The Future of Europe with Niall Ferguson | L'Echo New Year's Event

so ladies and gentlemen it's a real honor and my great pleasure to introduce to you neil ferguson mr ferguson welcome to our event the floor is yours thank you very much indeed johan i'm almost relieved that astrid isn't playing an introductory theme tune for me especially after your reference to my uh past enthusiasm for punk rock i was asked what music i would like astrid to play after i have finished my remarks and at first i thought of schubert's winterreise because it does seem as if europe is in the midst of a long winter journey uh which is far from over but as you'll see uh when i conclude in perhaps 20 minutes from now that's not the music i suggested because i want to end what i have to say on an upbeat note what i'm going to try and do is set the future of europe in a global perspective and in particular to set the impact of the covert 19 pandemic on europe in a global perspective this is an enormous challenge because it amounts to writing history before the event is over the pandemic is not over a year ago when i first wrote about it just after the world economic forum at davos i observed that a global pandemic was certainly on its way and one of the first lessons that history has to teachers about global pandemics is that they come in waves they are not over in a matter of months but extend over more than one year and that meant that knowing about the great pandemics of the past gave me as an historian some advantage over other commentators working in different disciplines so a year has passed since i first foresaw a global pandemic and where are we 2.2 million people have died according to the estimates we have thus far around the world but the impact of the disease has varied enormously from one country to another belgium has been very hard hit in fact if you calculate deaths per million uh belgium has been harder hit than almost any other country in the world only gibraltar and san marino have a higher uh proportion of deaths i hardly need you to tell me that in the first wave back in the spring of last year belgium was hit harder than almost any other country including the united kingdom and the united states and belgium had another very severe experience of covert in the autumn although the mortality numbers have greatly improved since november the united states looked as if it was handling the pandemic much worse than europe during the middle of the 2020 uh period but in fact looking at the autumn events europe ended up catching up in the terms of mortality with the united states indeed thinking about this story in terms of waves we can see that the third wave in the united states has crested but we can't entirely rule out a fourth wave for reasons i'll talk about in a moment the third wave in the united states is not uh the worst wave in terms of excess mortality which is in many ways the best measure to try to calculate the impact of a pandemic but in almost every other metric the third wave has been the worst so i think those people in europe uh in the summer who looked down on american performance and prided uh themselves on the success of european uh measures spoke too soon failing to understand the way in which pandemics come in waves and underestimating the great risks to europe that lay ahead in the in the autumn particularly when attempts were made to reopen economies restart higher education and so forth before in fact the spread of the virus had been brought under control the vaccination race is still at a very early stage uh though of course we arrived at effective vaccines very rapidly indeed much more rapidly than uh vaccines have been developed in in recent years but looking at europe's performance in this respect one is in for a profound disappointment at this point of course as you doubtless know israel is far ahead in terms of the proportion of people who've received at least one dose of a covert 19 vaccine the israeli number has passed 30 percent uh the united arab emirates is in third place on something like 24 percent in third place is the united kingdom which has already got uh some one dose of vaccine uh to ten percent of the population then comes bahrain then comes the united states europe lags far behind whether you look at it on a country by country basis uh or at the eu data as a whole the doses per 100 people number for the eu when i checked on the bloomberg tracker yesterday is just over two percent compared with as i mentioned something in the neighborhood of eight percent uh for the united states and ten percent for the uk as vaccination happens we can foresee with some clarity at what lies ahead the next few months will continue to be deadly for many people and then depending on which country you're in you'll see an improvement perhaps starting in late february or march as vaccination uh thresholds uh are passed and we approach something like herd immunity with vaccine vaccine and natural based immunity there'll be a steep decline in mortality it'll probably happen in the uk before it happens in the u.s and it will happen in the u.s before it happens in europe but we can see because of the success of the vaccination research and development an end in sight to this catastrophe john mccain whom i did once advise used to joke that it was always darkest before it went completely pitch black but actually its darkest in this case before the dawn uh it will be i think surprising to you and to