1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:09,600 So on behalf of the European study, sentencing at this college, it's my great pleasure to celebrate the launch or relaunch of Timothy Garton Ash. 2 00:00:09,600 --> 00:00:16,530 His book, The Revolution of 1989, witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague when he was pulled that summer. 3 00:00:16,530 --> 00:00:21,060 Remember that he, a history faculty and also member here at the European Studies Centre. 4 00:00:21,060 --> 00:00:24,640 Now, of course, it's become kind of a cliché to say that someone doesn't need introduction, 5 00:00:24,640 --> 00:00:32,910 but I think in this case, Timothy Garton Ash really does not need one. He is a he's professor of European studies here at the college. 6 00:00:32,910 --> 00:00:39,750 He is also a long standing member of the European Studies Centre and also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford. 7 00:00:39,750 --> 00:00:46,980 He's the author of some 10 books, most recently his book on free speech, which I'm sure many of you know and have read. 8 00:00:46,980 --> 00:00:56,040 But tonight we're going to go back to some of his early work looking at the publications and reflections on his book on the Magic Lantern. 9 00:00:56,040 --> 00:01:01,620 And I just want to draw attention to one thing because I think in that book, those who have read it is in a sense, 10 00:01:01,620 --> 00:01:09,270 it's a kind of special book and that he's thinking about his role as a journalist, but also as a kind of witness and is an historian. 11 00:01:09,270 --> 00:01:13,710 And I just wonder before you probably forgot in this passage, you might want to read out one thing or you sense, 12 00:01:13,710 --> 00:01:17,410 I think, a kind of reflective moment about that actual process itself. 13 00:01:17,410 --> 00:01:24,060 We said the witness can, if he is any, if he is lucky, see things that the historian will not find in any documents. 14 00:01:24,060 --> 00:01:30,720 Sometimes a glance, a shrug at a chance for more will be more revealing than 100 speeches in these events, 15 00:01:30,720 --> 00:01:36,270 even more than in most contemporary history. Much of great importance was not written down at all either, 16 00:01:36,270 --> 00:01:43,890 because it occurred in hasty conversations with no no takers present or because the business was conducted on the phone, 17 00:01:43,890 --> 00:01:47,400 or because the words or pictures came by television. 18 00:01:47,400 --> 00:01:53,640 And perhaps the most difficult thing of all for historians to recapture is the sense of what at a given historical moment. 19 00:01:53,640 --> 00:01:58,530 People did not know about the future. Now the things we know a great deal about this future. 20 00:01:58,530 --> 00:02:06,210 We're now in six, three decades on. And I think now as we're coming up to 30th anniversary celebration of of 1989, it's a very, 21 00:02:06,210 --> 00:02:14,040 very different Europe than it was at the 10th and 20th anniversary celebrations in 1999 and 2009. 22 00:02:14,040 --> 00:02:25,200 Now, a Europe that's beset with a range of new threats and developments, the idea of A. A. just yesterday have made it quite clear if on a continent, 23 00:02:25,200 --> 00:02:33,330 several range of issues of nationalism, xenophobia and what is now called illiberal democracies, or 1989, was about the dismantling of walls. 24 00:02:33,330 --> 00:02:38,220 You can argue that contemporary Europe is about the construction of fences and barbed wire borders, 25 00:02:38,220 --> 00:02:44,900 and remember that Eastern Europe is the only region in the world in the 21st century that's actually suffering population loss. 26 00:02:44,900 --> 00:02:55,890 So it's also a story of radical and it's serious about immigration sentiment that a sense working with this idea of that kind of his story as witness, 27 00:02:55,890 --> 00:03:01,120 I think in this particular talk tonight is he's looking both backward and looking 28 00:03:01,120 --> 00:03:05,040 to the president's kind of reflections on the publication of Magic Lander, 29 00:03:05,040 --> 00:03:09,900 his experiences and recollections for that and his mirabilis three decades ago. 30 00:03:09,900 --> 00:03:20,470 So please join me in welcoming Tim for tonight's topic. All right, thank you very much, Paul, 31 00:03:20,470 --> 00:03:28,330 it's great to be doing this on home turf and I can see we're going to reproduce the atmosphere of 1989, which was full of overcrowded rooms. 32 00:03:28,330 --> 00:03:36,910 I warn you it's going to get very hot in here. The only thing missing is cigarette smoke and the smell of damp snow. 33 00:03:36,910 --> 00:03:44,980 It's also a great pleasure to be doing it with Paul Betts, if any of you haven't really read his article in past and present. 34 00:03:44,980 --> 00:03:55,390 Looking back on 1989, 30 years on, which is a true historian's reflections on the changing meanings of 1989, 35 00:03:55,390 --> 00:04:02,110 as Paul mentioned, I started travelling behind the Iron Curtain in 1978. 36 00:04:02,110 --> 00:04:13,060 I was travelling throughout the next decade, particularly getting to know the leaders of the Democratic oppositions, the dissidents, 37 00:04:13,060 --> 00:04:24,430 people like lots of Havel, Adam McNair, Qian Qichen stylish and writing about it very much as a spectator, our own guys. 38 00:04:24,430 --> 00:04:32,020 So my model for political writing was Orwell, which is you don't pretend to be impartial, let alone objective. 39 00:04:32,020 --> 00:04:39,050 Nobody is objective, but you don't even pretend to be impartial that you're honest about your own sympathies, your own impartiality. 40 00:04:39,050 --> 00:04:45,880 Read homage to Catalonia. This book, originally published in 1990, that whole book of witness. 41 00:04:45,880 --> 00:04:53,050 From that moment, I then came to this college for the last 30 years, I've kept up with the literature, 42 00:04:53,050 --> 00:05:01,240 including the scholarly literature on this whole area, but also with developments in the countries themselves. 43 00:05:01,240 --> 00:05:13,990 And what I've done in the last year is to go back very intensively to the four or five countries covered in this book to to try and understand, 44 00:05:13,990 --> 00:05:18,610 in a sense what has gone wrong, because of course, that's part of our subject today. 45 00:05:18,610 --> 00:05:23,020 There also what's gone, right? And so there's a big new chapter. 46 00:05:23,020 --> 00:05:33,250 This is what you can buy outside is a new edition with a big new chapter really wrestling with the question of the last 30 years. 47 00:05:33,250 --> 00:05:37,900 What are you going to do today in the next 45 50 minutes, if three things? 48 00:05:37,900 --> 00:05:46,510 First of all, I'm going to try and remind us all of a little of what happened with a slideshow. 