Timothy Snyder - Nations, Empires, Unions: European Integration and Disintegration Since 1914

okay I'm going to be talking at you in English I've been studying Norwegian for the last 45 minutes but but I can already do a lot but but not quite enough to to do this as as Nick says what I'd like to try to do in the next hour is give you a kind of overview of the last century in European history give you a sense not only of the significance of the first world war but also a sense of what it means that a century later were asking about the first world war the way I propose to do this is to consider European history within the categories of nations empires and unions to move through examples of European integration as well as European disintegration in the last century or so the main concepts that I want to use the kinds of European entities that are going to appear and disappear integrate and disintegrate our land empires maritime empires new sorts of internal colonizers and finally the European Union and its rivals at the present day so the land empires to begin at the beginning the world as seen from Europe in 1914 was an imperial world it wasn't a world of nations or States it was a world of empires the great European powers were imperial powers and the world from any other point of view was also an imperial world this is where we have to begin the world that was broken in 1914 the Europe that was broken in 1914 was an imperial world and yet the breaking of European empire took place in stages and what I want to stress at the beginning is that the first stage the end of European Empire had to do with the land empires the empires with European capitals whose possessions were contiguous territories across Europe across Europe and Asia the war of 1914 was their undoing and this took place in two stages no let me take a step back because when you when you imagine the shattering of empire in the First World War you're probably thinking of the of the post-war settlements the end of the hapsburgs the Hohenzollerns and we'll get to that but something happens before this which is just as important something happens before this which i think is absolutely crucial to understand where we are now and that is the beginning of decolonization within Europe itself so Europe is a Europe of empire and the world is a world of empire we know looking back at it from our point of view in 2014 that all these empires are going to come undone that all these colonies are going to be unmade fine but where does it begin the decolonization begins in Europe itself and that is the prehistory of the First World War the decolonization of the world just like the colonization of the world begins in Europe it begins in the ottoman empire if we want to understand the prehistory of the First World War how we got to 1914 it's the steady weakening of the Ottoman Empire over the course of the 19th century which is so crucial the the greek revolution for example the liberation of Greece which European romantics found so charming from from our point of view this is an example of decolonization it's one people freeing itself from a larger Empire the crucial example of decolonization inside Europe itself though is the Serbian Revolution the people who are at the center of European history I would argue in the late 19th century in the early 20th century are precisely the Serbs because when the Serbs make their revolution against the Ottoman Empire they are doing so only in their own name they're doing so in the name of a nation and they're doing so in order to found something entirely new in European history which is the nation state the Serbs found the nation-state they found that they found the idea of statehood which is something for the nation now you might be saying what about the French didn't the french revolution happen around this time yes in many ways France is more fun to remember than Serbia the you know I'm the food is actually not better but the architecture is better the countryside is prettier French is easier to learn I grant you all of that but the actual model of the nation-state is not France France was a universal revolution which a revolution which ended up in the attempt to invade and convert the entirety of Europe that's not national the way that Serbia was national the Serbian Revolution was about creating self-sufficient states Serbia is the model for the modern nation-state as such Serbia over the course of the 19th century as well as the other Balkan states that imitated Serbia and became independent over the course of the 19th century Romania Bulgaria demonstrated some very fundamental dilemmas of sovereignty dilemmas of sovereignty which will be free well they won't be familiar to you because of your natural resources but they're familiar to everyone else the first dilemma of sovereignty is is what you might think of as the nationalist political economy in the 19th century as these new nation-states formed they were excluding themselves from a larger economic space right the Ottoman Empire is a larger economic space if you form a nation-state you're excluding yourself from that the only way to have a larger economy the only way to collect taxes from the Kings point of view seems to be to have more territory how do you have more territory you explain that the people across the river or across that mountainside are also your ethnic brethren right they're Serbs too or they're Bulgarians too or they're means to whatever the case may be so in this elegant way political economy and nationalism work hand in hand the second dilemma of sovereignty is that these nation states are created not so much as nation states but really as protectorates as clients