Professor Timothy Snyder lecture — "What past catastrophe teaches us about future possibility"

I'm constantly it's a museum director at the house of European history in Brussels your host for this evening I have the great pleasure of introducing professor Snyder and to moderate a discussion after his lecture to our listeners whom I warmly welcome you are invited to write your comments and questions into the YouTube chat we will take a selection for the Q&A after the lecture and professor Snyder has around an hour so we will take up until 7:00 to answer all the questions that we can get to as we are museum discussing history from European transnational perspective inviting professor Snyder to our lecture series was a must and we are very honored that he has accepted Timothy Snyder knows Europe inside and out from the inside for having studied its history and notably the history of Central and Eastern Europe for decades and for having lived in Europe for 10 years now holding a permanent fellowship at the Institute of human sciences in Vienna from the outside as a US citizen and Richard Seeley Levi on professor of history at Yale University whose books have been translated into 40 languages and won several awards professor Snyder's numerous books and articles have been focused on those trans national historical phenomena that are also presented in our Museum as part of a shared European history for example the devastation created by the German Nazi and Soviet powers and central Eastern European blood lands the Holocaust nationalism and authoritarianism and last but not least the history of European integration professor Snyder is an advocate of a shared connected transnational history he has expressed regret that in the 21st century we mainly write national histories and reinforced his perspective through national remembrance in his view there is only one history everything is connected within this framework history allows for juxtaposing different perspective it allows for relativism it allows for thought in his words I'm quoting history does not repeat but it instructs knowing history means to know what is possible imagining the unimaginable and preparing for the future however one might imagine that living through a health crisis such as the one we are experiencing changes perceptions and professor Schneider is going to speak about this in his new book as the crisis confirmed or rather changed the situation regarding the big questions you are working on have we moved further down the road to and freedom where the nation states and the reinforced borders strengthened or weakened through the crisis what is the future of the European Union professor Snyder you are holding a mirror to Europeans by pointing out the Serbian and Greek origins of a certain idea of nation-states you correct some Western European narratives by stating that the European communities were not built on nation-states but on declining empires you confront us with our Imperial and colonial past and with its dire impact on those who have been ruled and Exploited by Europeans by claiming that the most that most supposedly glorious national pasts are nothing more than a myth meaning we must nostalgically remember something which did not exist you question the dreams of national autonomy so widespread in elections and political decision-making today last year on Union Platz in Vienna you said that Europeans based on the history bear a particular responsibility for the 21st century you refer to Schuman's idea of a living Europe a Europe that creates you said that we Europeans were a hope for those outside to look into this mirror you are holding and to assume the responsibility of our own reflection we need courage I am confident that by the end of this evening we will be in a stronger position to question who we are and where we are going what makes me hopeful is that the title of your lecture is not a cannula deluge but after the deluge knew professor Snyder over to you thank you very much I'd like to thank you doubly or triply for that very kind and very appropriate introduction first of all I want to thank you for the invitation I would like to thank the House of European history for the invitation we had initially planned that I would come to Brussels once more and speak I regret that I can't do it but I'm very grateful that we can be together in this particular way secondly I'd like to thank you for reminding me of the general course of what my arguments have been the introduction is very much uh proposed because I would like to I would like to address precisely these questions I'd like to think about what the larger course of European and American history means in light of the covin pandemic I'd like to ask about the historical alternatives of empire nation-state and integration in light of what we've learned about ourselves about Europeans about Americans in the last few months and thirdly and finally I want to thank you for bringing the introduction to the present because today is a day and this is where I'd like to start my own thoughts today is a day which is a very unusual one for me as an American it's a very unusual one for the United States of America Glen Sansa was kind enough to mention that I've lived for about ten years in Europe that's probably about right maybe a little bit more at this point but ever since I've been an adult indeed my entire conscious life it's always been true that I could simply buy a ticket get on an airplane and fly to Europe if I wanted to stay longer of course I'd have to get this permit or that visa but my entire life beginning with when I was a visitor to what was still the Soviet Union beginning with the time that I to Britain to be a student and then to France to be a student that for that entire time Americans were always in a very privileged position when it came to travel in Western Europe at least I could simply appear and that was all I needed to do today is the first of July 2020 and as of today that is no longer true as of today Americans will have a great deal of difficulty if they try to simply get on a plane and fly to Western Europe or Central Europe or Eastern Europe or anywhere in the European Union and of course it's doubly ironic or perhaps fitting for us because this is also the week which leads to our main national holiday which is the 4th of July Independence Day so what I'm going to be thinking about in the next half an hour or 40 minutes or so along with you and then in the questions and answers what I'm going to be thinking about is this relationship between independence that thing which we imagine that we have and our common Imperial history because the European and American imperialist tree is very similar overlapping and finally the future of integration now I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining about the the travel ban the the thing which is significant I believe about