because bridges don't belong anywhere, but Turkey as a mediator, a country that could actually speak the language of the three regions that surround it. And what I call Turkey surrounded or at the center of what I call three geopolitical ecosystems, the European one, Russia, central Asia caucus is one, and of course the Middle East. Ecosystem in the Middle East may not be fitting these days, but still. And Turkey, to the extent that Turkey could rise to the occasion and manage to actually mediate between those three, then it would have accomplished its role and that is precisely almost in so many words how Richard Holbrook defined it and the Clinton Administration tried to push us and the Europeans in that direction. In fact, in an article he wrote in 1994 for Foreign Affairs, which he had a strange kind of because Holbrook wrote, during the cold war Germany was the frontline state, in the post cold war period Turkey is the frontline state, when there was no war or the threat of war, so what was the front, what did the war consist of? And that was, of course, to avoid what Huntington raised, clashal civilizations. Maybe this was formulated wrongly, I mean in retrospect I would think it was, but no doubt that issue of identity starting with the dissolution of the Yugoslavia, the Yuan Dong massacres, and all that had actually been with us and actually hunting us and we are now dissociating ourselves from it because interest has come back. I wish to take a detour before I go back to Turkey and to talk a bit about the United States, since our topic is hypocrisy in our project. I have a very hard time personally to accept the bemoaning of many liberals today that the Trump Administration's policies are ending the liberal world order. First of all, five years ago we didn't talk about the liberal world order. And, secondly and much more importantly, who broke that order? Many of the people today who lament the passing of the liberal world order were cheerleaders for the Iraq war, whether they came from the right or they came from the left. They were the intellectual promoters of an act by the most powerful country in the world at the time to break the rules that actually itself formulated at the beginning of the cold war era. We really cannot have an intelligent or a fair discussion about Russia and what it does, about China and what it does, about Turkey and what it does, we doubt accepting the fact that the rules in a major way were first broken by that country which actually set them. And it will be very difficult in my judgment under those circumstances to put Humpty Dumpty back together, okay? Secondly, we also have to acknowledge in my view and I hear what Thomas has said literally and then but I also add to it there was a sense of complacency and that's what the end of history debate was all about. We've reached the search, the end of the search, there will be nothing better which blinded those who actually benefited from the unilateral moment, it blinded them to the inequities that the economic system generated, it blinded them to the dialectic of globalization that everybody championed. That is you could not have a win-win result from globalization forever, and it turned out that those who support for the liberal order and it was necessary, that is the working people of developed countries ended up on the losing side of that development and in return, of course, millions, hundreds of millions of people in the developing world actually benefitted immensely, but those who ruled those, I mean the developed countries did not take into account that the legitimacy of what they were pursuing depended on taking care of those who were actually being left behind. And I'm not certain that that blindness has been cured, even now, because without understanding this we really cannot understand or begin to treat the populist rage, whether it is of a leftist kind or a rightest kind. Secondly, not to be reductionist in terms of inequities, I mean economic inequalities, obviously the top of a liberal order also reflected a certain understanding of what the culture of that order was and I guess one does get carried away with one's own rhetoric and beliefs and you start belittling those who do not necessarily fit your own description of what the ideal life or ideal identity ought to be like. And now once the vase is broken these are really very difficult things to fix. I mean Germany's unemployment rate is what, 3.8, Austria's is probably below zero, I don't know. The United States today is at 3.7 and all that. And if it was even more equitably done once those questions have been put on stage it's very difficult to actually change the conversation back to one where you use the terms that you used to be using. So we've got to accept that. And coming to Rosa's question, do we go back to what we used to have once the blip is over? The blip may not be over, that's one thing and, second, even if it is over we cannot go back, I mean we're back to Ancient Greece, right, you cannot take, we don't get baited in the same way but twice, okay? And the Greeks have a lot of wisdom to give us on that. So coming to Turkey, Turkey of course is a very flexible country or it can be. Okay, we will play the dialogue of civilization scarred and we will give the European Union a chance as the European Union was going to give us a chance, and I must say for a very, in retrospect of course, for a fleeting moment both sides actually dropped the hypocrisy, double talk and insincerity that defined their relations forever. Very fleeting moment. I wish that both those who were in positions of responsibility in the European Union and those in Turkey actually truly understood the meaning and the potency of that moment and actually went ahead with it. That wasn't to be, we're now back to our usual positions. But in between, though, because of the weakening of the international system, and I personally do not talk in terms of the return