as puppets from the point of view of Britain or Russia or Germany Romania and Serbia are not independent states they're clients in the Balkans they're supposed to do what we want to do now it turns out that there is a solution to both of these problems of sovereignty it's not a solution that you are going to find very beautiful well I don't know you personally so maybe some of you will find it beautiful the solution is militarism to spend huge amounts of your budget on the military to go into foreign trade and budget debt year after year and to fight wars to gain territory this is the this is the the Serbian method par excellence the height of this is the first balkan war of 1912 when the new nation-states of southeastern Europe of the Balkans do something extremely interesting actually two very interesting things the first is they drive the Ottoman Empire from Europe and the second thing is they do it in defiance of the great powers everyone tells them not to do it and they don't listen it's at this moment that the Balkan nation-states truly I would say become sovereign they're defying the world they're doing what they want in 1913 they fall out and fight a war against each other and then in 1914 there is this little incident in Sarajevo which is really the third Balkan war right the Serbian attempt to gain territory from the hapsburgs is follows the exact same logic as the serving attempt to gain territory from the Ottomans it's the nationalist political economy it's the joining of nationalism to economics it's the attempt to make empires fall apart but for reasons that go beyond the Serbian imagination the third Balkan war of nine 18:14 becomes the event that we call the first world war now interestingly enough the first world war which I'm not going to tell you about because you have a lot of other lectures about the first world war the first world war ends in a Serbian intellectual victory the result of the first world war by the time the war is over by the time the dust settles by the time the peace treaties are signed in 1919 or 1920 or 1921 the Serbian idea of national self-determination is triumphant right it's it has won the intellectual battle it wins the intellectual battle during the war so that everyone who is fighting the war on all sides has to talk about national self-determination on all sides the Germans as we tend to forget promised national self-determination in fact they even deliver it more or less um one settlement of the war the one we forget about because it didn't stick because it didn't stay are the treaties of brest-litovsk in early 1918 according to the trees of brest-litovsk in January and February of 1987 Airy February March of 1918 the Germans established a series of nation-states the Baltic States Belarus and Ukraine which were to be client States puppet States on the traditional European model but which were to be called independent nation states the most important of these was of course Ukraine why was Ukraine so important Ukraine was important because Ukraine then as now was one of the most fertile territories in the world one of the most important agricultural regions in the world and certainly the most important in Europe the German ID in 1918 was to extract huge amounts of grain from Ukraine feed their soldiers with it feed their civilians with it and then win the war on the on the Western Front the last part didn't work out the first part didn't work out either but that was the that was the general idea now I remind you of that because Ukraine is going to keep coming up we continue the peace settlements that do stick the ones that are applied by the victors in this war are are known under the heading of their sigh right and we all know that the trees of Versailles Sgt well y'know the the peace treaties organized by the French the British and the Americans after the war also are based on the principle of self-determination they bring to an end the old empires the Hohenzollern Empire the Habsburg Empire and they create new kinds of nation-states Poland Czechoslovakia Austria so ironically what happens is that the Serbs start a war which from most points of view as a disastrous war but the result of it is a Serbian so to speak intellectual victory and the balkanization of Europe itself because the balkan model the Serbian model of the nation-state spreads from the Balkans into East Central Europe right so you have not only Serbia Montenegro what Montenegro goes away sorry so Serbia Romania Bulgaria Yugoslavia you also have Czechoslovakia Hungary is an independent state Austria Poland the three Baltic states you have a bunch of small nation states where you didn't before the Balkan model has spread and with the Balkan model of course spreads the dilemmas of the nation-state these are economically weak states which which can't really be self-sufficient and if even if they're not quite puppet states there's certainly client states of larger powers there is no way that places like Austria or Czechoslovakia or Poland can survive without some backing from great powers without some backing from the great victorious powers namely from Britain and France okay so so much for the land empires we've done away with the land empires let's pat ourselves on the back and move on to the maritime empires the interesting things about the maritime empires by which I mean chiefly the British and the French the interesting thing about the maritime empires is that they are the victors right in the first world war if you had a big land Empire you lost either you lost the battlefield the Germans were the Austrians or the Ottomans or you lost because of a revolution the Russian Empire was on the other side but the