the travel ban of Europe of Americans to the European Union is that it's entirely justified that's what's significant about it if I believe that we're it were a matter of politics or a matter of appealing to European populism or something like this that would be a different question but the hard fact is that it's entirely justified that Americans are being banned from the European Union and this gives us something deeper I think to ponder what is it about the United States today that makes it legitimate possible and true that I'm Americans can no longer freely travel to the European Union how exactly has it come to pass that 120,000 Americans are dead how has it come to pass that such a huge percentage of the worldwide cases of Kovach are precisely in the United States how has it come to pass that the county where I live or the city where I live has has more fatalities from kovat than whole European countries how how did that happen and how and this is where I'd like to go how is that related to this question of nation-state and empire and here I think there's actually a very close relationship let's let's stay with the United States for it for just a moment and see if I can try to make it clear as you know and as was kindly made clear in the introduction I think the most significant question in European history and for that matter American history is the question what happens after Empire if that's the most important historical question then one of the most important normative questions or political questions is what should you do after Empire that is in the moment when Empire is no longer tenable in the moment where as a matter of simple fact empires no longer possible what should you do what do you in fact do now as as was as was kindly presented the introduction I've generally applied this logic to the European Union and I will again before we're done but I want to apply it for a moment to United States because of course we are also a post imperial unit and Americans particularly Trump administration have been trying to answer the question what to do after Empire in a very particular way so of course the Trump administration can be characterized in a number of different ways one can look at the Trump administration I think very legitimately and say this is a regime of by and for oligarchs one can look at the Trump administration and say this is a very unusual case of a kind of digital occupation where the fact that we carry out American elections in American political campaigns with basically unregulated flows of disinformation and money led us to this very particular spot one could also characterize the Trump administration as I've done in other settings as not even fascism that is a set of leaders who use fascists terms and fascist techniques but who hold themselves back from some of the actions especially wars abroad that characterize fascism another way to think of the Trump administration and this has been on display especially in the last few weeks is as a kind of monopoly on subjectivity where the president sees it as his task to be the only person in the world who has feelings that count he sees it as his task to define every single thing that matters in the world is being simply about him the Trump administration can be characterized in all of those ways it can be characterized in others but what I'd like to do is stay close to the ground and take one of its own major things seriously and that theme is precisely the return to the nation-state mr. Trump in 2015 or 2016 ran on a platform of returning the United States to a moment of national greatness by which was meant precisely a mythical moment in the past a mythical moment when America was great the mythical moment in which there were only white people and Christians that was very attractive that kind of rhetoric works in United States as it works in other countries and in the United States as in other countries it is of course a mythical reference iíve talked about this with respect to Europeans before let me very briefly talk about it with respect to United States there is no moment in American history when we were a nation-state that simply has never happened from the very beginning of our history there were at least two classes of people the the slaves and the people who could own slaves enslaved people and people who could not be enslaved the events in United States now the marches the protests after the murder of George Floyd remind us of this basic bifurcation in our history from the beginning Hannah Nicole Smith and her work in the New York Times has done a very good job of bringing to public consciousness this fact that if you have a bifurcated history than what you're not what you can't call yourself is a nation or a nation-state secondly the whole history the United States like the history of much of Europe until very recently is a history of imperial expansion that's what the United States was it was a frontier Empire which begins on the east coast makes its way across the Midwest leaps to California fills in the middle eventually adds Hawaii and Alaska in other words we are expanding that is our reality that was our story of ourselves we are expanding into the middle of the night of the 20th century that's not a nation-state a frontier Empire is not a nation-state a power that is subordinating and exterminating native peoples is not a nation-state it's it's something else and then at the very moment when that phase over history comes to an end at the very moment when Alaska and Hawaii becomes States at the very moment when the frontier the American frontier is closed the United States enters the world as a superpower it enters the world after the Second World War as one of the two great powers and of course in that sense it's not a nation-state either because a nation-state is not something which defines its identity in terms of the way that it engages the world a nation-state is not a place whose ideology depends precisely on defending against what's regarded as a universal threat a nation-state is is not a place that defines its own history as being normative for everyone else so there are specificities to American myths and of course I can only briefly touch on them here but what I'm trying to make is the general point that the Trump administration's idea of making America great again the idea that we could return backwards in time that we could withdraw in space and find ourselves in some nation state which we had previously abandoned that this was logically impossible from the very beginning that it contained tensions which simply could not be resolved and have not been resolved now when I say all this about America you won't forget I'm also saying about others if you look at other large other large countries who are facing a huge problem with the pandemic Russia or Brazil the idea of a return to an innocent nation-state is also very I think