of geopolitics, I'm more comfortable with geopolitics finally waking up from a long sleep because I don't think geopolitics ever died. The United States exercised it. With the return of geopolitics, declining American power and the colossal failures of the Iraq war Turkey, of course, repossessed for itself an identity that it is usually very comfortable with, and that is a post-imperial power which wishes to become an important not to be ignored regional power. ^M00:59:30 And I must say I also detect in Turkey a post-imperial trauma syndrome. I guess Mr. Cooper could understand me well, they lost an empire as well. The thing is our trauma really came a bit late, about nine years later, and now we're trying to make-up for lost time and, therefore, all of the regions that surround us are for Turkey fair playing in terms of projecting Turkey's power and vision of I guess hegemonic domination. And whether or not Turkey will be able to do that still is out in the open, but I'll start, I'll conclude with what I'm sure most of you at least with some interest are following, what happened to Mr. Khashoggi and what kind of policy Turkey is pursuing in that? I have to say the Khashoggi affair fits right into our project. There was a murder, a rather gruesome one. It is now I guess pretty obvious that the Turkish Government was aware of it, the British Government knew about it in advance, and unless the American intelligence was as usual sleeping on the job they must also have had some inclination as to what was going to happen. And, therefore, we are now playing a game and the game, therefore, beyond the moral aspects of the murder this has now become a dance between three partners. How will Turkey treat Saudi Arabia? How will Turkey or will the United States side with the Turkish narrative and then dump MBS, or as the President said initially I have arms to sell, I really cannot jeopardize that? That remains to be seen. I mean again he was not hypocritical, but it's obvious that for this particular issue at least for the moment the American political system for a variety of reasons and American media and maybe civil society are not going to let this go. And if, indeed, this leads to a dumping of MBS as a result that will really be a victory for a noncynical approach to power relations. And if with all the problems that it had so far Turkey I think managed it relatively well, protecting national interests but also keeping interest alive and also giving enough information. And at the end of the day this may turn out to be the defining or a decisive moment for the Middle East to see whether it will be the Saudi version over an Islamic power or a Turkish version of a Sunni power that is going to have more of a say in the future order of the Middle East. Don't count on order in the Middle East, though. Thank you. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. I need just to go and to take any type of a comment, any type of a question, not just answer one-by-one but try to make it much more as a discussion and then going back to the panel. I just want to stress one thing that I do believe is interesting for at least our starting point when we started. Every order goes for crisis and being changed and so from this point there is nothing that is happening that is historic than expected. But if you go back to 1989, 1990s the major story was that this was a kind of a world order which everybody is going to feel victorious. And though on the level of the rhetoric it is not simply that the West has won the cold war, that the Russian people has won the cold war against the communist regime and everybody was winning. Thirty years later everybody identified as a victim and loser, Russia to be honest is the most obvious case, but then you go into central and eastern Europe particularly some of the populist government who said we lost, and then suddenly with President Trump the Americans said we are the biggest victim of the world that the American created in 1989. And for me this type of an important transformation of the world which was a win-win and now is lose-lose is something to be taken seriously because it is also trying to throw not simply a kind of a language, but this is something that Simon Vale [assumed spelling] is going to define cheap collective imagination. Suddenly you start to see the world totally differently. Something that till yesterday was looking as an advantage starts to see as disadvantage, vulnerability. We are finishing the book with Steven Hobbs [assumed spelling] this was the reason I was here, I'll give just one example, English language. Fifteen years ago everybody is going to claim that the spread of the English language was the best demonstration of the American soft power. You go everywhere and you're going to hear somebody speaking English. And then suddenly the spread of the English language starts to be perceived as America's vulnerability. Why? I'm just going to give you three examples. Because if everybody speaks English everybody knows how America functions, but America is not very aware how other people function. It is easier for everybody to go onto social media and to pretend to be an American, it is not easy for the Americans to go onto social media and to pretend being Bulgarians. Secondly, on the level of knowledge the fact that you have so many English speakers in different countries, you go to a country you're always going to find somebody who speaks English and you have the feeling that you talk to the local population. But not always the English speakers which are self-selected groups are very much representatives for the general kind of understanding in the very general mode of the country. So certainly, strangely enough, which was America's biggest kind of advantage starts to be perceived asymmetry, vulnerable, everybody can interfere in our politics and we find it more and more difficult to interfere in the politics of others because we don't know what is