49 00:05:46,510 --> 00:05:57,880 Second, and by the way, when I talk about Central Europe in this context, I am talking specifically about the countries that used to be East Germany, 50 00:05:57,880 --> 00:06:04,830 Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia and are now the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland and a part of Germany. 51 00:06:04,830 --> 00:06:11,740 And I'm talking specifically about those. Secondly, and the main part of my talk. 52 00:06:11,740 --> 00:06:24,370 I'm going to be wrestling with that question of why, what went wrong and why and what is the specific character of Central European populism. 53 00:06:24,370 --> 00:06:29,380 And then thirdly, and rather briefly, I'm going to ask where we are today. 54 00:06:29,380 --> 00:06:36,250 Go to my title. Is it time for a new liberation and ask what Europe can do about it? 55 00:06:36,250 --> 00:06:49,300 So we're going to start with the slide show and we start with a video which I made for the BBC, a documentary in 1989. 56 00:06:49,300 --> 00:06:56,890 And the moment I've chosen to start with is actually near the end of the 17th November of 1989. 57 00:06:56,890 --> 00:07:02,320 And it's about the students kicking off the Velvet Revolution in Prague. 58 00:07:02,320 --> 00:07:08,110 And I thought if there were any students in the room, you might like this and maybe get a couple of ideas from it. 59 00:07:08,110 --> 00:07:31,870 So here we get. The police broke up several of them earlier in 1989. 60 00:07:31,870 --> 00:07:37,090 But on the 17th of November, crowd students confronted the regime. 61 00:07:37,090 --> 00:07:47,440 I remember Sunday, the 17th of November, I was with my friends, some of our agents who were on our underground paper. 62 00:07:47,440 --> 00:07:55,990 You're very human VIDEO. There was some information about the students, about a student demonstration and the people in the underground developed. 63 00:07:55,990 --> 00:08:11,830 The students had nothing. The police chief didn't believe the students would change part time. 64 00:08:11,830 --> 00:08:15,940 So the students started it. 65 00:08:15,940 --> 00:08:25,450 And what then happened was that the crowds, the rest of the people started coming out in the crowds, by the way, in Bratislava as well as Prague, 66 00:08:25,450 --> 00:08:34,480 started growing and growing havo lots of Havel hurried back to this country house and as it were, took charge of the revolution. 67 00:08:34,480 --> 00:08:39,010 His headquarters were in a theatre called the Magic Lantern. 68 00:08:39,010 --> 00:08:49,220 Hence, the title of the book and I, to my great delight, managed to get a visa from East Germany and took the train into to to Prague. 69 00:08:49,220 --> 00:08:58,510 I'm just so you understand what's going on. This next clip is from the 1999 documentary It Has Havel on Me. 70 00:08:58,510 --> 00:09:10,450 And Then We Look at Samizdat Visit VIDEO from November 1989, when I found Havel in his favourite beer cellar. 71 00:09:10,450 --> 00:09:24,010 Here we go. To know hundreds of thousands of people out on Licences Square every day chanting. 72 00:09:24,010 --> 00:09:47,170 The time has come. The problem directed the revolution from the back rooms of the Magic Lantern Theatre. 73 00:09:47,170 --> 00:10:06,610 I was there with him at the time, know. Now we revisit the scene of the most astonishing performance. 74 00:10:06,610 --> 00:10:22,280 You know, and I think that. He hasn't been back for years, and it was just that, you know, 75 00:10:22,280 --> 00:10:30,340 it was need to be this way that I found some footage from an undercover video filmed at the beginning of the revolution. 76 00:10:30,340 --> 00:10:42,740 And we were all wondering then, how long we would love to see you so suddenly this is a police station, even if it is. 77 00:10:42,740 --> 00:10:50,590 You. Going to say you need. 78 00:10:50,590 --> 00:10:57,340 Apart from the fact that I'm absolutely delighted to be here, the addition and the history, 79 00:10:57,340 --> 00:11:02,510 because that's the beauty of the region, the Foreign Ministry, which we hope is accelerating ahead of this, 80 00:11:02,510 --> 00:11:11,590 and it took 10 years to develop the satellite in the words of wisdom to the people and the families of the victims, 81 00:11:11,590 --> 00:11:18,190 to the potential criticism that suggests the rocket will take 10 days. 82 00:11:18,190 --> 00:11:30,550 So that was the quote. And what was characteristic of 1989 was this extraordinary acceleration effect. 83 00:11:30,550 --> 00:11:37,330 So historians, as you know, can trace things back as far as you like, we pretty quickly get back to the Big Bang. 84 00:11:37,330 --> 00:11:45,670 And certainly, if you're tracing back the causes of 1989, you have to go back at least to 1945. 85 00:11:45,670 --> 00:11:50,530 But if you're looking for the direct chain of causation in Central Europe, 86 00:11:50,530 --> 00:12:00,160 as I've defined it and specifically in Poland for 10 years, it is summer 1979, the visit of John Paul, 87 00:12:00,160 --> 00:12:09,130 the second to his native land in which millions of poles turned out and to greet him and for days, 88 00:12:09,130 --> 00:12:13,480 it was as if the communist states had almost ceased to exist. 89 00:12:13,480 --> 00:12:16,660 It was an early experience of solidarity with us more or less, 90 00:12:16,660 --> 00:12:24,010 followed a year later by the birth of solidarity in the great occupation striking the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk, 91 00:12:24,010 --> 00:12:28,630 something unprecedented in the history of the Soviet bloc. 92 00:12:28,630 --> 00:12:32,770 A movement at its peak of 10 million people. 93 00:12:32,770 --> 00:12:40,060 One in three adults in Poland, which lasted 16 months without a Soviet invasion. 94 00:12:40,060 --> 00:12:45,730 It was finally crushed by the declaration of Martial Law in December 1981. 95 00:12:45,730 --> 00:12:48,640 The tanks on the snow covered streets, 96 00:12:48,640 --> 00:12:59,450 but Poland was never quote unquote normalised in the way that Czechoslovakia was after 1968 or Hungary after 1956. 97 00:12:59,450 --> 00:13:06,340 Solidarity was very much reduced, but not eliminated. 98 00:13:06,340 --> 00:13:15,430 And what then happens is that after Gorbachev comes to power in the Kremlin in 1985, 99 00:13:15,430 --> 00:13:21,730 there is an amnesty in Poland and solidarity very rapidly recovers its strength. 100 00:13:21,730 --> 00:13:29,260 The communist authorities recognise that they're going to have to deal with solidarity. 