americans how quickly we go from a very grim winter of high mortality and still large-scale hospitalization to a much brighter summer we need to watch closely what's happening in the uk where as i mentioned vaccination is racing ahead of europe and we also need to look at israel closely because in both these countries there's a race going on between vaccination and new strains of the virus sars cave ii in particular the b117 strain which seems likely to be significantly more infectious wherever it uh appears than earlier strains at the moment i i think that race is being won by vaccination in both countries but what i can't tell you with any certainty is what happens if b117 spreads rapidly across the united states you can't rule out at this point a fourth wave of infection uh in the united states even as vaccination is gathering momentum now for the sake of brevity i'm not going to dwell deeply on the economic consequences of the pandemic those have been dramatic but mainly because of the way lockdowns were used by western governments to try to limit the spread of the virus after early containment strategies had failed the one thing i'd say is that it's pretty clear you did not need to do lockdowns if you had understood as the south koreans and the taiwanese did that early action large-scale testing contact tracing and isolation of suspicious infections could in fact prevent the spread of the virus altogether deaths from covert in taiwan are still in single digits lockdowns were what western governments resorted to when all those options had been omitted i want instead to focus on the political consequences and the geopolitical consequences of the pandemic let me focus on the united states first i want to make it clear that europe's future can't be understood apart from what happens in the united states and also what happens in china and i think a great many europeans are still puzzling trying to work out what on earth happened to american politics not just in the last month but in the last four and a half years what exactly should we make of a storming of the capital by uh an angry pro-trump mob uh exhorted to march on the legislature by the then president himself a few striking features in some of the polling that followed the events of january the 6th as many as 45 of republicans said they approved of the storming of the capital though another poll uh put the figure rather closer to 18 leaving me uncertain about just how profound support for this extraordinary attempted insurrection was polls agree that a significant proportion perhaps as much as 70 percent of republicans do not trust the results of the 2020 election and so you might well conclude as many europeans have that u.s politics is in a catastrophic situation regardless of the fact that joe biden won the election and has been sworn in as president trump may be out of office but trumpism does not appear likely to disappear anytime soon trump ended his presidency unpopular but it's worth noting not the most unpopular president in modern american history both harry truman and richard nixon ended their presidencies even more unpopular than donald trump was at the end of his the other point i draw your attention to is that congress is also deeply unpopular and has grown steadily more unpopular really since the 1980s and this uh hostility to congress is a part of i think the peculiar pathology of trumpism now europeans are very optimistic i find about the biden administration on the whole they loathe trump and they're relieved to see barack obama's vice president now in the top job what i want to do briefly is tell you about six events that could derail the biden administration and disappoint as a result many europeans the prime minister of britain uh back in the 1950s and early 60s hal macmillan was once asked what his biggest problem was as prime minister and he replied events dear boy well let me tell you about some of the events that i as a historian anticipate coming along pretty quickly to spoil the uh enthusiasm that has greeted the biden administration's early days one of them is the virus itself at the age of 78 joe biden is the age ronald reagan was at the end of his presidency and even without a pandemic would have according to the social security actuarial tables a five percent probability of dying within a year of being sworn in as president and then you have to add into that the risk posed by the virus itself which of course has disproportionately hit men in their 70s and older let's not rule out that we could be talking about the harris administration much sooner than most people i think assume the second thing that could upset the biden administration's trajectory is immigration it's already clear uh because of a raft of executive orders relaxing uh immigration rules that there will be a new surge of interest from south of the border particularly from central america and getting into the united states especially as joe biden is talking about a path to citizenship for all illegal immigrants the third event that's already i think a very disturbing feature of american life is the big increase in homicide in violent crime that we've seen since the summer protests that occurred following the death of george floyd in minneapolis uh in the uh early part of the summer these increases in homicide are really dramatic the homicide numbers are up 74 in seattle to give you just one example the fourth problem which i think is going to loom pretty soon