by no coincidence at all also very popular among among those leadership so the claim that I want to make is that this idea of a return to a nation-state and the rhetoric that followed from that idea and the policies that followed from that idea have contributed to making the pandemic what it is in the United States in other words I'm saying that the very idea of returning to a nation-state has powerful consequences it has consequences in people's lives and has consequences in people's in people's deaths I'm what I want to try to establish here is that the pandemic in the United States far from being a sign just of American backwardness and even far from being simply a sign of the personal flaws of mr. Trump is a predictable outcome of this attempt to return to nations statehood in other words the real fact that more than a hundred thousand my fellow citizens have senselessly died the real fact that we are still having in the range of 40,000 new infections every day these these real facts are consequences of the embrace of a certain kind of little fiction the political fiction of the return to greatness as a nation-state let me try to give you one or two examples of how I think this works out in practice what I'm trying to show is that as the gears turn in this move towards trying to become a nation-state there are consequences which go beyond ideology which which go into the epidemiological which go into the physical which ends people's lives unnecessarily so one example of how this works is the problem that the United States has had in the last several months with the truth as you probably know essentially everything which has come out of the White House about the kovat pandemic has been untrue often colorfully untrue but there's a there's a major theme or a set of themes that one can follow from January of 2020 to the beginning the first idea is that the virus is itself not significant the second idea is that it's significant but it's not happening here the third idea is that it's not happening here because we're special we're innocent and the third idea in the fourth idea and this is profoundly important and I think beyond United States probably almost impossible to believe the fourth idea is that it's better not to test because if we test that might violate our own feelings about what might be happening as you may or may not know a few days ago in a rally in Tulsa Oklahoma the president United States said is explicitly he said I'm ordering the test be slowed down because in effect we don't want to know what's happening it's better not to know what I'd like to suggest is that this is a way of thinking which has something to do with this post-imperial attempt to return to being a nation state when you move from Empire to nation state or when you try to you naturally say that you're innocent you whenever you whenever you retract from Empire the things that might have happened during the Imperial period of your history or of course not your fault in fact you were always innocent and the return the idea of the nation-state is a way to forget all the things that you might have done on the way to becoming a great power so paradoxically the very fact that Imperial history is complicated and messy and full of episodes about which one might feel guilty in the American case that means the genocide of the native inhabitants of our continent it means slavery as well as the number of other things abroad it the very fact of trying to revert to a nation-state means an insistence that the nation is innocent that we are withdrawing back into our stronghold which is morally utterly defensible and pregnant and so what this has meant in the discussion of coving is that we not only deny the truth but Americans were taught by their leaders not just by mr. Trump they were taught by their leaders that we're not going to get sick because we are innocent and then this of course sets us up for the next step when we then do get sick as we have we're sticker than anyone else when we do get sick we then blame others if the nation was innocent and we do get sick well then this must be the fault of others and this is of course not a theoretical proposition mr. Trump has gone out of his way to blame the European Union for our pandemic he's gone out of his way to blame China for our pandemic in national and in local politics American leaders have blamed African Americans for the pandemic and in local politics especially in Florida American leaders have blamed explicitly blamed migrant workers for the pandemic so what this leads to is this grotesque spectacle where you have a great power of perhaps the greatest power in the history of the world the United States of America whose entire reaction to an objective problem the spread of a virus is based upon denying factuality and insisting on innocence and what I want to suggest is that that pattern that way see in the world the insistence on innocence and the exclusion of the facts that might get in the way of that vision that this has something to do with choosing the nation-state as your as your destination after Empire okay I think that's what's happening and I think it's coherent on its own terms but before we move on I want to make clear that not everyone in the United States thinks that way most Americans don't think that way the way that the American president has reacted to the pandemic and for that matter to racial injustice is actually highly unpopular which brings me to a similar pattern that we can observe in the u.s. in the current protests so again I'm sorry that I haven't been in Europe for the last six months which means that I don't know how American events are appearing to you but the protests since it's the murder of George Floyd are the most significant political demonstrations in the United States at least since the go for and probably going back into the 1960s there have been demonstrations in all 50 states and there have been massive and inconsistent demonstrations not only by African Americans but also by by whites and and others and in their vast majority they've they've been peaceful I I mention them not just because racial history is the essential part of American imperial history we built our empire on the labor of Africans but I mention it also because it's a second example of how this attempt to move back to a state of innocence this attempt to move back to the nation-state flips around the question of who is innocent and to end and who is guilt is in who is guilty so in the case of the protests and the demonstrations in the the president United States insists that he's the victim and so therefore he must take shelter in a bunker in the basement of the White House he must call in the hundred and first Airborne to defend him from people who are calling for for essentially for nothing more than the Equal Rights the real victims are the police in this way of seeing things who have