101 00:13:29,260 --> 00:13:36,460 At the same time, we have a framing development, which is these guys. 102 00:13:36,460 --> 00:13:45,370 That is to say, the Reagan administration makes a remarkable shift from the hard Cold War arms race stance 103 00:13:45,370 --> 00:13:51,520 of his first term to embracing the opportunity presented by Gorbachev in his second term. 104 00:13:51,520 --> 00:14:00,400 This is at the end of December 19 December 1988. Reagan Gorbachev, handing on to Bush senior, 105 00:14:00,400 --> 00:14:06,490 said that the international framework conditions also as made by the West German 106 00:14:06,490 --> 00:14:12,790 government and the US politic are very favourable so that at the end of 1988, 107 00:14:12,790 --> 00:14:20,020 it was possible for me to say the emperor indicated that one could see what one could 108 00:14:20,020 --> 00:14:27,250 not see foresee was how it was going to happen or how fast it was going to happen. 109 00:14:27,250 --> 00:14:32,170 So the image I used at the time was of Ottoman ization. 110 00:14:32,170 --> 00:14:36,700 This was going to be a gradual, piecemeal decline of the Soviet Empire. 111 00:14:36,700 --> 00:14:40,780 I thought wrongly like that of the Ottoman Empire. 112 00:14:40,780 --> 00:14:43,870 Piece by piece disappearing at the edges. 113 00:14:43,870 --> 00:14:55,030 And then, as I say, what is characteristic of 1989 is that fantastic acceleration years, months, weeks, days. 114 00:14:55,030 --> 00:15:06,580 So February 89, we had the opening of the unprecedented round table talks between the communist authorities and solidarity 115 00:15:06,580 --> 00:15:14,230 that leads to an agreement to the first semi free election in the Soviet bloc on the fourth of June 1989. 116 00:15:14,230 --> 00:15:28,630 Remember that date? While the protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing were being crushed by the Chinese security forces that very same day? 117 00:15:28,630 --> 00:15:38,140 You had the worst first semi free election in the Soviet bloc, and its symbol was Gary Cooper. 118 00:15:38,140 --> 00:15:47,350 You see him on the right here. So the poster says high noon, 4th of June 1999, and that Gary Cooper wearing the Soviet and not Spanish. 119 00:15:47,350 --> 00:15:51,900 That's American soft power. That is at its height. 120 00:15:51,900 --> 00:15:58,110 Imagine that today solidarity won almost everything it possibly could in that election, 121 00:15:58,110 --> 00:16:05,340 including completely dominating the upper house, the Senate in in a free election. 122 00:16:05,340 --> 00:16:13,410 This led to the selection of the first non-Communist prime minister in the Soviet bloc today, 123 00:16:13,410 --> 00:16:22,110 which mousavi its key that he is absolutely exhausting but exhausted, but making the V for victory sign in Hungary. 124 00:16:22,110 --> 00:16:23,970 The great symbolic moment, and again, 125 00:16:23,970 --> 00:16:34,620 I describe this at length in the book was a ceremonial reburial of imminent of the communist leader of the 1956 revolution. 126 00:16:34,620 --> 00:16:43,990 And the most electrifying moment of that was the speech by a then unknown, fiery young student leader. 127 00:16:43,990 --> 00:16:46,200 Anyone recognised him. 128 00:16:46,200 --> 00:16:57,840 Viktor Orban, who, by the way, breaking the agreement between the opposition speakers, called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops. 129 00:16:57,840 --> 00:17:04,050 I've never forgotten that moment. He was fantastic back then. 130 00:17:04,050 --> 00:17:12,210 At the same time, something else really important was happening in Hungary, namely the opening of the Iron Curtain. 131 00:17:12,210 --> 00:17:20,220 Quite literally, with giant wire cutters, the Austrian and Hungarian foreign ministers is the famous picture, 132 00:17:20,220 --> 00:17:25,860 openly cutting the wire of the Iron Curtain knowing full well. 133 00:17:25,860 --> 00:17:32,790 And by the way, we now know from the documents that the Hungarian Communist Party knew very well that the 134 00:17:32,790 --> 00:17:39,180 East Germans would seise the opportunity many East Germans went on holiday in Hungary. 135 00:17:39,180 --> 00:17:48,420 This is the famous pan-European picnic of summer 89, located strategically just by the now open Iron Curtain, 136 00:17:48,420 --> 00:17:53,370 and there's a bunch of happy East Germans fleeing across. 137 00:17:53,370 --> 00:17:56,130 Now this, of course. 138 00:17:56,130 --> 00:18:12,060 Triggered a reaction inside East Germany itself, where people said, remember, exit, voice or loyalty rather than exiting, I'm going to raise my voice. 139 00:18:12,060 --> 00:18:17,250 Initially, these protests were, as usual, violently repressed. 140 00:18:17,250 --> 00:18:25,170 7TH of October 1989 Leipzig the 40th anniversary of the German Democratic Republic. 141 00:18:25,170 --> 00:18:34,200 People fleeing from the security forces. It's a great photo, I think, filled with a mixture of fear and excitement on their faces. 142 00:18:34,200 --> 00:18:39,150 Only two days later, the 9th of October 1989. 143 00:18:39,150 --> 00:18:49,110 That's what we have a vast turnout on the streets of Leipzig at the Monday demonstration. 144 00:18:49,110 --> 00:19:02,790 An estimated 70000 people filling the Ring Road around Leipzig, and this was a crucial moment at which the barrier of fear was broken. 145 00:19:02,790 --> 00:19:07,590 And from that point, there was really no turning back for the demonstrations, 146 00:19:07,590 --> 00:19:16,410 which by the 23rd of October, and this is also Leipzig had turned from the Chant Villas in dusko. 147 00:19:16,410 --> 00:19:21,300 We are the people with already turning towards. 148 00:19:21,300 --> 00:19:29,640 We been involved. We are one nation. We want one new Germany followed, of course. 149 00:19:29,640 --> 00:19:39,060 As you all know, on the 9th of November by the totemic images of the opening of the Berlin Wall back in Prague. 150 00:19:39,060 --> 00:19:43,830 However, they were still repressing the protest. 151 00:19:43,830 --> 00:19:49,320 I think this is a wonderful photo of the student protests that they grabbed by an 152 00:19:49,320 --> 00:19:55,980 equally young policeman who doesn't quite know what he's doing like it very much. 153 00:19:55,980 --> 00:20:04,480 After the 17th of Ember, the student protests, of course, the crowds gather in Windsor Square, 300000 people. 154 00:20:04,480 --> 00:20:10,620 Now what this crowd is about to do is this. 155 00:20:10,620 --> 00:20:20,910 That doesn't sound much, but I do it alone. But I can tell you if three hundred thousand people all take their keys out of their pockets and do that, 156 00:20:20,910 --> 00:20:25,920 it makes the most amazing sound like mass Chinese bells. 157 00:20:25,920 --> 00:20:31,050 Nobody, no historian will ever know who was the person, 158 00:20:31,050 --> 00:20:37,440 the unknown citizen who first decided to take the keys out of that party and in whatever notes. 159 00:20:37,440 --> 00:20:47,100 But it's one of those examples of the creativity of the crowd and very rapidly, not quite in ten days, but very soon thereafter. 160 00:20:47,100 --> 00:20:51,960 My old friend Vladislav havo here. Still, the dissident becomes at the end of December, 161 00:20:51,960 --> 00:21:01,740 the president in a hastily made suit with the famously too short trousers and quite a leg length right back. 162 00:21:01,740 --> 00:21:11,940 So if we could have the lights back up, please? That was the reduced Shakespeare Company Company version of 1989. 