Russian Empire also ceases to exist so all the big land Empire ceased to exist the major maritime empires on the other hand the British Empire the French Empire are victorious and continue so their Imperial history continues however what these maritime empires are unable to do is build up a strong and durable relationship with the new nation-states right so the international system the European system in the 1920s and 1930s depends upon the British Empire and the French being able to defend the new nation states of Eastern Europe there are a couple of problems with this on one problem is that the theirs is the contiguity problem right by which that's just a fancy way of saying that there aren't any common borders it's difficult of a military alliance with someone with whom you have no common borders the other problem is the economic problem which becomes very clear in 1930 with the Great Depression when the Great Depression hits Eastern Europe the French essentially pull out leaving the East Europeans to their own devices no in 1930 right around 1930 right around the time of the Great Depression other kinds of systems new kinds of systems are starting to look very good I have in mind in particular Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union the new kinds of colonial powers which function inside Europe itself now both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany have very powerful understandings of what happened in the First World War I mean it's a it's a banality and a cliche to say that they wouldn't have arisen without the First World War that's obvious but what I want to stress is that each of them has a very particular and powerful argument about what the First World War was and what it means and by the way everyone has to have some idea of what it was and meant because the scale of death was so huge the first world war was not an event in the 1920s and 1930s where you could say oh yes you know it happened but it doesn't really mean anything the First World War like any event where millions of people die creates a vacuum of meaning right it creates a vacuum into which ideas must Russia so the Soviets have their own very compelling idea of what the First World War means what the Soviets thing is that the First World War what the revolutionaries in Russia think is that the First World War is the beginning of the end of imperialism as such which as we've just seen is not so crazy it was certainly the end of a number of empires what they think is the end of imperialism and such and as Lenin teaches us imperialism is the last stage of capitalism so the first world war means the end of capitalism it means the opportunity for the great world revolution and they bring about a revolution in Russia not because they think that Russia is ready for revolution every Marxist can look at Russia and say this is a backward country with no working class they understand that they bring about a revolution in Russia on the logic that this is the spark that will begin the world revolution that will begin the conflagration of world revolution when the world revolution doesn't come and as Lenin dies and power goes to Stalin the leaders of the Soviet Union face a certain problem they've made a working class revolution on the idea that capitalism will has come to an end capitalism just to remind you about the 1920s capitalism doesn't come to an end the Soviets find themselves isolated they have to come up with something to do what do they do they carry out a policy of what Stalin calls with typical precision internal colonization because now I'm just quoting Comrade Stalin because we the Soviets because we do not have access to foreign colonies like the imperial powers do we must explode our own territories in people's so the idea is to turn the Soviet Union into a modern state by exploiting what is available Soviet agricultural territory and so Liat peasants chiefly the form that internal colonization takes is something called the collectivization of Agriculture which is just a way of saying that private farmers lost their land became employees of the state this was carried out by force very quickly and on a dramatic scale beginning precisely in that key year of 1930 the result of collectivization as you can guess was a great disappointment in terms of agricultural production a failure which was blamed on the people who were supposed to succeed precisely the inhabitants of Soviet Ukraine now again we come back to this notion that Ukraine was a breadbasket for the world Ukraine was what the Germans thought was going to help them win the first world war in 1918 and it's also what the Soviets thought was going to help them modernize in 1930 the result was a catastrophe and a famine in 1933 ok 1933 is the year that Hitler comes to power Hitler and his National Socialists also have a very powerful understanding of what the First World War means from Hitler's point of view the first world war was a war that Germany could not have lost but did lose could not have lost but did lose and if Germany did lose the first world war there must be some explanation some meta historical some supernatural explanation and of course the reason that Hitler gives is the international Jewish conspiracy for Hitler the Jews are a kind of force that operate beyond the normal bounds of history whenever a superior race from Hitler's point of view from whatever a superior race fails it must be because the Jews somehow have gotten in the way so interestingly Hitler in a little book called mine Kampf which is now a bestseller by the way are you aware of this because now mine Kampf is available electronically right if I see any of you order it now on