going on. This type of change is for me critically important. Something that you liked yesterday you start to fear today. This is also east European example, you go on the opinion polls, ask the east Europeans what is the best thing that happened to you after 1989? And they are going to tell you opening of the borders. Ask them after the refugee crisis, what is the things that you fear most? Opening of the borders. And from this point of view the fact where the best and the worst happened to be the same. Is a kind of miss in the important political reality that we are talking about, but I am going to stop here. Please feel free to ask, to comment, and basically then we'll go back to the panel. Please? Yes, there should be a microphone, yes. ^M01:07:14 ^M01:07:19 >> Thank you, this is very interesting. I have a whole bunch of questions, I'll limit to two. First, on the question of BREXIT, Theresa May was opposed to the idea of BREXIT at the beginning, but when she took office she promised she would implement it, of course she's taken forever to do so, and I'm wondering is she trying to get someone to force her to call a new referendum to try to reverse the decision? That's question number one. Question number two for Ms. Brooks, you talk about whether the US will return to normal and I'm just wondering what is normal? Was George W. Bush's Administration normal? Was the Obama Administration normal? Is there such a thing as normal? >> Ivan Krastev: Yes, please? >> John Van Houdt: Thank you for those presentations, very interesting. My name is John Van Houdt and I'm from The Library of Congress, I worked on European politics for a long time. This is a comment, but feel free to comment on the comment, if you would. I think hypocrisy is a very interesting conceptual way to look at it, particularly when it's Putin versus the West or whatever, but from an internal Western perspective I think a useful way to look at it is laziness. I think it strikes me how lazy the elites of the West who talk endlessly about this liberal international order how sort of lack of effort they've put into even understanding what creating and maintaining that order was. I mean I just, I could give many examples, but I'd just give one. The Bretton Wood system, you have to read article after article after article in which Eikenberry and others go on and on and on about the alphabet soup of the Bretton Wood system. How hard people like the young Paul Volker used to work to maintain the convertibility of the dollar into gold at $35 an ounce and not keep the whole system from crashing down, and it was just really hard work. Now Germany runs a $300 billion trade surplus, the US runs a $500 billion trade deficit, it goes on and on and on. The IMF is a bunch of well-paid bureaucrats who give advice to mostly developing countries and occasionally a country like Greece, but there's no really hard work that goes into maintaining a difficult costly world order. And so what we've simultaneously done is put less and less effort into maintaining that order and made it more and more expansive, both geographically it's supposed to apply to everybody, everybody except a few rogues, to use the lingo of the '90s, and also more and more areas in our national criminal court, Kyoto and so on and so forth. So there's a kind of a now a laziness, we invoke the international order but we don't put much effort into it. Now the cold war, of course, imposed discipline, it was partly if the dollar goes, if we go off the gold standard or whatever the world is going to come to an end that's what people like Johnson and Eisenhower thought and so on. ^M01:10:47 So the East-West conflict imposed a discipline, maybe it was just a different sociology and so on, but I do think we have a problem not only with hypocrisy but also with kind of effort. And the European Union is a wonderful thing, but it does kind of and enlargement cost and it was not cheap and so on, but it does kind of spin-out lots and lots and lots of projects that sound great, but how much real effort goes into actually reality. Anyway, that's a comment, but I would like anybody to comment on it, as well. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. There was a question there? Yes, please? >> How do you see global capitalism fitting into these shifts that you're talking about? >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you. Please? >> In regards to Germany you mentioned that the nationalist identity is so rooted in history that Germany is now defined by an international liberal order. If Germany were to shift back to the national identity do you see some of that extremism still coming up and what are your comments on extremism that has arisen in Germany, the neo-Nazi sentiment? And in regards to Turkey with the resent Sochi agreements and action in Syria how has that impacted Russia's relations with Turkey and Turkey's relations with the US and the EU? >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you. Yes, question, next to you? >> Topaden [assumed spelling], I hope said it right, did I? >> Ivan Krastev: Yes. >> Would it be better for American foreign policy if more Americans, especially foreign policymakers and politicians, instead of speaking English while abroad if they know French or know German or know Polish, that's becoming very popular to learn, and they spoke in those languages instead, would that be a way to almost from the bottom up start to rebuild the international community and a sense of global solidarity? Because instead of everyone else speaking English it'd be like us being, you know, I'm going to speak your language or I'm going to learn a little bit of yours and it'll build connections that may help solidify the international community to become more pro-democratic and more working together in solidarity like it used to be. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you. Probably this is the last question, I believe I'm not missing something here. >> Hi. Thank you so much for all of your comments. I was thinking about what you said with in terms of hypocrisy and like how it's represented now in the US. In terms of education and raising this new generation to think about American hypocrisy how do you think that's going to work? Is it so embedded in our institutions that even like the education we receive at this point kind of represents that or do you think that there's a way that that can be applied broadly in education moving forward for the new generation? Thank you. >> Ivan Krastev: Thank you very much. We're basically back from Turkey to Britain, the imperial arc this time the other way, and we try to be very concise. On your question about languages, which is critically important, Carl Schmidt [assumed spelling] was somebody that Germans normally are not going to quote, he used to say that Victoria's powers tends to [inaudible] curiosity. Part of the problem is the history story is that you're not very much interested in the world because they're coming to you, one day they're going to be like you, you know what they're going to be, why are you interested who they are? And from this point it was very different than the kind of knowledge dynamics during the cold war. If you see the affect of the Sputnik on the way basically the Americans get the feeling that they don't know the other side, everybody was learning languages, you have the feeling that there is something very important that you should learn. Now you to go your countries and what you're seeing basically is what they don't have. You come to Bulgaria and they said, they don't have [inaudible] they don't have this, they don't have that. In a certain way you're starting basically to understand countries on the base of how different they are from what they're going to be sometime. And this is not good from the knowledge base, and I very much agree with you, it's not simply that you should learn the language but basically it means that you should very much try to understand how society functions and not how dysfunctional they are from your point of view, and this is a different story. Of course, knowing the English language also creates on the outside world the talk of the false image that you understand the United States, and particularly it could be a very cynical image. There is a well-known quote when Mr. Shroyko [assumed spelling] was promoted to become the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation he had a talk with President Putin and Putin told him, listen, you're now going to do the international relations, you're going to deal with the Americans, you don't need to do too much, just watch the house of cards. And this is part of the story that, okay, house of cards probably is telling you something about the United States, but if you're going to make all your policies towards the United States just based on watching the house of cards this also can turn to be not the greatest idea, but I'll go to Solly. >> Solly Roselle: You want to find out Turkey's policy in Syria and its closeness to Russia, well, Turkey made a number of miscalculations and I think it's a tribute to its geopolitical position that despite those errors it is still as they call at the table. The major error Turkey committed, apart from thinking that Assad would go easily, was to attack a Russian plane thinking that this might lead to a mobilization of NATO on its side in order to actually pursue its policies in Syria. It didn't work, in fact, in return the Russians kind of punished Turkey, and in the meantime the United States, Turkey's ally, has gotten even more intimate with Turkey's sworn enemies, that is the PKK's Syrian branch, PYD. That led Turkey to reconsider its relations with Russia and it also led the Russians to reconsider their relations with Turkey, which actually was becoming a bit desperate. And they allowed Turkey to do a number of things that Turkey could not without Russian permission could do in Syria. So for the moment Turkey is using America's indecisiveness and kind of weakness and the Russian's immense desire to divorce Turkey from NATO, playing both sides. How long that can go on I really do not know, but so far Turkey was able I think with both a blink from the United States and with the help of the Russians to make sure that the PYD could not control all of its southern border. And that to a certain extent resolves Turkey's security problem. And from this point onwards what will happen between Turkey and Russia and between Turkey and the United States will be determined in my judgment by also what happens between Russia and the United States for the conclusion of the Syrian debacle. My sense is that peace is not to come very soon and if that is the case Turkey will continue to be administering the areas that its military operations actually made it possible for it to occupy. >> Ivan Krastev: Thomas? >> Thomas Bagger: Yes, I'll try to make two points. The first one to the laziness charge and the languages question. I think this sort of laziness, it relates a bit to what Ivan said. We were very good with grand generalizations and again to the argument I tried to make earlier, if you believe that everyone else becomes like you you don't have to study their peculiar circumstances, right? Why they think what they think, how they got there, and how they will, how they look at their own future. So just one example in the cold war understanding Moscow and the Kremlin was existential for Germany and there was quite a bit of intellectual and academic effort and resources put into that. After 1989 we dissolved most of these institutions, it was no longer interesting. They would modernize and eventually, you know, they would become like us and we could speak English with them about how long it would take them to get there. Now two years ago we recreated an Institute for Eastern European and International Studies because we realized this is not going