the right to call in the military and who have the right to act like the military so again when an imperial system moves in the direction of becoming a nation-state what we see is this odd juxtaposition of enormous power and enormous grievance the very people who have the power are using that power to express their grievance this is this is the way this passage from Empire to nation-state looks if this is how you try it and to be clear just just to put a period at the end of this sentence these two crises are pandemic and our racial strife are deeply deeply connected part of the way that the United States moved to become a nation-state is by insisting that white people are too strong and too virtuous to actually need health care and that if there were health care it would be exploited only by the immigrants only by the blacks only by people who are defined as being marginal again that's a post-imperial way of thinking the people who once carried out the colonization effort are now told by their leaders you don't need support the support would just be taken up by those inferior people and this is one of the basic reasons why we don't have a welfare state now if it seems to you that that connection is abstract I can only assure you that it's essential to the history of America in the 20th century and I can only point to the example of what's happening right now right now even as tens of millions of Americans have lost their job and therefore their health insurance right now even as tens of thousands of Americans get sick from Kovan every day right now the administration is seeking to is seeking to get rid of the Affordable Care Act which would throw tens of millions of more Americans out of it out of health insurance in the middle of a pandemic it's not a coincidence that this is happening at a moment of racial discussion on the contrary the two questions are the same question if you decide that what you're doing in America is you're going back to this mythical moment of America or in particular white American innocence and virtue what follows from that is this desperate politics where we have to leave other people out so aggressively that we end up hurting ourselves okay so I'm now at the comfortable point in the lecture where all I have done is criticized the United States it's very strange to be lecturing over zoom because when I lecture over zoom I can't see my audience and I can't tell whether you're nodding or whether you're not in agreement or whether you're nodding because you're falling asleep but I'm going to assume that up to now much of what I said hasn't been controversial what I want to do in the remainder of this lecture is as Constanza suggested is turn the mirror on the European Union and ask the same question about the European Union the same question of what to do after Empire of course oh the the at the surface as we look at contemporary politics things look right now I have to say better in the European Union than they do in the United States the pandemic response although it's varied of course from localities locality and and from country to country I feel very comfortable in saying has been uniformly better in the United States these aspects of innocence and ignoring the truth although present in Europe are much less pronounced than the United States now I don't want to comment on these things too closely though because I haven't been there to witness them what I'd like to do instead is ask this larger question of what does that pandemic tell us about political choices of what to do after Empire and I'm asking this question of what I take to be a very interesting moment for the European Union why an interesting moment because there are very few things that seem to convince Europeans that the European Union is a good idea is popular it should be strengthened but interestingly if you look at the polling just carried out by the European Council on Foreign Relations 63% of the citizens of European Union member states believe that the experience of pandemic shows that the European Union should actually be strengthened I I think I think that they're right but the deeper question is why are they right what is it about the European Union which makes it an appropriate way to respond to a crisis of this kind and just to be clear by appropriate way to respond I don't mean simply that I and other Americans are banned from entering the European Union I mean an appropriate way to respond in in a broader sense what is it about the European Union which makes it easier for Europeans to mentally and psychically handle a crisis like this by comparison with a place like the United States so my answer which I'll give now and shall return to at the end is that the European Union is a better answer to the question of what to do after Empire now that's all good it's good that the European Union is an answer to what to do after Empire the problem for me is that Europeans tend not to realize this or to put it in the sharpest possible form the problem in Europe and the risk to Europe the intellectual and moral risk to Europe all the time is that at a Depot European share and pro Europeans propagate and indeed the European Union self propagates a myth about the past which at its core I'm afraid is not so very different from from the story that mr. Trump is telling what is what is this story and and what is the similarity the story of course is about nation-states the the European story which I like to call the fable of the wise nation the European story is that European countries fought a second world war and European countries learned from the second world war that peace was desirable and therefore they began to cooperate i from I have to say from from my point of view as as a historian of Eastern Europe and from my point of view as someone who tries to be a global historian I think that story is not just entirely wrong I think it's it's deeply deeply harmful I think that story which seems so comfortable and natural puts the European project at risk because of course at this tit didn't happen this way what happened is that European empires like American Empire European empires fought around the world until they couldn't fight any longer and when not was done then they found in integration an economic and political substitute the the the most maybe the most important example is West Germany so West Germany is at the center of European integration is West Germany a nation-state of course it's not what had just happened to West Germany West Germany had been or Germany had been defeated in an imperial war Germany had been defeated in in a war in which the idea was to bring Imperial practices from Africa from around the world into Eastern Europe when Germany fought the Second World War which was chiefly a war conquest and empire in Eastern Europe I brought to this war familiar asymmetrical ideas of race that Germans were a higher race