is the sheer scale of debt that the united states has accumulated as a result of the pandemic and is going to continue to accumulate under president biden's plans the trajectory of the federal debt has uh undoubtedly an alarming dimension to it uh we're already above where the federal debt was at the end of world war ii and we could see that ratio to gross domestic product doubling between now and mid-century on present policies if nothing else the combination of fiscal and monetary expansion almost certainly means a weaker dollar in the coming months and it's not even clear that the federal reserve and the u.s treasury will mind a weaker dollar event five brings me to china china's rise uh in many ways explains donald trump's accession to power it was his willingness to change policy on china that was one of the vote winners back in 2016. china is on course to catch up with the united states in terms of gross domestic product perhaps as soon as 2030 or at least the early 2030s china which was the point of origin of the pandemic is also the only economy of any size that achieved growth in 2020 and it seems set to lead the recovery in 2021 the chinese challenge is the single biggest geopolitical challenge the biden administration faces and you will have been struck i think if you've been following it by the continuity that seems to be likely between the trump administration and the biden administration yes i said continuity not everything that donald trump did is being repudiated by joe biden in particular trump's tough stance on china seems likely to be continued judging by everything that i've heard so far from tony blinken the new secretary of state from jake sullivan the new national security adviser and from kurt campbell the so-called asia tsar on the national security council let me conclude my remarks with some reflections on europe in a world which i would characterize as being dominated by cold war ii by a struggle for economic technological and strategic dominance between the united states and the people's republic of china you'll remember that in the first cold war there were many countries including india and yugoslavia that wanted to be non-aligned they did not want to take sides in the cold war well it seems to me judging by opinion polls that a great many europeans would like to be non-aligned in cold war ii polling uh across the european countries suggests a strong a widespread belief that the political system of the united states is broken really large proportions of europeans agree with the proposition that it is either completely or somewhat broken secondly there is a an amazing amount of support across the european nations for neutrality in the event of a disagreement between the united states and china 66 percent of germans say they would like their country to remain neutral in the event of a u.s china dispute and so the future of europe that seems to beckon is a rather surprising one that of being a non-aligned power during the second cold war whereas the first cold war was in many ways a transatlantic phenomenon with berlin as its flashpoint number one cold war ii is a trans-pacific conflict and taiwan will likely be one of the key flash points in that sense europe is strategically less important than it was in cold war one and that may explain this preference for non-alignment that we see amongst many voters let me conclude with a final observation as johan mentioned in his nice introduction i was somebody who voted for remain in the 2016 brexit referendum not because i'm passionately attached to european institutions but because i suspected that britain's divorce from europe would take a lot longer and cost a lot more than people were claiming on the leave side of the debate but when that vote happened my attitude was to admit defeat and get on with the realities of brit of brexit it seems to me that we now see more clearly than we did a year ago that brexit has some clear benefits if anything could have confirmed the wisdom of britain's decision to leave the european union surely it has been the fiasco of european uh union coordination of vaccination which has turned into an outright debacle i must say it seems to me the slowness with which the eu authorities acted when it came to acquiring vaccines from manufacturers was a classic example of the kind of cumbersome bureaucracy that many proponents of brexit have criticized about europe for many years and the success by contrast of britain's high-speed vaccination program suggests that after all there may be some benefits to getting divorced even if it can take a long time and costs a lot more than you thought it would well i've now reached the end of the time available for my remarks and it only remains for me to ask astrid stockman to play me a tune astrid i've tried to paint the future as realistically as i'm able to but you'll have noticed that i began with a short and painful winter journey a winterizer i want to end with an evocation of what summer is likely to be like for most of us at least in the northern hemisphere when summer comes this astrid is the song i hope that we're all going to be singing regardless of whether we're in europe the uk or the united states happy days are here again happy days [Music] of cheer again happy days who can doubt it now so let's tell the world about it now happy days it's always good to conclude with a positive note thank you astrid you are very very talented really now another gifted woman