Kindle are going to be upset just so you know but it's become a Kindle bestseller it's become a digital bestseller just little curiosity my Kampf is now a best-seller I don't know what that means about the world but I thought you should know forget any father okay so in a little book called mine Kampf Hitler actually appeals to the Serbian model as a way to restore national greatness he appeals to Serbian militarism what you should do is ignore domestic policy build up huge budget deficits borrow lots of money run trade deficits create a huge crushing army and that's how things are going to begin but of course Hitler goes well beyond the moral logic of the Serbs because what Hitler is interested in is not national fulfilment or national justice what Hitler isn't interested in is something much grander much more radical much more grandiose I should say than that and that is a racial struggle for what he calls living space where the amount of living space that a race deserves is determined entirely by how much it can take right so the racial struggle is not at all a moral struggle there are no rules or principles it's just a matter of might making right the Germans deserve as much as they should take and they should take it however in Hitler's imagination Lebensraum does have a certain geography the place that Hitler believes that Germany must take in order to undo the damage of the first world war in particular and restore the German race to greatness in general is precisely Ukraine from Hitler's point of view Germany is hemmed in it's over industrialized it's decadent the way to solve all of these problems is to have a grand eastern empire a grand eastern empire which will include at its center precisely the fertile soil of Ukraine so these new colonizers these new kinds of colonizers in Europe itself the Nazis and the Soviets they seem to have an answer to the vulnerabilities of the nation-state or they seem to have an answer to the vulnerabilities of the relationship between the nation-state and the maritime empires right they have a problem - they have an answer to the problem of contiguity they are in fact right next to Eastern Europe Germany is on side of Eastern Europe the Soviet Union is on the other side and they seem also and this is very important to have solved the problem of economics at a time when capitalism as such really was in crisis at a time when pretty much everyone took for granted that capitalism was over both the Nazis and the Soviets seemed to have an alternative to capitalism which are in the early 1930s appeared to be working whether it was or wasn't working as a different question but from the point of view of observers from the outside both the Soviet and the Nazi model appear appeared to be much more dynamic efficient and modern than the capitalism that had just collapsed and of course both of these colonizers were revisionist on a grand scale both of them wished to change the world order and between them in the late 1930s early 1940s they changed the European settlement quite considerably I would focus in on here in a crucial a crucial period between 1938 and 1941 between 1938 and 1941 the this the peace settlement after the first world war is essentially destroyed okay and I don't mean in the sort of trivial sense that the Germans built up their army that I was important but in a much more fundamental way the states that were created after the First World War were done away with the states that were created after the First World War as the basis of the new order are destroyed Austria 1938 in the Anschluss Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939 and then Poland and the Baltic States in 1939 in 1940 austrian czechoslovakia were destroyed by Germany Poland in the Baltic States as a result of cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union so we're looking at six political entities six nation-states that were removed from the map right over the course of less than three years what is that what did this mean it amended norton enormous amount for the people who live there of course but what does it mean for the structure of European history first of all it was a failure of the maritime empires right to put it gently written in France were unable to defend the system and the states would say themselves created and backed but also it looked and felt like a failure of the nation-state these nation states were not able to defend themselves against the first threats that emerged to their existence um these events from 1938 to 1941 confirmed a view which was quite general in Europe the 1930s that the old order was gone and that a new order was coming and the main question was as of 1940 or 1941 which new order that was going to be right the Soviets in the Nazis had both demonstrated their willingness and their ability to get rid of the order that was created after the first world war and the relevant question seemed to be which new order was it going to be that question was was posed in the most fundamental way in in June of 1941 when Nazi Germany broke its alliance with the Soviet Union and invaded the Soviet Union and Operation Barbarossa now this war is very interesting because this war between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1941 is about above all other things the control of a Ukrainian colony from the point of view of Moscow Ukraine is the keystone of the Soviet Union from the point of view of Hitler Ukraine is the crucial possession that's needed to break into an entirely new world to break out of the grasp of history and into something beautiful and new and fulfilling and qualitatively different than anything that's happened before um Ukraine is the essence