that Ukrainians for example belong to a lower race Germans brought to this war asymmetrical ideas of disease that Germans were healthy inherently and the Jews inherently brought brought brought malady and Germans brought to this war the ecology of empire that the that hunger and other basic problems of human life were not going to be solved by technique or by justice they were going to be solved by by conquest now I can't talk about this at length but I just want to I just want to emphasize that how we understand the German war is very crucial to how we understand the European project because if we see the German war as a as a second round of a franco-german conflict it has to do with Western Europe then we get to the present myth about nation-states learning from conflict however if we understand the Second World War as indeed a world war in the sense that Germans were fighting with ideas and with which came from a world history of empire then the significance and the origins of the European Union can clarify and of course broadly speaking this is true about the other important members of the European project as well France when when Schumann issues his famous declaration France is in the middle of a war in Indochina which it fights until it can no longer fight it when the goal makes his famous choice for Europe in the early 1960s the most important moment perhaps in European integration to call he is making a choice against Algeria this is what the French choice for Europe means the French choice for Europe is a choice not to be an empire but to be Europe and there's never a moment in that history where France is something like a nation-state it doesn't happen the same can be said of Italy with respect to the end of the war with respect to Netherlands and the East Indies with respect to Belgium and the Congo and this is this is not a coincidence this is simply one history the end of empire and the rise of integration happen at the same time because one of them is a consequence of of the other even in Great Britain this was understood at the time in the 1960s in Great Britain the British understood that the choice was between integration and empire the idea that Britain ought to be a nation-state only appears later in the 21st century and we see the consequences of that of that now now this idea that integration and decolonization have something to do with one another is very prominent in for example Tony Judds outstanding book post war what I'm trying to do is to draw this idea forward and to see what the consequences might be so the consequences for how the European Union considers itself is that we have this story that we we learned probably we were victims of the second world war if we weren't victims of the second world war then we at least learn from the Second World War we think of the war as between Germany and France or between Germany and other West European countries we marginalize or minimalized the Eastern Front and the Imperial part of the story and thereby we create a kind of compartmental history in which there's just there's this news story of a kind of civilizing project in Western Europe and then in Central and Eastern Europe in which the rest of the world is basically excluded and what I'm trying to insist upon is that if we if you have a broader history of the European Union you also have a broader sense of European possibility and a broader sense of what Europe might mean in the future now naturally you might be asking well what about Eastern Europe we're aren't there nation-states in Eastern Europe and indeed there were there there is there is the nation-state project of Serbia and Greece and Romania and Bulgaria to make a long story short those true nation states unlike France which was never a nation-state those true nation states and their competition for territory in the Balkans is what brought us the first world war that's not really a recommendation and yes indeed after the first world war more nation-states were created six of them Poland Czechoslovakia Austria the three Baltic states 20 years after their creation not a single one of them existed so again that's not a very strong recommendation for the nation-state and after 1989 if you'll remember what the East Europeans said was we want to return to Europe so back then before joining the European Union East European leaders were very much aware that the nation-state on its own wasn't the goal of the project the goal of getting out from under Soviet domination was to become part of this larger European organization so what this all means is that the European Union is much more I think interesting and certainly much more important than it's portrayed as being either here in the United States or even in Europe itself what this means is that Europe isn't just a settlement of this the European integration is not the settlement of the second world war it means something much more significant it's a settlement of both world wars it's an answer to the question of what you do when Empire's collapse whether those are land empires in Europe itself whether those are maritime empires like the Netherlands or France or Britain whatever Portugal or Spain the European project is an answer of what to do when Empire collapses now all along though the European Union's story and this is Schumann story and it's basically everyone's story the story is that we are nation-states who learn and I think this is this is the danger because if you're in nation-states who learn what you tend to learn earn really is that in the past you were innocent and that others were the source of props if we look at how the European Union functions today we can see the extreme examples of this and for example Hungary or sometimes in Polish policy where the idea is that we were nation-states and we chose to join Europe and now our job is just to extract as much from Europe as as we can but on the contrary what really happened is that the European Union saved the European state it saved the post-imperial West European state and in a different way it saved the post-imperial East state it made the European states as we know them and as they function now possible so this is now where I'd like to bring this to a close because I want to make sure that we have time to talk like this this lecture I play let the luge new because what I want to consider is who we are I've said something about who Americans are and what art is tried to suggest is that at its root problems that we're facing is a common one who are we after Empire now the phrase a pilot luge new I am stealing from my admired colleague and friend Timothy Garton ash who writing the 1990 Bridey thirty years ago asked what was going to happen after communism in Europe asked what would happen to all the people who had grown up under communism and what that would mean for a larger a larger Europe I wanted to ask a similar question what happens