to happen. There was a laziness certainly in the assumption that we had or in our expectation, and we need to understand the debates, the intellectual concepts in places, not just like Russia but also in central Asia, in eastern Europe sort of east of the European Union. So in that sense I would go along with you. ^M01:20:51 In a different way I don't think the charge is entirely fair because it is also true that international relations today compared to the days when they conceptualized the Brattenwood's [assumed spelling] institutions is infinitely more complex, more states, more interdependence, more interaction, more stakeholders, not states only but others as well. Just take the climate negotiations as one example. So there's an infinite necessity to invest time and energy to sort of produce the solutions or the way forward for problems that are no longer, that you can't solve on a national or even the level of 20 states let's say. So I would argue that sort of the task ahead of people who try to do this today it's a tall order and it's not that they just sit back, neither in Brussels nor elsewhere, but maybe that's sort of my own defensive nature because I'm part of a government organization. >> Ivan Krastev: You're lazy. >> Thomas Bagger: And I hate to be called lazy, yes. The other point is to the immigration, nationalism question, but it also goes to sort of the global capitalism question. You know, clearly Germany is also experiencing currently a repolarization of the political landscape. For decades the pendulum swung a different direction in Germany and in the United States. The story I told earlier, when I was studying here in 1989, 1990, this was a very centrist political discourse, very civil in the US. It was much more polarized around the division of my country in Germany. After unification we became, we had a very centrist political system able to integrate the extremes. That's why we had grand coalitions in Germany where essentially the former left and former right party, the Christian democrats and social democrats, they could easily form a coalition because they all subscribed to this general idea that you basically just need the best technocratic solution, but there were no big ideological fights to fight anymore. Whereas here in the US the development went exactly the other way. So now we see a repolarization of the German political landscape and it has a lot to do with the immigration question, with the identity question. And I would say that because both big parties are suffering and leading voters to the polls of the debate. But these polls of the debate that we see are no longer in the sort of the classic left, right spectrum of politics, doesn't help you to understand really anymore. It's far more, it's sort of like a different axis that defines open versus closed. And if you think about identity do you think of something that you need to protect, that you need to close off against foreigners or others, those who are not part of it, whether that's an ethnic definition or a culturalist definition, people who cannot possibly become part of it? Or do you look at identity more as a resource and says, look, this is what Germany has to offer, for everyone who is able to read not just Goethe or Schiller, but listen to German music, read German intellectuals? It's actually an open resource that can help you to relate better to your own culture, to your own thinking about the world, and you have a much more open perspective. And that's what I see developing, that that's the spectrum along which political forces are aligning themselves, and clearly also in Germany you have those that basically want to tell sort of the story of a victim and we need to protect ourselves from attacks from outside or from others and from immigration and so forth. And that is what gets me to the global capitalism question, as well, and I think, Solly, you mentioned it in your first statement. That sort of our blindness to the dialectics of globalization, to the inequities, to the incredible loss of credibility of the Western model or the Western order that came with the financial crisis of 2008. I mean many of these other countries, they looked at the West not necessarily with a lot of sympathy, but with this idea that they're richer than we are, they also may be freer than we are, they're more efficient than we are, but certainly they know what they're doing. And if not in Iraq with the Iraq war or in the Middle East at least economically financially they knew what they're doing. And it turns out we didn't, and this is not just at a state level, but lots of economic actors who were actually gaming a system that they didn't understand, that they created but they couldn't control and didn't understand, with massive repercussions for lots of other people who tried to make a living every day with their job. I think we still underestimate how much this contributed, the 2008 crisis, in the eyes of the Chinese and the Russians and others to say that's not the future, they don't represent the future, they don't even know what they're doing. And so I think this question of what is the role of the state in regulating the affects of globalization, what do future trade agreements have to look like, how do we regulate technology and technological disruptions so that it doesn't destroy the social fabric and doesn't only profit a few globalized companies? All of these questions are back on the agenda, and I think there's a pretty broad consensus now, but when you look back clearly many people were sort of oblivious to the challenges that globalization was actually piling up in front of us until sort of we, until we hit the wall with it. So in that sense I think these two are related because if you want to keep sort of the good parts of openness as a society, but also as an economy or as a political system, because I think we do need cooperation, not just for prosperity but also for problem solving on the