of Levens file Ukraine is that bit of the planet any of you who have spent time on you in Ukraine I know it's gonna be even harder for you to imagine this than those who haven't but I mean the idea that you can make Ukraine do what you want to do is very challenging but um okay I hear laughter from people who have been to Ukraine that but but this is this was what Hitler thought it wasn't just a matter of agricultural self-sufficiency in some boring technical sense it was a matter of changing Germany into a world power it was about changing Germans into the racial Warriors that they were always meant to be and of course these ideas had a very they had these weren't just dreams there were practical policies associated with this one of them was the hunger plan which was meant to be implemented in the winter of 1941 the idea of the hunger plan was colonial although ruthlessly colonial the idea was that the agricultural production of Ukraine would be diverted from Ukraine from Ukraine itself from yellow ruse and from Russia that is from the Soviet Union to Germany and to the rest of Europe as necessary this diversion was meant to change the world political economy so that Germany would be self-sufficient but it was it was also and this was a side effect it was also meant to starve 30 million people 30 million people were supposed to starve in the middle of Europe in the winter of 1941 after this plan the true colonization would begin after 30 million people had starved the Germans and other Aryans from the Nazi point of view were to settle Ukraine and the rest of the so the west of the Soviet Union along the way ethnically cleansing starving and killing tens of millions of more people so there was a rather rath radical plan this plan and this is a subject that I treat in blood lands and I can't spell out here these plans although they kill a lot of people don't work out the way that they're supposed to and what happens in fact is that the Germans accelerate and radicalize another plan that they had the final solution so that it becomes events that we know as the Holocaust what the Germans what the Germans achieve in terms of their intentions most completely is the elimination by physical extermination of the Jewish population of all the places that they control okay so the Second World War ends as you know the so I'm not even you notice I'm not even talking about the Western Front the Second World War is chiefly a German Soviet war for control of Eastern Europe it's chiefly a clash of two different models of colonization in which one wins and one loses and of course the one that wins is the Soviet one which which brings us to the next part of what I want to talk about that is the post-war European projects the European projects after 1945 the themselves as answers both to the First World War and to the Second World War now when you're the victor when you win a war you you don't think you have to adapt in general it's the losers of wars who carry out reforms right or well in the case of America you have to recognize that you've lost a war right that's an important we you know we we haven't ever lost a war and therefore we never see the need for reform but in general it's the losers of wars who rethink if you win a war that that's sort of a poison chalice because you don't see the need for internal transformation so the one project after the Second World War is the extension of the Soviet model into Eastern Europe so all of these places that were created after the First World War as independent sovereign states all of them except for Austria now come under either communist or direct Soviet control right from the Baltic States down to Yugoslavia through Poland Hungary Romania Bulgaria Czechoslovakia this this experiment with the nation-state now becomes an experiment in Soviet satellite states the Soviet model is extended westward and it is very striking how its it that the the the overlap of territory is almost perfect the exception of course is Austria and you can see how different Austrian history then is the Soviets extend their model this model of internal colonization but this model has a couple of problems or one one fundamental problem the fundamental problem with internal colonization is that it's a model for development within what we would think of as third world conditions or the conditions of developing countries it's a model for economic development for primarily agrarian countries right which seek to follow an accelerated way the capitalist path towards massive industrialization right that is what Soviet industrial Soviet internal colonization was every country which the Soviets controlled after the Second World War was already was considerably richer than the Soviet Union itself right Czechoslovakia I mean at least the Bohemian part it sucks I was richer than pretty much anywhere else in Europe so the model applying a model which is meant for accelerated industrial development in countries that were already more Excel or industrial than the Soviet Union had a limited shelf life that had it had had limited possibilities as we as people began to see in the 1950s and the 1960s that's one vulnerability the second vulnerability is precisely contiguity when the Soviet model is applied in Mongolia that's one thing right when it's applied in China were arguably it made more sense although of course it led to horrible disasters there that's that's something else but when the Soviet model is applied in Central Europe that means that it's contiguous geographically contiguous touches another model it touches the model of West European integration which is always going to be the natural component anyone in Eastern Europe is