after Empire in general what happens after not just the end of Soviet empire but what happens after the end of European empires Soviet empire and American Empire what kind of posture do we have towards the world and should we have towards the world after the end of of Western empires and of course in brief what we can't do affectively or what we can't do without great toss'd s-- is try to manage as a nation-state not so very long ago it seemed to me that perhaps very large powers such as China or the United States might be able to manage as nation-states but I have to say the three years of the Trump experiment have not been encouraging on this front if we accept that what the Trump administration has been doing is actually carrying out this experiment by which we very hastily move from Empire to nation-state the cost of that experiment have really been very great and so in this light the European Union shines forth as a reply to globalization after Empire it's not the idea of moving back to the nation-state and indeed it's it's the most significant of these non-national attempts so what does this mean then for the future and here just a few brief remarks and then we'll have a quarter of an hour I hope for questions what this means is that globalization never goes away globalization is a constant globalization is simply there when you when you move from Empire to nation-state what you do is you stay we come first or we can make it on our own or we are innocent or we can deny reality the guilt is always from the outside that's a move but even if you're as empower 'full as powerful as United States and you make that move there will be consequences in the case of 2020 United States the consequences are absolutely palpable so that is one move but another move is to come up with something new which is the European Union the European Union is novelty which is being made every day and the European Union and here's the optimistic note on which I want to close has the capacity which the United States at least momentarily lacks to handle some of the global problems that are coming down to us the most obvious example I think is disease in health which are much better handled on a large scale which are much better handled without nationalist ideology and which are much better handled with a welfare state a second challenge of globalization is oligarchy and inequality which is much better handled when you can have a welfare states who are neighboring other welfare states another challenge of globalization is the weakening or the withering of the state as such whether that's because one country invades another like Russia invading Ukraine or whether that's because of the overwhelming power of financial capitalism either way the EU tends to prop up the state it tends to make the state stronger another challenge of the future is the is ecology the Imperial answer to ecology is to take more territory but there's another answer which is that we use technique and justice in the face of global warming the European Union may also be doing best here one final example very quickly are the empires of the mind Facebook Google big data in general the American perspective has been that the combination of big data and the end of privacy would make us all rational beings it's been very striking during the kovat epidemic just how wrong that has been we have not had privacy all of our data has been available the data about sickness health everything and this has not helped us at all we are sicker than all of the developed countries and we have not behaved rationally big data did not save human bodies on the contrary so this is another realm where the European Union might have a chance so let me close where I begin which is a comment about today it's it's sad for me as an American to ponder a present where Americans can't travel to the European Union because we have things to learn but it's it's all it's sadder still for me to realize that there are reasons for this deep reasons for this but my provocation or my hope is to suggest that the the problems that the u.s. is having this attempt to return to a nation-state with all its consequences that is also a logical problem which Europeans can address the optimistic part of that the hopeful part of that is that you already have an answer if the big question of history is what to do after Empire then the European Union is an answer and by the deluge I don't just mean the pandemic I mean the whole post-imperial wreckage of the past hundred years what to do about that you have an answer you have something like an answer the hard thing and the important thing is to see it and that's what I mean by new by us the important thing is to see ourselves for what we are and in the case of the European Union I think seeing yourselves for what you are leads to more hopeful prospects for the future thank you very much thank you very much professor Schneider for having not open not only it presented us the mirror again but having opened our eyes on what what or who we are for you and hopefully also for ourselves I would like to turn to the questions we have a very nice array of people listening from the west side of Canada to Ukraine and I'm actually going to start taking the questions from the east starting with a question from even a sniper from Ukraine who would like to ask you whether you think that this pandemic will integrate more countries into the EU or not so I'm very glad to have a question from Ukraine because in a way you Ukraine is the place from which I think one sees European history the best if you're looking at European history from Ukraine it's very hard to overlook empire it's very hard to overlook the consequences of massive Imperial inequality whether that's Nazi or Soviet in terms of enlargement I am I really like I can't say I don't have a because I'm not in Europe I don't have I don't have that kind of sense but I would i I think in the long term the pandemic may change the way that Europeans think about global politics a bit the Russian response which involves essentially the same pattern as United States plus more harassment of journalists plus the massive spread of disinformation into the European Union about what's happening I think that may give some European leaders pause about what's going on in Eastern Europe I think in the very in the long run I mean the logic is that Ukraine will join the European Union in my view because the European Union is a post imperial project and Ukraine is a posting imperial country I think in the long view this is what will happen and we go so far as to say that it's it's a logical logical completion of the European project is to get to the countries which were most harmed by European imperial history but that's going to happen next year I'm afraid I can't tell you thank you very much let's move down the list of questions and remain in Eastern Europe we have a