So, hi, Tim. You must be a happy person
in these days because history is basically
happening every day. How do you work as
a historian in that sense? How can history help us
to go into a better future? First of all, Boris,
it’s really good to see you. And I’m really glad to have
a chance to talk to you. That’s a big question about history
and I’m really happy to have it, because it’s such a nice question,
such a valorising question. I should say from the point of view
of a practicing historian, that’s not how life feels. Life doesn’t really feel like
people are paying a lot of attention to the humanities or people are
paying a lot of attention to historians. On the contrary. I think, one of the ironies
of this moment, the early 21st century, is that history is so palpably
necessary to explain what’s going on. And yet at the same time,
it’s generally dismissed. And even if you are… You know,
as I’m fortunate enough to be a historian who is employed,
who has some kind of status, who has some kind of voice,
you’re constantly dealing with the refrain of “Well, wait.
Can you really make a comparison?” or “Can you really make that analogy?”
or whatever might be. And all of those reflexes are basically
ways that people have of not thinking about the past, of claiming that
the present moment is exceptional, that nothing like it
has ever happened before. And the problem with that kind of thinking
is that it then enables everything. You know, it disempowers everyone. Because if everything
is always new and different, that just means that whoever
happens to have the power now can do what they want
without any argument, without any reason,
without anyone taking time to think. And so, to answer your question
in the most basic way, what historians do is they say:
No, this is not entirely new. Nothing is entirely new. Everything has some resemblance
to something else. And everything comes out
of something else. And if we take a deep breath and think
about some of the plausible resemblances and take a deep breath
and think about some of the continuities, then we see what we don’t see,
to answer your question. Then, this present moment
which was presented to us as shocking and new
and demanding an immediate response, an immediate response of the person
who has the power, then the moment starts to look different. And from that, when it starts
to look different, then you start to get traction and then
you can start to act. So that’s how history can help. But how does this play into a kind of
a collective discourse in a democracy that people have a chance to learn? How do we make sure,
that for the functioning of a democracy in our times, this knowledge is part
of the public debate? I think this in a way is the revelation
of the 21st century, that you have to make a value commitment to factuality.
Right? I mean in the late 20th century,
people who considered themselves to be supporters of democracy
or supporters of human rights, would very often take the position: Well, we don’t have to be sure
about what the truth is. There really isn’t any truth. In fact, part of our
very individual subjectivity, the thing we’re protecting, is that we all
have a different perception of the world. So, who is to say what truth is? But it turns out that that position
is actually fundamentally disempowering because if there is no truth to strive for… You know, you have your views
and I have my views, and if everybody has their own views,
all that’s left at the end of the day is money and power, is the ability to make
a spectacle to convince people very quickly and to move on through the rubble
to the next thing that you want to do. So, in order to empower people,
you have to say, well, there actually is a real world. And that real world is the place
where you can stand up to other people, where you can stand up to institutions,
you can stand up to governments. You can’t stand up to the government,
you can’t stand up to corporations, you can’t stand up to power in a fake world.
You just can’t do it. It can’t be done. So, there has to be a value commitment,
and then there also has to be an institution. We have to say, look,
factuality doesn’t arrive naturally. And this is a revelation, you know,
of the 21st century, too. We would like to think
that the free market, normal human exchange will make
the facts rise to the top. But it doesn’t.
That just isn’t true. I mean, there’s a long tradition
in liberal thinking which says, “Hey, let’s just have a free exchange,
the truth will always win.” It doesn’t. We have to say,
“Look, if you want truth, you have to create it.