always going to compare their state of development to the state of development in Western Europe because after all before the Second World War just to remind you there was no such thing as Eastern Western Europe right the term Eastern Europe and the term Western Europe come into being after 1945 the East was not poorer than the West before the war right no one would have made that distinction in those ways the East and the West diverge after 1945 and my point is that this is something that East Europeans under Soviet domination could themselves perceive which brings me to the project of European Union well I'm just going to call it European Union I'm aware that it was the European economic communities and so on and so forth well let's just call it the European Economic Community European Union for for safety's sake between 1945 and 1989 no the the thing which I find striking about the project of European economic integration after the Second World War is that it begins where colonization fails okay who who fails to colonize in European history the greatest European power the Germans right they are the ones who fail their great colonization project is the invasion of the Soviet Union that fails it fails in a really dramatic way which brings about tens of millions of deaths and millions of deaths of Germans the people who fail at colonization and who know they failed at colonization again it's very important to know when you failed I mean arguably that's what the Germans are good at the the people who fail at colonization and know that they failed are the ones who are most interested in European economic integration right which is you know to give away the whole argument a substitute for colonization right so the people who are most interested in European Economic Cooperation are precisely the West Germans the people the only people the only major country in Europe which has no colonies and no hope of having colonies right as of 1945 the other people who are very interested in European economic economic integration are the French who also lost the Second World War I mean let's not delude ourselves right they lost the Second World War in all kinds of ways I mean they lost it twice in fact no I mean I just mean this is look I'm not sure what Norwegians have to laugh about here anyway the the French the French lost the war in the spring of 1940 right I mean they fought and they lost they took they took more than a hundred thousand mortal casualties they fought and they lost and then they lost it again because more Frenchmen fought in access uniforms right than an allied uniform so they lost it again fighting on the side of the German so they lost the Second World War twice this is why there's no official military history of the Second World War in French by the way that second part that I just said so they lost the Second World War and they were and they were willing to go along with European economic cooperation so it begins with the federal public of Germany France and Benelux the better the Belgium Netherlands and and Luxembourg and as European economic integration precedes it precedes the logic follows almost perfectly the collapse of the maritime empires right see the maritime empires they win the First World War the British win the Second World War but after the Second World War you have decolonization and with decolonization right as the maritime empires lose and realize their lose around the world they become more interesting the project of European comic and integration and the bigger your maritime Empire and the longer it takes for you to lose it the less interested you are ie the British right but in general Grosso modo what happens is that places like France the Netherlands Portugal Spain and eventually Britain all of these places who are traditionally great maritime powers they become partners in this project of European integration precisely as they lose their overseas colonies so what's happening the big story of European economic integration as I see it is that it is the counterpart to and in a way the answer to the global process of decolonization all right the the process of decolonization which begins in Europe itself with the Greeks and the Serbs in the 1820s and 1830s ends in Europe in the 1970s with all of the or most of the great colonial powers joining in this process of European of European integration if in this larger scheme of the year 1914 then becomes a kind of middle point right 1914 is the end of land Empire but not the end of maritime Empire 1914 is is a step along the way in a general process of the decolonization of Europe itself ok now this brings me to where I want to leave you which is a couple of thoughts about 2014 I'm a historian so I sometimes get these things wrong but I'm pretty sure the year we're now is 2014 right ok that's why we're talking about 1914 that and we have a base-10 system in math ok so look what does it mean this is the reflection I want to leave you with what does it mean for us today in 2014 to be looking back at 1914 where are we in relationship to 1914 what are some of the connections that are present that we don't see because of course the risk of commemoration is that you make something exotic right that happened a hundred years ago and you know look at those crazy wars in the trenches look at those crazy Serbs and you know these things that couldn't happen today right I mean the danger of commemoration is that you can put make things seem too distant what I want to suggest is that 1914 is really in the middle of things that are happening today okay let me try to defend that claim let me begin with where the European Union is today the European Union in 1989 was a