question from Ruben asking well how do you see current Eastern European populist journey for nation-states I think it's a position of luxury because if we think back to the 1990s again one of the odd parts about zoom is I don't know how old my interlocutor is but if we think back to the 1990s in Eastern Europe that it was generally understood like it was understood for example in Britain in the 1960s that the alternatives were some kind of empire and some kind of integration in the 1990s the concern was Soviet and then Russian imperialism and and it's a solution not just for security but also prosperity was obviously Europe the the the the problem now the basic I think the basic irresponsibility of the position of populism now is that countries that are already inside the European Union can very easily forget why it was that they joined the polish state is a very functional state it's remarkably functional it's hard to it's hard to imagine a Polish state that is more functional than the polish state that we have right now but if the Polish state were not in the European Union it would not be nearly so functional I don't like to imagine what the Polish state society would be it pulling her outside the European Union so I think there's this basic tension and I think the populace know it and I think they're they're quite think they're exploiting it in in in bad faith what I worry about though is education because if populist educate young people to think that the 1920s and 1930s were glorious times except for all the foreigners then that leads to in the least a long-term political consequences and I worry that we're already beginning to see that yes we have an interesting view which seems to be it come from a different corner actually Larry Moffitt says that most Europeans have travelled abroad and therefore might be less likely to support nation states because they were exposed to intercultural exchange well it's complicated because I mean it's most Americans haven't troubled abroad but it's also I mean now now I'll go back to being you know now I'll defend the country a bit America is a very big country so you can see all kinds of things without actually leaving it I think I think though that the point is well-taken I think I think confrontation especially confrontation at a meaningful point in life like when you're studying confrontation with another culture friendly a friendly confrontation with other culture does help to relativize a little bit but the problem for me in Europe though again would be education because Europeans de facto have more contact with other societies than Americans do well because there's not really European history education they don't quite know how to place those contacts in a bigger story so even if you meet a Belgian married to an Italian the the Italian and the Belgian are going to have national ideas of history because they learn those when they were children that's the deep problem which I'd like to see overcome I would like for there to be a common not not not an identical but a common history of Europe that people from Scandinavia and and you know and the Mediterranean could identify with the people in Eastern and Western Europe had in common so I think that would help comment I think that common history would help common experiences which as you say do exist yes and here we have a very interesting question related to what you said about in the imperial past and actually the person would like to know how you see the future of the countries who have suffered from it well that's a very large question I think the it's not a inferring for one thing it's not only countries I mean often the peoples who have suffered from imperialism can be overlooked because precisely because they don't even have formal cognition as countries so in the case of American history the voices of Native Americans and our politics are almost completely absent the voices of African Americans are muted and though they don't have countries right they're just they're inside a country and the same can be said for or something similar can be said about other places which after the reshuffle of empire in two states didn't have their own state as I mean the question is so broad that it's hard to get hold of but what I would say in general is that that for all around the world the crucial question is whether you are allowed to form whether you're allowed to create forms of cooperation and integration which you see is serving you and that that's that's where the Europeans who had lots of advantages advantages of just having had empires but that's where the the Europeans have have excel that's where the Europeans have done very well when you're when you're a victim of empire and you're cut off from state power and you're cut off from other forms of cooperation then the same patterns can repeat themselves I mean the patterns of imperial suffering for example can repeat within a state just on the smaller scale where the capital of the new state then starts then carries out a similar process of of exploitation but I'm afraid that's all I can say because the question is is is very very broad I want to agree with them I want to agree with its moral thrust though which is that it's it's not it's wrong for Americans and Europeans and we both do this to withdraw historically from Empire because we withdraw our history from our history of empire we also withdraw from the kinds of moral questions that I think you're pointing to yes and we have many new questions now coming in but we time is short so we will try to summarize two of them which are actually about the narratives why do the leaders of the you systematically rearticulate this narrative of finding peace after World War two and second question in a similar direction but from another listener what would you suggest to strengthen the post-imperial historical narrative in Europe to counterbalance the rise of nationalism I I think the reason why okay I think one of the reasons why Europeans repeat the story about learning from the Second World War is is a anti Americanism I think that's because it that story is implicitly or explicitly a story about how Europeans are smarter than Americans and the idea is that Europeans learned no we did these terrible things but we learned for them whereas Americans just keep doing these terrible things over and over and over again and that's I think reassuring to Europeans and it gives them a sense of identity that the Americans may be stronger but we are we're morally more righteous the problem is that is not true it's just that Europeans ran out of the ability to fight wars a little bit sooner than we did I mean I think it's been the broad historical scope it's gonna look very similar the you know the French and the dust the Dutch are exhausting themselves the British are exhausting themselves in the 1960s the Americans are exhausting themselves in the 