You have to manufacture it.” The important truths are the things
that are happening every day, going back to your first question,
that we don’t see. You know, the pollution or the inequality
or the new pandemic which doesn’t get covered
by the newspapers in America, because there are
no newspapers to cover it. These are the things that you have to
have facts for and those facts have to be produced,
they’re not just there. And that means,
you have to have producers, you have to have local journalists,
people who actually are paid to do this job. And in Russia and in my country,
that job basically disappears and when that job disappears,
what you lose is the facts and then you lose the faith in facts
and then you find yourself in this weird quasi authoritarian situation,
where anything goes. So, I think there has to be
a moral commitment to factuality on the left, on the right, in the centre,
and we have to do what it takes to support institutions,
especially local journalists, which keep producing facts
day after day after day after day. In times where kind of big techs
feed their business case, the dependency of democracy
on these big techs who feed the business case
is kind of the driving force. Getting Trump out of Twitter
was a shocking moment, because it shows the dependency
you have as running a democracy being dependent on the fact that
there are these different channels, which give you the access to the people and
all the other accesses are not there anymore. Where do we go here? Going back to your very first question
about what history is good for: History is good for things like this.
History is good to think about new media. New media are always shocking. The printing press cost Europe
about a third of its population in religious wars before you got
the printing press sorted out into the idea of a book with copyright and verifiability. The radio was used by the Nazis. They saw it as a great opportunity
to get the same message across to every household. And so the same goes for the Internet. We shouldn’t think we’re rational people
and therefore there is this high-tech and we’re going to use it rationally.
Nothing in history suggests that. Everything in history suggests that whenever
there is a new medium that’s powerful, people use it to do crazy things
for a really long time and that’s where we are
with the Internet. I mean, the Internet is like this new drug
which we’ve only had for half an hour and we’re still experimenting with it. So what history says is:
We don’t really have 150 years this time. We can’t go through another… We can’t go through 150 years
of religious wars, we can’t afford that. We have to get our minds around this
in the next few years. And what history also says is that media
end up having regimes around them, they end up having rules, right? And so, all this talk, you know,
the happy talk around the Internet that you can just not regulate it,
that it’s like the laws of the market and freedom and so on,
that’s just not true. Any new medium will eventually
have its own rules and the question is what rules do we want to have. So, with Twitter and Facebook
and Trump and so on… I don’t have any problem
with Twitter and Facebook giving Trump access on Thursday
or giving him access on Wednesday, or not giving him access at all. Because I don’t think there is
a moral question there. The moral question is not that.
The moral question is: Why do so few media
have so much power? Because, the real question is not…
it’s not our access to information, it’s their access to us. You know, the things that we see,
whether we see a Trump tweet or not, depends on what the companies
think they know about us. And that’s what worries me. Is it rather than being the people
who are seeking the truth, we all become the objects
of constant search in ourselves, right? And so, my view is that… The issue is not whether
Trump is on Twitter or not. I mean it’s a relief that he’s not,
of course, but the issue is that these companies have
so much central power over what we end up seeing
or not seeing. We saw what happened on the 6th of January
in the United States, the riot on the Capitol. If we understood that after
the Second World War, there was this kind of alliance of the West
for democracy and human rights, and the European Union coming in
as a player which had its limitations in having this aura of a “force”
fighting for the values… I think lots of this credibility is gone basically.
Do you see it the same way? Or do you still see that
this Western alliance is still there? I don’t see it so darkly
and I’ll tell you why. I mean, first of all,
at a very simple tactical level, I think this is an opportunity
for the European Union and an opportunity
for European capitals, including Vienna. The Americans need you.
The Biden administration needs you. They have a lot of other things
on their minds, and it would be a good time for Europeans to come up with initiatives,
big initiatives, small initiatives, tiny initiatives, which don’t cost anything
but have symbolic value. I mean the kinds of things which went
from the United States to Europe in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Just a little bit of that coming back
in the other direction right now, a tiny bit of that,
would be a good thing. Now, that’s just tactics.