163 00:21:11,940 --> 00:21:20,520 Ten years in ten minutes. Read more about it in the book, which is available at a knockdown price in the hole. 164 00:21:20,520 --> 00:21:25,920 Of course, Bulgaria had followed and Romania, which are not going to talk about by the end of the year. 165 00:21:25,920 --> 00:21:35,190 This was followed by German unification in 1998, with some very impressive statecraft from the Bush administration in West Germany 166 00:21:35,190 --> 00:21:41,790 by the equally stirring story of the self liberation of the Baltic states. 167 00:21:41,790 --> 00:21:43,500 And by the end of the Soviet Union, 168 00:21:43,500 --> 00:21:51,870 which our colleagues in the Russian and Europe from the Study Centre have written about so eloquently so that by 1992, 169 00:21:51,870 --> 00:21:58,800 we could say we are now in the post war world. 170 00:21:58,800 --> 00:22:05,040 From the post-war world to the post war world now, these days, 171 00:22:05,040 --> 00:22:16,950 a lot of people complain about Western triumphalism or liberal triumphalism after 1989, and there was a lot of that. 172 00:22:16,950 --> 00:22:23,700 But that's because it was one [INAUDIBLE] of a western crime, right? 173 00:22:23,700 --> 00:22:31,800 It was one of the greatest victories for freedom, democracy, Europe, the West that any of us are likely to experience. 174 00:22:31,800 --> 00:22:44,070 Probably the greatest. A nuclear armed post, totalitarian enormous continental land and apart softly and suddenly vanished away in just three years, 175 00:22:44,070 --> 00:22:55,620 with hardly any shot fired in anger. These were almost entirely peaceful revolutions, unlike the 1789 model, and I would argue that 1989. 176 00:22:55,620 --> 00:22:59,910 Was the best year in European history. That is a challenge for you. 177 00:22:59,910 --> 00:23:09,510 Namely, a better life. A mistake on mistake was not that we celebrated this as a great Trump. 178 00:23:09,510 --> 00:23:18,690 Quite right. Our mistake was to believe that this was the new normal, the way things were going, 179 00:23:18,690 --> 00:23:24,180 the direction history was travelling so that when it comes to Iraq, 180 00:23:24,180 --> 00:23:32,460 many of the neo conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz genuinely believe that if you only knocked down the dictator, 181 00:23:32,460 --> 00:23:40,710 a new democracy will somehow miraculously emerge as it had in Central Europe or when it comes to the Arab Spring. 182 00:23:40,710 --> 00:23:46,800 The almost entire journalistic coverage treated this as a kind of new 1989. 183 00:23:46,800 --> 00:23:52,590 I plead guilty to this myself. I have those hopes, too. But it was a big mistake. 184 00:23:52,590 --> 00:24:02,280 These illusions were reinforced were encouraged by the fact that things in Central Europe, 185 00:24:02,280 --> 00:24:09,240 not in the former Yugoslavia, not in former Soviet Union, but in Central Europe, were actually going very well. 186 00:24:09,240 --> 00:24:17,010 That was successful transition to democracy Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary to join NATO by the end of 1999. 187 00:24:17,010 --> 00:24:22,230 So on the tenth anniversary, we had an awful lot to celebrate on the 20th anniversary. 188 00:24:22,230 --> 00:24:34,200 2009, we had even more to celebrate because not just those countries, but Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and most remarkably, the Baltic states, 189 00:24:34,200 --> 00:24:44,880 which haven't existed on the map of Europe in 1989, were members of the EU and NATO, something no one would have dreamed of. 190 00:24:44,880 --> 00:24:49,410 Almost no one would have dreamed of on the first of January 1989, right? 191 00:24:49,410 --> 00:24:55,080 And political scientists were arguing that Poland, the countries of Central Europe, were, 192 00:24:55,080 --> 00:25:02,250 quote unquote consolidated democracies might be an idea just to open the door to give a tiny bit 193 00:25:02,250 --> 00:25:08,240 of ventilation because I'm sure you're feeling increasingly like people in the Magic Mountains. 194 00:25:08,240 --> 00:25:16,920 But no. However, on the 30th anniversary, what a different feeling we're not. 195 00:25:16,920 --> 00:25:25,920 We look at what is happening in these countries and actually we rather tend to understand what has still gone well. 196 00:25:25,920 --> 00:25:34,590 The fact that there's been enormous economic growth, that life expectancy has increased up to 10 years in many of these countries, 197 00:25:34,590 --> 00:25:40,860 that young people have extraordinary life choices and life chances thanks to the EU. 198 00:25:40,860 --> 00:25:46,560 But politically, we look at it and we remember that guy. 199 00:25:46,560 --> 00:25:49,170 And then we look at that guy. 200 00:25:49,170 --> 00:25:57,640 Look, I think the change of the physiognomy of Viktor Orban over the last 30 years, he now has what I would call a Mussolini jol. 201 00:25:57,640 --> 00:26:04,020 I think it is very significant. The worst case is clearly Hungary. 202 00:26:04,020 --> 00:26:09,660 Hungary has been downgraded by Freedom House to the status of three. 203 00:26:09,660 --> 00:26:18,060 I have argued and this is a bold claim, but I will defend it in Q&A that Hungary is no longer a democracy, 204 00:26:18,060 --> 00:26:26,490 not just illiberal democracy, but no longer democracy is what political scientists call a competitive, authoritarian system. 205 00:26:26,490 --> 00:26:31,080 Now you're going to say, but look, they just the opposition just won Budapest. 206 00:26:31,080 --> 00:26:36,120 Indeed, they did. And do you know what? The opposition just won Istanbul. 207 00:26:36,120 --> 00:26:42,840 The fact that you win the mayoralty of the capital city doesn't mean you are in a proper democracy. 208 00:26:42,840 --> 00:26:49,170 No one would say Erdogan's Turkey is a proper democracy. Poland is an intermediate condition. 209 00:26:49,170 --> 00:26:53,970 The Law and Justice Party, which won another election on the 13th of October, 210 00:26:53,970 --> 00:27:02,190 is clearly attempting to follow Orban's example to do what I call order urbanisation alla colonnades. 211 00:27:02,190 --> 00:27:14,070 But isn't there yet? And we'll talk about that. I think the term illiberal democracy is a helpful term to describe a liberal democracy in decay. 212 00:27:14,070 --> 00:27:20,940 It's a transitional, not a stable state. OK. And I think Poland, in that sense, is close to a liberal democracy. 213 00:27:20,940 --> 00:27:30,750 Czech Republic has an oligarch who's a former secret police informer as its prime minister and Milos Zeman as its president, 214 00:27:30,750 --> 00:27:36,540 who is extremely close to Xi Jinping's China and Putin's Russia. 