collection in general of former maritime powers right the story that I'm telling you about decolonization is the story of 1945 299 but since 1989 the European Union has transformed itself by admitting places that were never empires of any sort by admitting the places which were the nation-states created in night after the war of 1914 right all these places that are new members of the European Union Poland the Czech Republic Slovakia Slovenia Croatia three Baltic states hungry these are all places that became began their lives as sovereign states when after the first world war right they were sovereign states in the first world war after the first world war they collapsed in the 1930s one way or another they're they're destroyed in the second world war one way or another they become Soviet satellites the LAT the latest step on their career is joining the European Union right which of course transforms the European Union the European Union now is part of the post first world war settlement that is what it is as of the enlargements of 2004 2007 and 2013 which admitted these countries with these enlargements you can see some of the basic purposes and if you like successes of of the European Union it solves some of the basic problems of nation-states these dilemmas that I've stressed the whole time that these places are too small to be economically too self-sufficient and that they need contiguity with some kind of defender in order to survive the European Union solves those particular problems it also as I've already stressed become is the place where defeated European colonizers get to go I'm not going to say it's a kind of rest home because there you have too many risks but not you you're not in the European Union yet we're gonna get to that before it's all over Europeans have too much in front of them to think of it that way but it is a place where European states can go after the history of empire is over it's that and it's a place where nation states can go when they realize the nation state can't work right okay so it is both of these things at the same time however it has limits and the limit that I want to stress is that it's because it's not an empire and because it's not a state it doesn't have a conception of itself and it doesn't have a foreign policy it the United States the United States used to have a foreign policy that's all I'm going to say about this question right now its foreign policy and the Queen the crucial questions of Europe is much less relevant than it was 25 years ago or even or even 15 years ago the European Union runs up against these limits of not having a foreign policy of course on its borders right here in Norway I'm just going to say one thing about Norway later on and most relevantly now I would say in in in Ukraine now the interesting thing I find about Ukraine is that when I say that the European Union was an answer the first world war that the enlargement of the European Union are part of the first world war settlement right there was a limit to that claim and the limit to that claim is the Bolshevik Revolution the European Union now includes all of the small nation states that were created from the German Empire or created from the Habsburg Empire and some that were created from the Ottoman Empire what it doesn't include is a single square metre of territory that was in the Soviet Union as it was established in December of 1922 not a single one right so that seems to be a real line right and that seems to be a place where the legacy of the First World War is still very much with us which brings me to the counter model to the European Union the title promises unions so I'm going to give you a second Union there is now roaming the world a counter model to the European Union which is known as the Eurasian Union um you in Norway are in a very um uh said very unique that's how you can tell an American at somebody who says things like very unique the the Canadian sort of laugh at their sleeves and we say things like that it's so unique anyway but Norway is in a unique position because as of January 2015 eleven months from now Norway will have a border a long border with the European Union and also a 200 kilometer long metre on land at sea with the Eurasian Union right with Russia there was a counter project to the European Union it's called the Eurasian Union just what it will be we don't know yet but some of the basic principles have already been outlined it involves the subordination of individual freedom to the state it involves the ritualization of democracy and it's mechanization it involves a hierarchy among states rather than the recognition of sovereignty it involves a very different reading of both the first and the Second World War than any of the ones that one is likely to find in in this part of the world in which both of the world wars turn out to be stories of the ethnic virtues of Russians and interestingly enough and this is the most interesting part there's a there's there seems to be a clear difference in the way that history is processed in the European Union as a code as opposed to Eurasian Union and this is just something I'm gonna try to convey to you because I spend a lot of time lately reading precisely the kinds of stuff we're talking about in Russian and Ukrainian um in Western Europe or in Central Europe the contemplation of the first and second world wars is generally done as a way to try to draw lessons right history is moving forward insofar as we learn things from the past that's why you and I are here today I take it the way that the Eurasian Union processes history is a little different history they they seem to process history rather in a postmodern way so the first