But in terms of history… Look, some of the credibility
the United States had, it didn’t really deserve. And I don’t think it’s particularly
a bad thing for the United States to now have to reconsider
its own history and build forward. And that’s what this is all about. I mean, for me the underlying question
to all this is: What do you do when a certain
kind of empire basically fails? What do you do after that? And that’s what 6th January is all about. I mean, 6th January is all about people
who believe that they have a certain kind of claim of superiority to other people,
which is more important than votes, which is more important than democracy. And they’re going to assert
that claim with violence. And that’s natural.
When you have a frontier empire, when you conquer native populations
and exterminate them, when you have a history of slavery,
you will also naturally have a current in your country which says,
certain kinds of people, because of the colour of their skin,
or because of how they interpret the past, have a right to control. You know, when those men
were standing in the Capitol, in our parliament, saying
“Whose house, our house”, that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying: This belongs to us,
regardless of the voting. It belongs to people like us.
And so you have to face that. I mean, this is why… I mean,
I’m going again to your first questions, which is so important:
This is why history is so important. Because if you don’t have history,
you can’t say: Well, wait a minute, the Confederacy in the United States
really wasn’t such a good thing. Wait a minute, we have a long history
of excluding people from voting. Where does that really come from? Wait a minute, when you say that
there’s voting fraud, aren’t you really saying just
that black people shouldn’t vote? Is that really what you mean? And of course, with some people,
it really is what they mean. They really do want to exclude
other people from voting, they really do want authoritarianism. But without history you simply
can’t have that conversation. Without history it’s just about
how some people feel that they are the real Americans and that
they therefore have endless rights. And the same thing is true
for the European Union. I mean, as you know this is
what I talked about when you were kind enough to invite me
to speak a couple of years ago. That the European Union can only
move into the future if it has a serious look at its own past. I mean, right now it has
an unserious look, which is that “we’re a bunch of nation states,
we learned from the Second World War, now we’re going to move forward”. But that’s not really what happened. I mean, just like the US,
the major European powers were empires. And the European Union is
the answer to that question: What do you do after empire? That’s the same question
the US is facing now. I mean, Joe Biden will never
stand up and say it, of course. It’s too grand and it’s too abstract,
but that’s the question in the US: Can you, after having been a kind
of country which builds a frontier empire and enslaves and destroys,
can you then incorporate, can you then treat everyone
as a citizen? And I think you can. I mean, this is why I don’t see it so darkly. I think that’s possible,
but I only think it’s possible if we… again going back
to your other important question, if we’re serious about facts
and if we’re serious about history and if part of being a citizen
or educating citizens, is to inculcate those values
of historical thinking and factuality. One thing is clear, I think,
and many people also have this opinion saying that the European Union
won’t move until they accept that they are also
something like a hard power. They establish methods and instruments
of being a hard power. The other thing, I think,
is the strange relation between the European Union and Russia,
which also limits the fact that Europe really can be globally
and politically active beyond its borders. How can Europe get its act together,
considering those circumstances which make it rather complex
in order to have this voice or to be this force which could… You know, where the Americans
could have a player they need, as you said, but also somebody
who is able to act at the end of the day? I think the ability to act is really important. And I think you can take relatively
modest steps which would have significant consequences in creating an ability to act. To look at this from the other point of view: If you look at the Americans
in the last couple of years, we’ve had a terrible time
with the Coronavirus. Although, of course,
we don’t know everything, but it looks like we had
a second terrible defeat in another cyber-war with Russia last year. And in both of those cases you could ask, “Well, what did our 700 billion dollars
of defence spending get us?” And in both cases the answer is:
Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. I mean the greatest threats arguably to life
in the 21st century is pandemic and then cyber. We can spend almost, you know,
the better part of a trillion dollars a year and we did nothing to stop them.