215 00:27:36,540 --> 00:27:47,610 And as Paul mentioned in East Germany, despite the massive financial transfers from the rest of Germany, more than two trillion euros, 216 00:27:47,610 --> 00:27:55,320 despite the fact you're part of one of the largest, richest, most stable democracies in the world in recent Lund. 217 00:27:55,320 --> 00:28:02,250 State elections, one in four voters in round figures in Saxony. 218 00:28:02,250 --> 00:28:07,320 Brandenburg only last Saturday, fewer India voted for the RFA. 219 00:28:07,320 --> 00:28:15,030 The alternative a few Deutschland, a genuinely far right xenophobic party using a Turkish rhetoric. 220 00:28:15,030 --> 00:28:20,100 We haven't heard in German politics, except on the very far right. 221 00:28:20,100 --> 00:28:30,390 A shocking fact. So here I turn to the second part of my lecture and assume that we both understand the problem, 222 00:28:30,390 --> 00:28:36,750 namely the strength of nationalist populism in Central Europe. 223 00:28:36,750 --> 00:28:42,130 And I want to ask the question. Wow. 224 00:28:42,130 --> 00:28:55,990 So if you look at the media, there are so two stereotypical answers with very crudely summarised are because they're part of the West. 225 00:28:55,990 --> 00:29:00,370 And alternatively, because they're part of the East. Right? 226 00:29:00,370 --> 00:29:01,570 So on the one hand, 227 00:29:01,570 --> 00:29:11,410 Orban and Kaczynski are looked at in through the same prism as Trump and Le Pen and Nigel Farage and other populists and mature democracies. 228 00:29:11,410 --> 00:29:17,410 On the other hand, there's a very strong stereotype which says, Well, these were really all along the eastern countries, 229 00:29:17,410 --> 00:29:21,130 and all that's happening is that they returning to their historic form. 230 00:29:21,130 --> 00:29:28,120 OK, now logically, these two explanations on the face of it cannot be true. 231 00:29:28,120 --> 00:29:34,150 You cannot be both with the West and east any more than you will be both black and white, right? 232 00:29:34,150 --> 00:29:36,730 That in principle is a logical contradiction. 233 00:29:36,730 --> 00:29:45,550 But I think there is a more nuanced form of the argument, which I am going to try and make in which it is a bit of both. 234 00:29:45,550 --> 00:29:55,600 So on the one hand, I remember in the mid 1980s the attack on the great Polish dissident and I were talking 235 00:29:55,600 --> 00:30:03,550 and I was complaining to him about the damage Mrs Thatcher was doing to British society. 236 00:30:03,550 --> 00:30:08,770 And he said, if only we had your problems, right? 237 00:30:08,770 --> 00:30:15,850 Well, in a sense, one could argue, now they do. It's a kind of backhanded success. 238 00:30:15,850 --> 00:30:21,460 Look at the contours of Central European populism. 239 00:30:21,460 --> 00:30:27,010 Allegedly pure people account opposed to a corrupt liberal elite. 240 00:30:27,010 --> 00:30:31,690 The will of the people is said to Trump. The verb is well chosen. 241 00:30:31,690 --> 00:30:42,310 All other sources of democratic legitimacy anti-immigrant, Italian pluralistic institutions like independent courts are undermined and criticised. 242 00:30:42,310 --> 00:30:46,960 There is a simplistic, emotionally appealing nationalist narrative. 243 00:30:46,960 --> 00:30:56,620 If you look at the profile of social support, it's defined by class, education and geography. 244 00:30:56,620 --> 00:31:08,110 Those parts of our societies, which feel traumatised by globalisation, liberalisation, Europeanisation digitalisation tend to vote for the populists. 245 00:31:08,110 --> 00:31:14,950 A key part of the aetiology is inequality, both economic and cultural. 246 00:31:14,950 --> 00:31:22,570 In all those broad generic sense is one can absolutely say yes. 247 00:31:22,570 --> 00:31:25,990 It's a backhanded tribute to their success. They've become part of the West. 248 00:31:25,990 --> 00:31:28,750 They have our problems now. 249 00:31:28,750 --> 00:31:40,840 More interesting is to look at the specificity of Central European populism, how it's distinct, which is not what I propose to do. 250 00:31:40,840 --> 00:31:47,170 So the argument that, in my view, clearly does not hold up is what I call vulgar. 251 00:31:47,170 --> 00:31:52,240 Huntington is crude cultural determinism. 252 00:31:52,240 --> 00:31:59,650 There is a great book by the historian Larry Woolf, which I can recommend to you called Inventing Eastern Europe, 253 00:31:59,650 --> 00:32:10,210 in which he shows how certain prejudices about the east of Europe in Western Europe go all the way back to the Enlightenment of All and Rousseau. 254 00:32:10,210 --> 00:32:17,650 And if you hear President Macron talking about Poland and Hungary now, it's like Voltaire, but not quite in the sense you laugh. 255 00:32:17,650 --> 00:32:23,650 It's a it's an old West European press prejudice, 256 00:32:23,650 --> 00:32:31,990 which simply does not hold up as a broad generalisation because these countries have very different paths. 257 00:32:31,990 --> 00:32:36,760 This is a picture from the Velvet Revolution. 258 00:32:36,760 --> 00:32:48,400 A demonstrator is holding up a picture of Thomas Masaryk, the founding president of interwar Czechoslovakia, in front of the demonstrators. 259 00:32:48,400 --> 00:32:53,830 So when the Czechs and the demonstrators demonstrations that are now happening in Prague against vibrations, 260 00:32:53,830 --> 00:32:57,610 they're also constantly referred back to Mousavi. 261 00:32:57,610 --> 00:33:05,680 So when the Czechs look back to that pre-war history, what do they find an absolute model democratic statesman? 262 00:33:05,680 --> 00:33:10,870 If the Germans were to look back pre-war, they find out of Hitler and the Italians Benito Mussolini, 263 00:33:10,870 --> 00:33:15,040 civilised west, barbaric east, and then they get quite worse. 264 00:33:15,040 --> 00:33:24,760 What I would concede is that when you look at the rhetoric of is full of law and justice, 265 00:33:24,760 --> 00:33:30,190 there are clearly elements of pre-war political culture that are re-emerging. 266 00:33:30,190 --> 00:33:36,700 Pollock catalytic the old equation of the poll is a Catholic. The Pope must be a Catholic. 267 00:33:36,700 --> 00:33:49,420 The language of pre-war post-national democracy. In Hungary, the nationalism, the absolute obsession with Triano, 268 00:33:49,420 --> 00:33:59,290 Orban is now building a huge monument to the lost territory, some criminal when, as you know, 269 00:33:59,290 --> 00:34:05,950 Hungary lost nearly three fifths of its pre 1914 territory, which will be opened next year on Wait for it, 270 00:34:05,950 --> 00:34:12,370 the 4th of June 2020, which is the anniversary of the trade on treaty. 