international stage, but then you have to make a case that you can do that also in a just way, in a way that satisfy the largest number. And otherwise those who will argue for a closed system and you only look after yourself and basically everyone is out there just to get the better of you, then that will win the day. And I think part of the, you always have this group in each and every society, Germany but also every other country, I think the stunning realization in 2016 in Britain or in the US was that that can actually be enough to take over and govern a country. >> Ivan Krastev: Rosa? >> Rosa Brooks: Yes, let me start with the question of whether the US can go back to normal? What is normal? I don't think we can for two reasons. One being that you can't step into the same river twice, it's a different river and you're a different person reason, but also I think that the normal was as we've been saying so full of contradictions that we weren't acknowledging it was an unsustainable state of affairs. And I see Trump in many ways less as a cause than as a symptom or maybe it's Trump is the equivalent of pouring gasoline on a fire, but that fire was already smoldering, it's just that under Trump it's now a full-fledged conflagration. But I think even without, I think all of the forces that brought us to the moment that we're in were there before the election of 2016 in the United States. We saw them in Europe, we saw them in other parts of the world. And I suppose this connects to the laziness point in that I share Solly's eyerolling over the sudden nostalgia and insistence that we must shore-up and preserve the international liberal order. It's like the old quip about the holy Roman Empire being neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire, that the international liberal order it turns out was neither entirely international. There were entire states and peoples that were left entirely out of it. Nor was it particularly liberal, nor was it very orderly as it happens. And if we are too lazy or unimaginative or blinded to acknowledge that, you know, that's the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous, they say the first step is acknowledging you have a problem. You know, if we can't even go that first step and acknowledge to ourselves that the international liberal order was never looked like Cary Grant, to switch to Ivan's metaphor, then I don't know how we go about resolving any of those internal contradictions. And I was reminded when you were talking of my favorite, of the role that, as you say, the United States played a significant role in undermining, in making sure that that order would not be fully international, liberal or orderly through actions such as the Iraq war. I was reminded of one of my favorite Putin quotes, which I think I quoted to my friends in the hypocrisy study group on previous occasions. Vladimir Putin always quotable when, and this was not over the Iraq war, but when Kosovo declared independence unilaterally and, of course, the United States along with most of the EU states had said, no, no, no, Russia, don't worry, we are not going to support Kosovo independence from Serbia, absolutely not, we support Serbian sovereignty, et cetera. And then when Kosovo unilaterally declared independence and the EU and the United States immediately said, okay, we recognize Kosovo independence, Vladimir Putin said something, this is not a direct quote but it was more or less along these lines, he said you Americans, you Europeans, those of you recognizing Kosovo's independence, you do not understand, you are overturning 200 years of international norms about sovereignty and you do not understand this is a two-sided stick and the other end will come back and hit you in the face. And, of course, a few years later in Crimea that stick did come back and hit us in the face, and he wasn't wrong to level that critique. It does, one of the things that depresses me most is I do think that in this country, we've been talking about this with our friend and colleague, Steve Walt, one thing that depresses me most is the I think inability of the sort of mainstream foreign policy elites and also Democratic Party elites to grapple with any of those contradictions. And it pains me to say that I still see these statements coming out of my favorite Washington liberal think tanks and organizations where you'll get this sort of unblushing contradictions where you'll sort of simultaneously say we recognize that endless war is not good for our nation and so we will work to end these wars, we recognize that terrorism is a scourge to the whole world and so we will pursue terrorists to the end of the earth. And you think wait a second, hold on, you know, how are you going to do both of those things because if you think both of those, that's not going to work. And yet I think that we are still lazy or still blinded, there is a fantasy that there is a sustainable normal that we can simply revert to and just edit out this whole business of Trump and this whole nationalism and populism business and it really isn't. The final question I think and I'm sure I'm missing several, but about young people and how do we educate young people to not be quite as hypocritical and not be quite as lazy? I almost worry, and I have two teenaged children and I watch them, that they are so deeply aware of American hypocrisy that I worry it becomes paralyzing. You know, that they do not think of the United States as a force for global good, they think of the US as a force for global disruption and inequality, and of course they're right to think that, but I do worry a little bit that that leads to a sort of sense of paralysis. It's not laziness, it's depression, it's a sense of, oh, well, we're out of big ideas, communism didn't work, the great American experiment didn't work, the international liberal order wasn't so liberal or orderly, you know, we're out of ideas. And I don't quite know how to