is isabel albers as general editor of the ted liko she is absolutely skilled in journalism and will ask neil ferguson some more questions isabel ours she talks with neil on all these different topics good evening neil good evening ladies and gentlemen well we we've got only 20 minutes to discuss some of your topics neil so let's go right into the heart of the matter about the pandemic it's not over yet you showed it but when such a disaster strikes we ought to be better prepared than we used to yet you say and it looks like that we're getting worse not better at handling these disasters how come you call it the politics of catastrophe how come well isabel that is the subtitle of my new book that will come out in may with the title doom the politics of catastrophe and what i've tried to do is to set our disaster in historical perspective looking at the history of disaster in general all kinds of disaster including earthquakes including including wars and the conclusion i've come to is that western democracies despite being aware of the risk of a pandemic despite multiple warnings not just by bill gates but by many many experts were woefully unprepared when it came to the reality by comparison with countries like taiwan and south korea in east asia which had learnt the lessons of sars and mars so i think the simple answer is not just that we had poor leadership it's easy to criticize donald trump and boris johnson for example but also that our public health bureaucracies the experts who really should have seen this coming and prepared better for it let us down and i think the fact that belgium and the uk had very similar experiences gives you a clue that it's not just populist leaders we can blame uh for what happened because belgium did not have a populist leader through this crisis yeah we didn't have a leader at that moment but about this pandemic and the vaccination when we look at the european commission we see that they have enormous difficulties at coping with big pharma astrazeneca you told in your speech that it was a debacle what does that say about europe and the european commission yeah i don't want to be too uh harshly critical because the decision-making around vaccination was difficult it was being done at very high speed that's why the trump administration called its crash vaccine program operation warp speed and it required decisions that involved risk that is to say governments had to commit to buying vaccines before they knew if they worked and before they knew if there were significant risks associated with them the us and the uk government took the risk the european bureaucrats were much more risk-averse and therefore delayed major purchases and for uh several months and that's the reason the principal reason uh for the the lag i'd add one other thing what we see here is the importance of subsidiarity european integration should not be european centralization but all too often that has been the tendency and i think if one looks back at successive crises that the european union has grappled the financial crisis uh then the migration crisis and now this crisis one's bound to conclude that things have have gone poorly because of bad decisions at the at the central government all by the big uh or biggest countries in the eu it's not that i'm celebrating brexit i still think that ultimately britain will be the poorer of having left the european union 10 years from now but what i do celebrate is the proof that decentralization of decision making really is preferable and that's that's an important lesson for us all to learn from this crisis it's a reason we shouldn't idolize the chinese system as some people are attempting to do china's highly centralized system was the reason that this pandemic began in the first place because when it first began which is now more than a year ago the centralized communist party system sought to conceal the extent of the danger the china and the pandemic you said in one of your articles the pandemic is for china very much like chernobyl was for russia but if we have a look at the economic dashboard we see that china is up and running again while europe for example is still suffering very much so why do you say a chernobyl moment for china then well actually it's a worse disaster than chernobyl by far not many people died as a result of chernobyl and almost nobody died outside of the soviet union even although radiation spread all over europe by contrast as i mentioned we're looking at two million deaths around the world from covet 19 and i do believe that if the communist party had been honest and transparent in december and early january at the beginning of this crisis that number would have been far smaller so in fact in fact it's a worse disaster than chernobyl now it's true that the chinese economy is in much better shape than the soviet economy was in the late 1980s on the other hand the damage that this has done to china's reputation around the world is really remarkable i didn't mention it in my talk but europe european attitudes to china have grown a great deal more negative in the past 12 months now that's the other side of this story i told about european non-alignment i do think that the generation of political leaders in europe who wanted a good relationship with china such as angela merkel will soon be leaving the stage and their successes will be a good deal more hawkish and skeptical towards china so i think it's similar in terms of reputational