271 00:34:12,370 --> 00:34:20,050 So we have three Fourth of July, right? The Polish fourth of June, the Chinese fourth of June in the Hungarian Fourth of July. 272 00:34:20,050 --> 00:34:31,550 But I think, and I want to argue much more important than those elements from pre-war political culture on number one, 273 00:34:31,550 --> 00:34:37,060 the legacy of 40 years of communism and the nature of the transition. 274 00:34:37,060 --> 00:34:45,880 And number two, the external circumstances. And this is the heart of my argument that this is in effect, 275 00:34:45,880 --> 00:34:55,030 not somehow some throwback to a pre-war history, but populism with post-communist characteristics. 276 00:34:55,030 --> 00:35:06,730 That's the essence of it. So the joke at the time in 1989, at the beginning of the transition was after 40 years of communism. 277 00:35:06,730 --> 00:35:14,230 We know you can turn an aquarium into fish soup. Can we can fish soup back into an aquarium, right? 278 00:35:14,230 --> 00:35:20,320 Or the destruction wrought by communism? The destruction of independent institutions of all kinds? 279 00:35:20,320 --> 00:35:30,400 And part of the explanation for the relative strength of the populist advance in Poland and Hungary is quite simply, 280 00:35:30,400 --> 00:35:32,890 the fragility of democratic institutions, 281 00:35:32,890 --> 00:35:42,040 independent courts, independent media, civil society because they've only had 30 years to be built up, unlike in Britain or America. 282 00:35:42,040 --> 00:35:49,990 Even more important is the matter of the economy and poverty. 283 00:35:49,990 --> 00:35:58,930 So please remember that the opposite of communism for Marx enabled was not democracy. 284 00:35:58,930 --> 00:36:03,250 The opposite of communism for Marx and angles was capitalism. 285 00:36:03,250 --> 00:36:11,590 And in the Communist Manifesto, they said the essence of communism is the abolition of private property. 286 00:36:11,590 --> 00:36:18,910 So they tried to abolish private property. Now they didn't wholly succeed in Poland and Hungary. 287 00:36:18,910 --> 00:36:31,060 But most property in Central Europe at the end of 1989 was in either state or so-called collective or cooperative ownership, not in private hands. 288 00:36:31,060 --> 00:36:38,620 So the huge challenge was how do you make a market economy with virtually no private property? 289 00:36:38,620 --> 00:36:44,050 How do you make capitalism with virtually no capital? OK. 290 00:36:44,050 --> 00:36:49,960 Answer number one. Give it back to its former owners. Restitution slow. 291 00:36:49,960 --> 00:36:53,750 Difficult. Complicated. Only a small part of the story. 292 00:36:53,750 --> 00:37:01,300 Answer no to sell it to the friendly foreigners who want to emulate the Western Europe you want to trade. 293 00:37:01,300 --> 00:37:13,810 Quite successful, largely practised. Let me give you a clear statistic 50 percent of Hungary's exports saw a big one 80 percent. 294 00:37:13,810 --> 00:37:20,400 80 percent of Hungary's exports today come from foreign owned companies foreign and 80 percent. 295 00:37:20,400 --> 00:37:29,230 OK. Many of them German companies, German car manufacturers and so on, as in Slovakia as well, say, in Poland. 296 00:37:29,230 --> 00:37:34,690 But that's actually very good for the initial period of economic growth. 297 00:37:34,690 --> 00:37:38,980 But number one, it risks trapping you in the middle income trap, 298 00:37:38,980 --> 00:37:44,440 where you're simply a supplier of cheap, skilled labour to foreign aliens who make the profit. 299 00:37:44,440 --> 00:37:51,730 But number two, it does give you a sense of dependency and dependency, particularly on Germany. 300 00:37:51,730 --> 00:37:59,370 OK. But most of the property was privatised into domestic house. 301 00:37:59,370 --> 00:38:09,240 In a process that was swift and extremely corrupt because there were none of the independent institutions and the rule of law, 302 00:38:09,240 --> 00:38:21,030 independent courts or regulators to control it. OK, so what of course happened is that the people who were well placed in the communist apparatus and 303 00:38:21,030 --> 00:38:28,930 nomenklatura or had good connexions in the democratic era disproportionately benefited from privatisation, 304 00:38:28,930 --> 00:38:32,850 sometimes called the privatisation of the no category. OK. 305 00:38:32,850 --> 00:38:36,690 And they got a disproportionate share of the spoils. 306 00:38:36,690 --> 00:38:41,400 And some of them became oligarchs like the present prime minister of the Czech Republic, 307 00:38:41,400 --> 00:38:46,260 Andrej Babis, who is a classic product of post-communist privatisation. 308 00:38:46,260 --> 00:38:51,090 Extremely murky and corrupted a former secret police informer. OK, 309 00:38:51,090 --> 00:38:58,200 so now imagine you're a worker in the Lenin shipyard in GDAX and you went on strike 310 00:38:58,200 --> 00:39:03,900 in August 1980 and you've been fighting the communists and fighting for freedom. 311 00:39:03,900 --> 00:39:09,630 And no, because of shock therapy and marketisation. You're unemployed. 312 00:39:09,630 --> 00:39:17,460 You're on your uppers. You haven't been retrained. You're out of the job in very traumatic experience. 313 00:39:17,460 --> 00:39:24,720 Not only do you see other people getting very rich. What other people are? 314 00:39:24,720 --> 00:39:32,910 It's general. Yara's ask his former spokesman, Yasur, over who's now very extravagant parties in his luxurious dinner. 315 00:39:32,910 --> 00:39:37,860 It's former secret police chiefs who are now wealthy oligarchs. 316 00:39:37,860 --> 00:39:46,230 And so the peculiar feature of this story is not just the inequality that we have in the West. 317 00:39:46,230 --> 00:39:54,450 It's a sense of historical injustice about the apportioning of the spoils. 318 00:39:54,450 --> 00:40:02,880 It's not just some people rich and some are poor. It's bloody [INAUDIBLE] who screwed us for 40 years and rich and we're still poor. 319 00:40:02,880 --> 00:40:11,670 And this comes on top of what was already a sense of a lack of historical catharsis. 320 00:40:11,670 --> 00:40:25,470 OK. Because if you do a velvet revolution, a peaceful, negotiated transition of power, inevitably you have to make compromises with the former. 321 00:40:25,470 --> 00:40:31,470 Oh, that's right. You can't just the next day put them in prison, let alone hang them through numbers. 322 00:40:31,470 --> 00:40:34,440 This is something we were extremely well aware of at the time. 323 00:40:34,440 --> 00:40:42,960 I remember long conversations with various Hungarians who was a wonderful historian of France about this problem. 324 00:40:42,960 --> 00:40:49,020 Most of these countries didn't do anything about it. East Germany is a peculiar exception. 325 00:40:49,020 --> 00:40:55,440 They actually follow the Spanish model after Franco amnesty and amnesia. 326 00:40:55,440 --> 00:41:04,830 That hasn't worked out so well at the moment. And nor is it in these countries because a sense of historical injustice and the lack 327 00:41:04,830 --> 00:41:11,310 of revolutionary catharsis has come back to haunt the politics of these countries. 