urge them and urge others in their generation, urge the students I teach to say don't give up, don't be lazy, but don't stop being creative and imaginative or then we really are done. And if there is a bright side to Donald Trump and the various other Trump-like conflagrations that we're seeing around the globe today, you know, it's the old saying what does not kill us makes us strong. If this doesn't completely blow things up I think it does create some potential space for people to break out of those old left, right dichotomies because they have proven inadequate. And I hope, I love to see young people viewing this more as a clarion call to say, all right, those old ideas did not work, what's the next set of big ideas, and that's going to be your job to figure them out. >> Robert Cooper: I think I would rather go for little ideas actually. I think the big ideas are the ones that get us into trouble. But I think that the world can be made better, but I think that it's mostly made better bit by bit. And I think that the US played an absolutely fantastic, stunning, indispensable role in that and one ought to remember that. You can see it, if you have to and now there are lots of, and when the US makes mistakes it makes gigantic mistakes. My personal view has always been that the first duty of Europe is to stop the US from doing really stupid things, and that's why actually it would be better if the UK was in the EU because, but still I would -- if you're European you can't forget how the US handled post-war Europe, it's actually a miracle. So maybe I can just answer one or two of the other? >> Solly Roselle: I wanted to add one sentence. You did mention getting into EU I think at 90 some. And I think what he says that is important for the next thing, we're still in the era of Ronald Reagan, that is government is not the solution, government is the problem. And what Paul Walker was saying was we have to make public service valuable again. That is in my view part of the answer. I just wanted to add that. >> Ivan Krastev: Robert, just I come back because I have it stuck in my head, in 19 -- I'm not very good at the dates, it's in 1943 or something like that. >> 20th Century. >> Ivan Krastev: 20th Century. >> Anyway, I wasn't yet, but still in 1943 the German who was in charge of running Denmark as an occupied territory in World War II received an instruction to solve the Jewish question. He almost certainly knew that the third secretary in the German Embassy, George Dukfitz [assumed spelling], was going to inform the community leaders in Denmark what was coming. And so when the Gestapo arrived to arrest the Jews they found only 200. Well, that was 200 too many, but the rest escaped. And the reason why, it's not absolutely clear, and I forget his name, whether the man who was in charge of Denmark at the time told Dukfitz to do this but I'm pretty sure that he guessed what was happening. And the reason why was because over the horizon they could see the US coming. And the guess that you made at the point that this order went out was you guessed that the US, that the world was probably going to be a liberal world. And, well, he got a lot of debits on his balance sheet and he wanted to try and finish with one credit. And I think that it was even the looming presence of the US at that stage in the war was a good influence, and there's much, much more behind that. So that's just intervention because it happened to be in my head. But I want just to come back to one or two of the questions. First of all, the mention of the IMF, I think the IMF is an interesting case because the IMF was set-up to do, to manage a system which is completely different from the one that we have at the moment. ^M01:39:44 And you thought that this system was being destroyed with the Nixon chalk, as they called it in Japan. Actually it's not a bad thing that we have a serious international institution that has some responsibility, rather vague, for the international financial system. It's not exactly a lender of last resort, that's Wall Street is the lender of last resort, but the ability to cooperate in financial crises and the ability of the IMF to steady national crises and to deal, to help Wall Street basically at the moment deal with real international crises. I think that that's actually indispensable for the order at the moment. So it wasn't what they planned at Brettenwoods, but it's I think still a very, very valuable institution. It makes mistakes like others do, but learns like others do. It's a good thing about institutions, unlike men, is that they sometimes learn. Second, a remark on languages. The British Ambassador in Tehran, way back when the Shah was there, said that when a British Minister came to call on the Shah and the Shah spoke English, which he did perfectly, it made his blood run cold because the British Minister would think he was dealing with an English gentleman, whereas, he was actually dealing with somebody who was very complicated and very different from the way in which he seemed when he spoke English. Consequently, there's a lot to be said for, actually there's a lot to be said for interpreters, at least you know then that you're dealing with a foreign culture and foreigners are not necessarily exactly the same as you. So it's a pity that American Presidents don't speak however many languages that are left, but it's several thousand. But, well, they have diplomats and other people who can help them. But one should never forget that it's not just the language, even if the language is the same the ways of thinking and the history and the words, they're all different. And then I come back to the question that was kind of in away for me, which is a complicated one. Theresa May, wow. The demonstration I was at last weekend there was somebody carrying a sign saying, hey, hey, Theresa May, when will you let us have our say? This recalls the last demonstration I went on which was against the Vietnam