Right? And so, just because we have
the biggest military budget doesn’t necessarily mean that
we’re using force in the right way. And so, when I look at the Europeans,
I look at your armed forces, you know, what you see is
a kind of post-imperial legacy, that the French and the British
have armed forces because of the kinds of powers
they used to be. Germany as it were
doesn’t have armed forces because of the kind of power
that it used to be. The question is: What kind of force
would Europe need? And I’m just going to repeat the thing
that I’ve been saying now for 20 years: I think Europe ought to have one division. I think Europe ought to have one division
that you can actually put on the battlefields somewhere,
which is a European division. And just that one division would change
the strategic calculus entirely when it came to places like Ukraine. Because now you’re thrown
back in the position that whenever anything happens,
no matter how small, if it’s military, your immediate response is to say,
“Wow, well, it’s military, therefore let’s transform it into economics
and make it an economic question.” And before you know it,
then you have Germans talking about how there has to be Nord Stream,
and you know, suddenly the aggressor in the war
is being rewarded. So I think it’s actually morally problematic
for Europe not to have that one division because it means that the other side
is always defining, in a way, the moral way that a conflict
gets understood. If somebody else uses military force,
you force back into talking about economics or you force back into
talking about discourse. So I think you should have one division
that can actually fight. And I think you should have
a European military academy, an institution, a small institution, which trains
actual European officers who then have some kind of European esprit de corps,
which maybe is a building block or something later on, maybe not. But an officer academy
and one division and I think you’d be in a different and better place. Part of the European countries
were happy about “Trumpism”, a part of the European countries
look at Putin in some way, drive some semi-authoritarian
regimes at home, as we all know it, and the European Union has also
become a bit incredible, has lost credibility there, too,
because these are all countries of the European Union. It is so hard to explain to
a country in the southern Balkans, “Listen, if you want to become a member,
you have to accept our values.”, when inside the European Union
you have states, which don’t accept those basic values that
the European Union was built on. So, how do you see
this development going on? I think here you have an opportunity
for a discussion between some of the European capitals
and the new American administration. Because the new American administration
in so far as it has a foreign policy concept… Its foreign policy concept is democracy. And in some measure
Hungary, Poland have been taking cover
behind the Trump administration. That’s not the only thing
which has been going on, but in particular the connection
between the Hungarian government and the American government
under Trump was quite intimate, with I think the Trump people
actually doing the learning rather than the teaching in that connection. I think there is a conversation
to be had now between some of the European capitals
and the Americans about this, about how you do democratise. I agree with you. I think it’s a shame
that the European Union only has incentives, democratisation incentives when
you’re trying to join it. But once you’re in it, you can kind of
do whatever you want. And there are some
very intelligent politicians like Mr Orbán, who figured out just how far
you can take this logic. So, I don’t have an easy answer for that,
because, in my view, the politics of the European Union
is more important than the economics. But that’s not how the European Union
is set up now. I think it’s actually an existential question
for the European Union. I think you’re right to be concerned about it
because the European Union has a kind of power around the world
because of the way it’s seen. And that’s true in the United States,
it’s true in Belarus or Ukraine, it’s true in Russia. And you don’t try to have that power,
you just do have that power. It’s just there. But if you have more than…
You know, let’s say you get up to three authoritarian regimes
in the European Union, I think you then lose that power. Even here I’m not without hope. I mean, if we’re talking
about Russia and Belarus, one of the interesting things
about Russia and Belarus is that these are
so obviously domestic movements. The irony is that the Russians
spent years explaining how any kind of democratic opposition
that post-Soviet states face, is the result of American interference. Then they have a President Trump
who agrees with them and says, “Yeah, it was all a plot by us.
People don’t like democracy. We won’t be doing anything now.