2000s that's a very small difference in time overall I think our stories are actually quite similar in in that respect but anyway I think the ability to say we learn from the second world war on the Americans didn't you know we're Greece in their room or whatever it might be you know we I think that's one reason another reason is education the European that that is the story if you're taught about the European Union that's the story that you generally learn in school I believe and the third reason is that it's just so attractive I mean everyone says it and I mean I everyone always says it and everyone always collapse so it's I don't know why it's so attractive exactly but it certainly is very attractive and it's like it's in this kind of world and the problem with it is that for me it's it's just a national myth at a higher level it's like a shared national myth like all we're all we are all innocent nations who all learned as opposed to just mayan as a nation learn but fundamentally it's it's a national myth and that's that's why it's so dangerous i mean I have a two-prong to answer the question of what to do my first answer is make European history bloodier and more complicated but also grander and bigger by including the Imperial part that it's it's not okay to write about Schumann without mentioning that he was the foreign minister during a war right that that if you mentioned Schumann in 1950 or 51 you have to also mention that France was at war if you mentioned de Gaulle you also have to mention that France was involved in this massive anti insurrectionary campaign in Algeria that these two things come together that's one side of it and then the other side of it is that if you want to narrate it which is not a word I love but if you want to narrative the narrative has to go into the future and the story we're no longer fighting the Second World War that's not a story with the future a story with the future I think is about the things that I was trying to stress like oligarchy and health and climate and and the end digital those are the things that are in the future that's the 21st century and and I think if you want a narrative the narrative has to have an arc which goes somewhere right so again like a problem with the national story is the national story ends when you get the nation-state then what do you have to talk about and the the European star has a similar problem once you get all that what you get what you think our nation states together it's like the story is over right and there's nothing left to do except sign more treaties but actually there's much there's much more detail and you're in you're pretty well positioned to do it okay and I'm trying to select two questions and draw them together about actors actually there's a question about what you think the role of the United Nations and other international organizations could be to shape the future and from the other end of the spectrum if I may say so a question about the role of civil society in shaping the future so let me I'll take them that order I think that the we've been focusing on the European Union because the European Union is special it's it's not an international organization like other international organizations generally international organizations start from the legal reality of States whereas what the European Union does is something different the European Union gets inside states and makes them stronger so the European Union is not an international organization in the same sense that the United Nations is an international organization that said in issues such as climate and health which are global in the purely technical sense it's very hard to imagine how we're going to deal with the future without the United Nations and for that matter without the World Health Organization you know I didn't mention it but the absurd reality that the United States has pulled back from the World Health Organization is also a signal example of what it looks like to try to become a nation the nation state or to return to national greatness civil society the civil society I use I think of that term in the sense that the East European intellectuals gave it in the 1970s namely civil society is something which exists not against the state but apart from the state it's something which enlivens the state it's the idea is not to make the state stronger if the idea is to contest certain things to generate ideas which wouldn't be generated only by politicians or only by Elections civil society has to do for me fundamentally with the unpredictable assembly of people in pursuit of unpredictable goals and end values and as such it's extremely important that I'm glad to have this question as the last question when I look at when I look at the the series of disasters that is American politics the bright spots are almost always in civil society lawyers doing this or Pro Tour protesters doing that and when I think about the future of the European Union and this helps with the last question to and I think about the future the European Union what what also makes me hopeful are the are the examples of I know often by young people of trying to create European civil society so not just the passive European civil society which I know exists and not just the multinational or not just the the multinational NGOs which I know are very important in which I applaud but also the less predictable initiatives to create a sense of what incidentally create a sense that there's a Europe by pursuing common concerns within the European Union democracy can't do without civil society and and the rule of law can't do without civil society and certainly Europe can't do without civil society and it's there's room for improvement there need there could be more you know there could be more European sports teams that could be more European newspapers and there could be more basically European everything when it comes to civil society but I'm I'm I see examples of it and I'm hopeful about that too okay qualities to all the others who have asked questions that we cannot answer now because time is over and while we are looking at dinner you might be looking at lunch so I would like to thank you you have said that learning can be dangerous but I think tonight we have learned something that can be absolutely useful and open our eyes on what we are in our own future and I would like to thank you for this message of hope delivered from across the ocean I hope that we travel will soon be back and that we will be able to meet you in person again back in Brussels thank you very much for your participation everybody and thank you professor Schneider for having been with us tonight thank you very much

Channel: House of European History

Views: 24,297

Rating: 4.8801498 out of 5

Keywords: Europe, EU, US, Trump, Covid, Nationalism

Id: 9BwZpiUSgpU

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 01 2020