damage abroad what we don't know isabel is how profound the damage internally to china has been we know the communist party is in complete control of the chinese population through a system of surveillance that even george orwell would have regarded as astonishing but deep down inside there are problems china's economy is not going to be able to grow as rapidly as in the past because of demographic and financial headwinds and i'm not convinced that the the system that we see in china today is going to last uh as long as most people assume i think it is much weaker partly because of this centralization i mentioned partly because it is a genuinely repressive totalitarian regime and so the analogy with chernobyl is a bit like this it took four years didn't it from chernobyl to the collapse of the soviet union i could imagine in a time frame maybe closer to 10 years major problems emerging about the stability of china and that's a black swan that most people don't give any consideration today okay thank you and um in our audience there's a lot of people asking questions about china and the relationship with europe and the us and more particularly about big tech and i suppose i propose we listen to two of our ceos from swaziland of malexis and guillen bhutan of proximous they want to ask you a question as a high-tech company headquartered in europe but serving global customers half of which are in asia i'm keen to understand niels ferguson's view on how the eu can garner its strengths better than today in order not to get squeezed in the technology cold war between china and the us mr ferguson how do you see europe and european champions play a significant role in a worldwide digital scene well the questions are clear thank you for these two excellent questions i think the key to understanding europe's power is that it is a regulatory superpower but not really a technology superpower the big tech companies are overwhelmingly american or chinese and that's because the chinese were able to build their own versions of the american big tech companies behind their great firewall essentially they used methods that that europe was not able to use to compete uh with the united states but europe has a regulatory power and it's very important because both the american and the chinese big tech companies badly need to be regulated and they are not going to be regulated by the u.s congress as far as i can see because the american political class for reasons there's no time to go into is not really serious about curbing the power of silicon valley the chinese problems the opposite problem the big tech companies in china are controlled by the chinese communist party so what europe needs to be doing is creating or helping to create a global regulatory framework which meaningfully protects individual users their privacy protects their data and limits the power of these all too powerful corporations the real coup that happened in the united states on january the 6th this year was the coup by the big tech companies against donald trump not that a hopeless populist mob that stormed the capital and the fact that donald trump could be cancelled even while he was still president by a handful of chief executives mark zuckerberg jack dorsey jeff bezos that is an extraordinarily dangerous state of affairs not just for the united states but for all democracies so this i think must be the key but your what needs to be setting global digital standards on the second question i think it's difficult i don't see how europe easily can compete at the level of software because it simply cannot get the economies of scale that you see in the us and china but in the in the realm of hardware i think europe is still an important contender and we'll all one day look back and ask why it was that with the advantage it had in companies like nokia and erickson europe did not compete better with china with huawei in the rollout of 5g networks i'll leave it there for the sake of brevity okay thank you very much um let's get quickly to the new president joe biden the new joe biden era you say well it will be pretty much the same he has another style decency is back but you expect that events my dear boy events will determine whether he will be successful or not but what about his economic policy when we look at the first week he seemed to stress america first as strong as donald trump did will there be a difference well as i mentioned the obvious continuity so far is uh in china policy but closely related to that is the america first element and indeed the fair trade element in what biden campaigned on and is going to do that buy america provision is already part of the raft of uh executive orders we've seen uh since the inauguration and i think it's a reminder that however much you hate donald trump and europeans by and large hate donald trump he did change the direction of u.s policy fundamentally on china and on trade and that's not those are not things the biden administration's going to to change in fact i don't think the biden administration is going to be able to turn the clock back to the obama years in many ways at all actually what we'll see are two important things first they did learn from the obama era that if you are going to get the economy going again after a crisis you need to go large in terms of fiscal support and they are going to and i think they may even overshoot because i don't think this crisis is like the financial crisis actually