I, Trump, actually quite like you, Putin. I think your regime is great.” And precisely at that moment,
you then have these tremendous pro-democracy movements
in Belarus and Russia, which just shows that these things
aren’t all machinations by America or the European Union. I mean, our reputation matters more
than our direct actions, far more. But also something more fundamental,
which is that people actually like democracy. I mean, we’re right to bemoan
developments in the US, we’re right to bemoan
developments in Hungary and Poland, but on the other side of the balance,
there is Slovakia, and there is Belarus and there is Russia. There are places where you can see that
despite the spread of authoritarianism these last 15 years, actually
democracy appeals to people. People want to be represented. And that’s a good reminder because
I feel part of the problem with the European Union
and with the Americans is that we’ve all got a little bit
cynical about democracy. You know, we’ve kind of stopped
believing in ourselves, and so it’s good to have refreshing voices
from beyond who remind us: Actually, this is something
you make sacrifices for. That’s not something you take for granted. One final question, Tim. We’re going through this pandemic now. One thing we experienced is
that the dependency of our pharmaceutical industry
on Chinese products is a disaster. So, what will stay out
of the two years, the second year of the pandemic
experience we’re in? Now you’re doing
the tough thing of asking historians
what’s going to happen. Sorry. So, I will 75% dodge that. I will say this: Pandemics are
hugely important in history. I mean, without the Black Death probably
there’s no Renaissance, for example, and no age of exploration. So it’s hard to say just how
a pandemic is going to affect history, but they clearly affect history.
As opposed to memory. You can say, people don’t remember
the Spanish flu and that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that
it didn’t have historical significance. I mean, all those people who died,
their absence changes history in some way, even though we’re not good
at writing about these things. We’re much better…
It’s a good example: We’re much better writing about war
because war makes a kind of sense to us. Even the first World War
which made no sense, makes more sense to us
than the Spanish flu, and so we write about it,
we remember it. But that doesn’t mean
the Spanish flu doesn’t matter. And I think you’re right that this, too,
will be a kind of a historical point, a turning point. I think with respect to the EU
and the US, it has significance. I think, the EU and the US
have both learned in different ways that we were too dependent
on other countries and it may be an opportunity for the EU and the US
to ask, well, maybe this could be a sphere where we could
cooperate more and be a little bit less dependent
on China than we were. I’m being optimistic,
but that’s a chance. I think more broadly one of the things
that we’ve learned… I hope we’ve learned out of this disaster
is how health and freedom are connected. So, in my country at least like,
health is all about the left and freedom is all about the right. But whether you’re on the right
or you don’t like masks and you want to do whatever you want,
or whether you’re on the left and you believe in the science
and you like the masks or whatever, in both cases you cannot but notice that
when you’re not healthy, you’re not free. And when there’s a pandemic,
the country is less free than it was before. So, I will write a book about this,
but this is one thing I would like to see, that we realise that health
isn’t just like a compartment, it’s not some technical problem to be solved,
it’s also about living a life where we get to express
ourselves as people. And that’s always true,
it’s not just in pandemic times. And I think also this has taught us
something about the digital world, which is basically how limited it is. How limited it is, that we don’t… I mean, basically what the pandemic did
was that it suddenly pushed us forward like 50 years into the future… Into one future, let’s say, where all we do
is what you and I are doing now. All we do is Zoom. We don’t see other people,
we’re locked into a kind of nuclear family. And how and when we can schedule
and achieve things, depends upon the machines.
And nobody likes it. Or I shouldn’t say nobody,
some people like it, but generally, we don’t like it. And I think that’s a lesson. You know, it’s a moment to stop
and reflect and say: Okay, the tools are good for some things. But we shouldn’t be letting the tools
decide for us what’s actually possible for us as human beings. And so I think that may turn out
to have been a useful lesson as well. I mean, I can remember like talking
to some acquaintances at the top of some of these big tech firms a year ago,
at the beginning of the epidemic, and they were happy,
because they were like, “Yeah, now everyone’s going to see
how great digital school is going to be.” But I mean, it’s not a secret,
despite the best efforts of really good people, digital school is not great.
Human school is great. There are a lot of things… You know, the human thing
is what’s actually great. And this may have been
a reminder of that, as well. So, there’s my very general answer. Tim, thank you for joining this Call. Thanks a lot. Okay, take care.