war, in between I'd missed the demonstrations, but. >> Ivan Krastev: Being in office. >> Robert Cooper: Yes, Theresa May was never planned to be Prime Minister and she was not intended by God to be Prime Minister, but things sometimes turn out that way. And when she became Prime Minister she knew that she'd voted for the other side, but the first thing she thought she'd better do is to persuade the BREXITers that she was one of them. So she made some fire breathing speeches about how awful the European Union was and said we were going to leave absolutely everything that we could possibly leave. Actually she didn't really know very much about the European Union at that point. Nobody does, it's only when you leave it that you begin to understand it. >> Ivan Krastev: Like divorce, yes. >> Robert Cooper: Exactly, exactly. She's been on this voyage of discovery. Everybody should, they say no good marriage is complete without one. So everybody ought to try and do a mock divorce early on in their marriage and then they would realize what they were going to lose. And she knew about one specific sector quite well and she operated it quite efficiently, it's a very narrow sector concerned with things like European arrest warrant and very useful instruments but a very narrow sector. And she's been discovering all kinds of things she didn't know before, like about how a supply chain works and the problems of the Irish border, all of these things that she didn't know. And I didn't know, too, even though I worked 10 years. The other thing that she's learning is she's learning how extraordinarily difficult it is, first of all, it's extraordinarily difficult to negotiate with somebody if you don't know what you want. And her opening slogan of no deal is better than a bad deal, she didn't know what she meant by a bad deal and she certainly didn't know what, quotes, no deal was going to mean. So this was completely vacuous and you can't govern just by slogans. And now as the more she discovers, the more she discovers what is disaster leaving the European Union, potentially is for the UK, and the more she's trying to find ways around it. But she's also discovering that negotiating with the European Union is one definition of hell, and negotiating with the European Union on absolutely everything and all things that are vital to your country is about as bad as you can get in terms of hell. It's the seventh circle, or I don't know which way the circles go, anyway it's the hottest part. And so it would have been better if the UK hadn't started the process without knowing what it wanted and how it was going to get there. But the point about the European Union is it creates fantastic solidarity among the member states because, as I think someone said earlier, I think it was probably Thomas, you're always going to need somebody else's help the next day, you can never afford to break with everybody. So if somebody has got a problem that matters to them then you really take it into account, you mold your policy around it. The Irish care very, very deeply about the Irish border for very good reason. The European Union will not budge from supporting Ireland because it's a member, it's one of them. So for the first time in history we have Dublin, which used to be kicked around by London because it was just a rather difficult colony, we have Dublin dictating the terms to London. The European Union is anybody who wants anything now, and the Spanish were talking about whether they might get Gibraltar back, I'm not sure how we fix that, but anybody in the European Union who wants something from Britain is now in position to demand it. So this is the most awful negotiation that you can imagine, and the most sensible thing to do would be to give up the whole idea. So I think that's probably a good place to stop. >> Thomas Bagger: Can I have a -- just because Robert was kind enough to bring up the case of Dukfitz who saved the lives of 7,000 Danish Jews 75 years ago and it brought me back to your question about education. The way I tell this story of the last 30 years to me and my own sort of illusions, intellectual illusions about grand convergence and the end of history is also to realize that in reality the future is open and that we should be aware of the grand generalization. So I'm very much with you on sort of little steps to make the world better, but I like the Dukfitz' case because I don't think he did it because he was concerned about a world dominated by America in the future. I think he did it because he knew it was wrong if it went ahead, he knew what was coming and he decided that he was in a position, he knew the right people to actually open a door for these 7,000 people to escape to Sweden across the narrow waterway between Denmark and Sweden. And what that story really tells in the midst of very dark times is individuals matter, people matter, they can change the world. And I think that would be the fallacy from sort of saying farewell to the grand generalization of 1989, that the future is sort of predetermined, only to turn around and say, well, we were too optimistic, now the world belongs to the strong man or to the authoritarian system. None of that is predetermined either, so it actually does matter what you're interested in, which position you're in, and what you do with the space that is accorded to you. And I think that's actually quite an optimistic outcome for me. So my, I would say be curious and aspire to something. >> Robert Cooper: And you never know when you may get the chance to make some decisive decision. >> Thomas Bagger: We all don't know, yes, and that may be a test but it also may be a way to prove yourself and actually make the world better. >> Ivan Krastev: History does not end, but the panels do. And I want very much to thank you, and I really do believe that people matter, even people on the panel matter. So thank them. Thank you very much and thanks to The Kluge Center. ^E01:49:47