the economy is going to come out of the pandemic roaring by the summer of this year an additional fiscal stimulus may turn out to be superfluous but that is the lesson that they learnt from the obama years the second point to notice is that the democratic party has moved much to the left since barack obama was president and that left-wing element personified by alexandria carzio cortes will have to be appeased by biden on multiple issues if you looked at the first 17 executive orders six of them were about immigration and two of them were really woke identity politics issues transgender rights for example so the biden administration is going to be quite woke in terms of the way that it deals with issues of identity uh and indeed uh of of gender and i i think it's quite worrying from a conservative vantage point already to see how much biden and his people have bought into notions of social justice and racial equity which in fact on close inspection turn out to imply discrimination against white americans okay let's get back to europe also about this new joe biden era i have a question from ilham kadri the ceo of the chemical company solver neil the transatlantic link has been essential for the european union the u.s military and economic support has been key for the european integration process this link however has been weakening very strongly under the president trump but also under president obama as the new priorities of the u.s seem to be now in asia how would you assess the need for the u.s to review the transatlantic relationship in the context of the increasing sino-american rivalry and how could europe position itself in this that's a great question again i think that in terms of mood music of atmospherics things will be much better uh with joe biden as president and indeed tony blinken as a secretary of state than they were when it was trump and pompeo that europeans had to deal with so you can expect all kinds of nice speeches from both sides about the importance of the transatlantic relationship but behind the nice speeches i think there are going to be ongoing problems after all trump was basically right that europeans don't pay enough for their security relative to the united states within the nato structure american presidents have been arguing that almost as far back as the 1970s so that issue is not about to go away i think the second issue that is not about to go away really has to do with china and that's why i emphasize this issue of non-alignment if europeans and european leaders want somehow to be neutral in a u.s china cold war then i think the transatlantic relationship will quite quickly come under strain because i don't think joe biden and his team are going to stop asking europeans not to use huawei hardware they're not going to stop putting pressure on the chinese government on a range of human rights issues in fact i think they'll do that much more than the trump administration did so i think once we get past the speeches that will happen no doubt at davos and in munich the the speeches that will be made when joe biden visits his european counterparts on key issues of substance in particular security and and the china question i don't think the transatlantic relationship is actually going to get massively better it'll just be the mood music that improves and in answer to your final point what can europe do about it my view is that ultimately europe has no choice if it is cold war ii and i believe it is it cannot possibly side with the one party state that is herding uyghurs into concentration camps and placing its citizens under a system of orwellian surveillance we can't possibly side with china if china decides to go after taiwan's autonomy or continued to militarize the south china sea uh and so this uh idea of a non-aligned europe i think is an illusion and as angela merkel leaves the stage i hope that a new generation of german and indie european politicians will see that ultimately the transatlantic relationship really does matter and it has to be meaningful it can't just be speeches okay thank you very much for your insights neil our time is almost up but before we conclude let me get to a more personal question um i heard you saying it's darkest before the dawn but those happy days they will come back what will you do the day we have our freedom back what will you personally do what are you longing for well i am originally from at the uk i was born in glasgow as was mentioned i have three older children who live in england and my mother who lives just outside oxford and what i can't wait for is to be able to fly to the uk and to see them in particular i'm looking forward to going into a pub somewhere in my favorite part of london highgate uh with my kids and maybe granny too if we can get her along and i'm gonna order a pint of uh best uh bitter uh and razor glass uh to the fact that uh it's over that's what i'm looking forward to and i i'm sure you have a similar fantasy uh involving beer after all you're belgian that's true and um i wish you a very nice flight back to your mother your children and that pint of beer thank you so much for this inspiring keynote and this q a and ladies and gentlemen i hope so much that we will see each other back in real life next year thank you

Channel: L'Echo

Views: 34,916

Keywords: L'echo, newspaper, Mediafin, Niall Ferguson, Stanford

Id: 4aFk8T3pAx8

Length: 43min 21sec (2601 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021