328 00:41:11,310 --> 00:41:15,450 My own view is lesson for the future. 329 00:41:15,450 --> 00:41:25,530 If you do a Velvet Revolution, have a truth commission, at least have some public symbolic confrontation with the past. 330 00:41:25,530 --> 00:41:29,850 You may not be able to lock the [INAUDIBLE] up because it was a negotiated transition, 331 00:41:29,850 --> 00:41:37,450 but at least now, with some sense drawing a line between bad past and better future. 332 00:41:37,450 --> 00:41:42,280 I could talk some more about the titular character of inequality, but looking at the clock, 333 00:41:42,280 --> 00:41:49,270 I'm going to skim that, and if somebody would like to ask me in the Q&A, we can come back to it. 334 00:41:49,270 --> 00:42:04,840 The populists have exploited all these pathologies and complexes of the communist legacy in the country, they say. 335 00:42:04,840 --> 00:42:09,400 What happened in 1989 wasn't a true revolution. 336 00:42:09,400 --> 00:42:15,460 It was a handshake of hands that handshake transition, 337 00:42:15,460 --> 00:42:23,410 a corrupt compromise between communists and former communist, and the true revolution, they say, begins now. 338 00:42:23,410 --> 00:42:31,630 And that has a certain appeal. They say these cosmopolitan, liberal metropolitan elites didn't take any notice of you. 339 00:42:31,630 --> 00:42:35,560 They were contemptuous of, you know what we're doing. 340 00:42:35,560 --> 00:42:46,480 We're giving you 500 zlotys a month for every initiative, a second and subsequent child to every family to show that we can. 341 00:42:46,480 --> 00:42:52,390 There's not just a significant amount of money 117 euros a month for a full family. 342 00:42:52,390 --> 00:42:57,820 I mean, has a real economic meaning. It's also a gesture of respect. 343 00:42:57,820 --> 00:43:01,990 And if you believe, as I do with the problem of inequality, 344 00:43:01,990 --> 00:43:11,020 is as much about the inequality of attention with respect to the other halves of our society as about economic inequality. 345 00:43:11,020 --> 00:43:17,560 And that's very important. Dawn, does this talk about the redistribution of dignity? 346 00:43:17,560 --> 00:43:27,340 Very interesting phrase. Not uninteresting. Of course, the populists all talk about immigration. 347 00:43:27,340 --> 00:43:32,770 All populists talk about immigration. Yeah, America, France, Germany, you name it. 348 00:43:32,770 --> 00:43:39,370 The peculiarity of Central Europe is that Central Europe does have a big problem with migration. 349 00:43:39,370 --> 00:43:46,960 Its problem is immigration, not immigration. The figures are absolutely staggering. 350 00:43:46,960 --> 00:43:58,350 27 percent of the population of Latvia left between 1990 and 2017, 27 percent to 250 million poles, also East Germany. 351 00:43:58,350 --> 00:44:05,050 You remember why the Berlin Wall was built. They don't always vote to stop the haemorrhage of people from East Germany. 352 00:44:05,050 --> 00:44:12,040 The Wall comes from the haemorrhage. Subsequently, since the wall came down the 9th of November 1989, 353 00:44:12,040 --> 00:44:18,490 nearly two million East Germans out of a population of less than 17 million people have left. 354 00:44:18,490 --> 00:44:25,150 Think about that. The population of those territories is back to the level of 1945. 355 00:44:25,150 --> 00:44:33,160 It's absolutely staggering. So why are they all about immigration? Well, even across the room, Stephen Holmes have made this point. 356 00:44:33,160 --> 00:44:37,870 Talk about demographic panic, demographic panic, right? 357 00:44:37,870 --> 00:44:43,450 We think that our country is being as it were evacuated by our own people. 358 00:44:43,450 --> 00:44:48,940 And so we worry about new people coming in. And I think there's some truth in that. 359 00:44:48,940 --> 00:44:54,730 But on top of that, there is a way in which populists can play on, 360 00:44:54,730 --> 00:45:06,010 as it were traditional conservative values and forms of identity that were curiously conserved under 361 00:45:06,010 --> 00:45:12,620 communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe is what it used to call the conservative effect of communism. 362 00:45:12,620 --> 00:45:25,570 And so that Orban and Kaczynski campaigned very effectively on the fear of Muslim immigration in countries that have virtually no Muslim immigrants. 363 00:45:25,570 --> 00:45:31,750 And this completely reverses the symbolism of 1989. 364 00:45:31,750 --> 00:45:35,530 Let me just show you one thing you will remember. 365 00:45:35,530 --> 00:45:42,250 Remember the wildcatters, the great symbol of 1989? Now take a look at this. 366 00:45:42,250 --> 00:45:55,000 You have to see this is a Hungarian tabloid, which is very close over during the 2018 election, which was fought on Stop Immigration, 367 00:45:55,000 --> 00:46:03,940 Stop Europe, George Soros in the centre, his arms around the shoulders of the opposition leaders. 368 00:46:03,940 --> 00:46:11,440 And then if I've got a project anywhere, do you see the work of this? 369 00:46:11,440 --> 00:46:15,040 You see a couple left that what one thing holding. 370 00:46:15,040 --> 00:46:23,260 So the wire cutters from being the symbol of liberation have become the symbol of this Soros led American 371 00:46:23,260 --> 00:46:29,950 Jewish West European conspiracy to flood conservative Christian Hungary with Muslim immigrants. 372 00:46:29,950 --> 00:46:43,750 But the symbolism of the wire cutters has turned through 180 degrees, and this appeal to traditional values is extremely effective. 373 00:46:43,750 --> 00:46:54,640 Paul says quite rightly, in his past and present article, he reminds us that nationalism or if you like it, you call it patriotism. 374 00:46:54,640 --> 00:47:02,530 And the churches with some two of the great motivating forces of the 1989 revolution perfectly true. 375 00:47:02,530 --> 00:47:09,300 Now the populist. Are reverting to and exploiting those forces. 376 00:47:09,300 --> 00:47:18,360 And they saying you don't want your country to be just a cheap copy of a decadent West European consumer society. 377 00:47:18,360 --> 00:47:24,120 We go back to traditional values of nation, family and church. 378 00:47:24,120 --> 00:47:33,690 So in both countries, the battle against LGBT plus rights and gay marriage is an important part of the programme. 379 00:47:33,690 --> 00:47:43,260 The Polish Catholic Church, I said I quote non heterosexual partnerships are completely alien to European civilisation, 380 00:47:43,260 --> 00:47:48,180 and Orban says We want more Hungarian children. 381 00:47:48,180 --> 00:47:58,080 So you decadent West Europeans, whether you are LGBTQ i.e. a class addressing your demographic problem by immigration. 