world war on the second world war produced fragments and symbols and images that you can use any way you like in order to kind of in order to maneuver for an advantage and foreign policy and you know this is very and this is in fact very effective the the classic the classic example which if you don't know it yet you will is that the the Eurasian foreign policy involves calling anyone who opposes the Eurasian project or who acts decisively against the region project a Nazi if you have this hasn't touched you I can pretty much guarantee you that it will touch you soon no I just want to close then with trying to make clear how I think there's there's a there's a kind of relevance to this to this century to the passage of time between 1914 and 1914 night 2014 which has to do precisely with with Ukraine Ukraine is an interesting place because Ukraine is the only country where one observes people marching suffering in fact it's not too dramatic to say even dying in order to join the European Union right one doesn't observe that within the European Union itself on the contrary it's the only but it isn't in some sense the only place which has a will to join Europe which is how the present way of protests and the president the president opposition movement began this is running up against in in in a way that from the distance of Oslo one can call it interesting it's running up against an interesting way the Eurasian project right so what we are seeing since November in Ukraine is a confrontation between these two alternative projects of Union for Europe um in which large numbers of people in Ukraine are protesting against their own government for rejecting a closer connection to Europe and the counter propaganda which is being used against them is that they are all Nazis right so this is an interesting again that's a word that you can use from this distance this is an interesting first example of the two projects of Union and how they're working themselves out inside Europe itself now one of the chief Eurasian ideologists Oda Kiselyov who's now in charge of the most important part of the Russian media and is the he is a talk show host um he recently proposed as a warm-up to the Olympics that when people who are homosexual die their hearts should be taken from their bodies and burned the if you're on the Ukrainian my Don right if you're a protester in Ukraine and you call the hotline that you're supposed to call when you get beaten up by the police that hotline was founded by lesbian gay bisexual transgender activists in Ukraine there is something going on here with fascism but it's not the thing that the Eurasian czar are telling you it is we have a very interesting sort of postmodern attempt to use concepts from from European history not in a constructive way and this is really my very last point but in the destructive way because the Eurasian model as far as one can work it out so far is to disintegrate in order to integrate the European model the European Union model says you have to have a nation-state if you have a nation-state than you can join but that's a precondition you can't join as an individual or you know you have to you can only join as a nation-state the Eurasian model on their hands seems to be that we will destroy your nation-state from within and then you'll be then you'll be quite happy to join so they're one model as integration of nation-states and the other is disintegration in order to and in order to integrate I think this is rather interesting and for Norway it might become before too terribly long relevant and I think it's it's already relevant this is really the very last thing I want to say for the European Union itself the European Union itself let's say up to 2014 but I think not for very much longer has been able to understand itself in in much the same way that I presented it as a kind of answer to historical problems but there's something fundamentally passive about that right I mean it's it's that Europe has a zone of peace and prosperity is unbelievably impressive but nevertheless the weakness here is that it doesn't give you this idea of solving past problems it doesn't give you much of a view into the future and the thing about running these two projects being in competition is that they're continuous they overlap they don't just have a long border but they're inside each other and all sorts of ways right so the the the power of the Russian Empire which depends upon hydrocarbons again something which you don't have to deal with for now but everyone else does and the and the the power of the Russian Empire which depends upon large concentrations of wealth these things already matter inside the European Union one of the reasons why the European Union doesn't have a foreign policy is that there's so much Russian Ukrainian health inside it lobbying against such a thing so I think we're really at a kind of tipping point interestingly in 2014 and and although historians are paid you know insofar as we are paid were paid not to make predictions I will leave you with one prediction I think this story of the competition of European Union's the European Union and the Eurasian Union is going to be the is going to be the undercurrent of all of our commemorations of 1914 it's going to be the thing which is actually happening on the surface in 2014 as we ponder and commemorate thank you very much you

Channel: Fritt Ord

Views: 37,246

Rating: 4.6937356 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 32_cqhaSJLs

Length: 49min 49sec (2989 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/olddoc]

Very interesting and provocative.

[u/flyingorange]

Well I expected a more interesting presentation :(