382 00:47:58,080 --> 00:48:06,270 But we there are all conservative, traditional European Christian Europeans just going to have lots more children, 383 00:48:06,270 --> 00:48:10,260 a rhetoric, by the way, which is very close to that of Vladimir Putin. 384 00:48:10,260 --> 00:48:18,480 I mean, this is a a spectrum which ideologically there's a there's a big overlap to the East, so it's the reverse of Donald Rumsfeld. 385 00:48:18,480 --> 00:48:24,120 Remember Donald Rumsfeld? New York was Eastern Europe, old Europe was Western Europe. 386 00:48:24,120 --> 00:48:33,630 It's the other way around now. Like they say, No, no, no. Western Europe is New Europe and where the good old Europe, Viktor Orban said. 387 00:48:33,630 --> 00:48:40,680 I quote back in 1989, we thought Europe was our future. 388 00:48:40,680 --> 00:48:48,090 Today, we think we are Europe's future. It's a complete reversal. 389 00:48:48,090 --> 00:49:03,930 The last area in my analysis and then I'll come very quickly to today is the external context, the external context in 1989. 390 00:49:03,930 --> 00:49:12,630 And if anyone is thinking about Hong Kong here, just make the comparison for a moment with uniquely capable. 391 00:49:12,630 --> 00:49:18,720 It was morning in America. The United States had enormous soft power. 392 00:49:18,720 --> 00:49:23,730 It had this great relationship with the Soviet Union. Western Europe was flourishing. 393 00:49:23,730 --> 00:49:28,260 We have the project of 1992 with Germany was doing very well. 394 00:49:28,260 --> 00:49:38,190 And if you ask people in 1989 in Central Europe what you really want to be, they would say we want to be a normal country, right? 395 00:49:38,190 --> 00:49:45,270 And if you then push them and say, what do you mean by normal? Basically, the answer was like West Germany, right? 396 00:49:45,270 --> 00:49:50,070 So there was this clear and present model of how you wanted to be. 397 00:49:50,070 --> 00:49:55,500 And Russia was weak and retreat. Today, it's a very different picture. 398 00:49:55,500 --> 00:50:02,100 I don't need to tell you the United States, the condition of the West, the condition of the European Union and of course, 399 00:50:02,100 --> 00:50:12,300 China, which, by the way, is as much a product of 1989 as all the fragile democracies of Central Europe, right? 400 00:50:12,300 --> 00:50:17,160 Because the Chinese Communist Party systematically learnt the lessons from the 401 00:50:17,160 --> 00:50:21,870 collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in order not to repeat them, 402 00:50:21,870 --> 00:50:27,840 and developed a unique system which ironically called in shorthand Leninist capitalism, 403 00:50:27,840 --> 00:50:34,410 which has made it has its own problems but has made it extremely powerful so that China is now a force, 404 00:50:34,410 --> 00:50:40,800 particularly in central and south eastern Europe, with large investments in countries like Serbia and Hungary. 405 00:50:40,800 --> 00:50:45,210 And when the EU stops threatening Viktor Orban, he says, 406 00:50:45,210 --> 00:50:52,740 and he said this once expressly said this you don't want to give us some money, we'll just go and find it from China. 407 00:50:52,740 --> 00:51:09,030 But the one thing that I do want specifically to draw your attention to is the deeply problematic role of specifically in the EU, 408 00:51:09,030 --> 00:51:18,360 in the erosion of democracy in Central Europe. So as you all know, the slogan of these revolutions in 89 was the return to Europe. 409 00:51:18,360 --> 00:51:24,060 And then we had 15 years in which the EU exercised enormous, 410 00:51:24,060 --> 00:51:29,580 normative and transformative power on these countries because they wanted to join it, right? 411 00:51:29,580 --> 00:51:30,270 And they changed. 412 00:51:30,270 --> 00:51:40,470 Their constitutions are law books, their competition policy, their food labelling everything in order to get into Europe, quote unquote. 413 00:51:40,470 --> 00:51:47,790 Once they got in 2004 for the countries, I'm talking about 2007 for Romania, Bulgaria, 414 00:51:47,790 --> 00:51:52,980 once they got in, they discovered they could get away with anything you can do, 415 00:51:52,980 --> 00:52:01,500 whatever you like once you're a member of the EU, whatever its fine principles in the in the treaties, and they are very fine. 416 00:52:01,500 --> 00:52:11,730 And it's worse than that. It's not just that the EU, despite all its fine words in Article two of the Treaty of European Union, 417 00:52:11,730 --> 00:52:19,350 is allowing Orban and Kaczynski to get through, which is what is clearly a violation of European standards and values. 418 00:52:19,350 --> 00:52:30,990 The EU is actually facilitating facilitating the erosion of democracy in east central Europe and no one. 419 00:52:30,990 --> 00:52:37,260 We can't do much about this, but the fact is the people who emigrate are by and large, 420 00:52:37,260 --> 00:52:42,090 the pro-European pro liberal pro-democratic people, young and energetic, right? 421 00:52:42,090 --> 00:52:47,640 So the very fact of immigration is is weakening the Democratic Forces. 422 00:52:47,640 --> 00:52:56,190 Number two, EU guarantees of foreign direct investment means that German car manufacturers are quite happy to go on investing. 423 00:52:56,190 --> 00:53:01,410 Russia announced a huge new investment in Hungary. Whatever the politics, because you'll secure. 424 00:53:01,410 --> 00:53:09,870 Number three, because the EU, as you all know, being in the European Studies Centre helps its poorer regions. 425 00:53:09,870 --> 00:53:20,700 Vast funds have been flowing to these countries through the national governments to be disposed of by the national governments. 426 00:53:20,700 --> 00:53:29,580 Hungary 2017 More than 3.2 billion euros net 600 euros ahead. 427 00:53:29,580 --> 00:53:38,580 A patronage fund for Viktor Orban 95 percent of public investment in Hungary is co-funded by the EU. 428 00:53:38,580 --> 00:53:44,100 Any small town in the Polish or Hungarian countryside and you will see something funded by the EU. 429 00:53:44,100 --> 00:53:48,600 And this is not only great because you can say we've rebuilt your your, 430 00:53:48,600 --> 00:54:02,730 your streets and your marketplaces and your hospitals mentioned the EU money, you can directly use it to reward your friendly oligarchs. 431 00:54:02,730 --> 00:54:08,430 Right? So Orban doesn't censor the media in Hungary. 432 00:54:08,430 --> 00:54:16,770 He just controls it through friendly oligarchs who are rewarded with generous government and EU contracts. 433 00:54:16,770 --> 00:54:27,360 So we are allowing him literally to bite the hand that feeds to run an election campaign under the slogan Stop Europe, 434 00:54:27,360 --> 00:54:33,630 stop Brussels to use EU money to undermine European values. 435 00:54:33,630 --> 00:54:40,020 And then last point on the moral functioning of the EU. 436 00:54:40,020 --> 00:54:48,240 Why doesn't the EU, which has been trying with the Article seven proceeding and the rule of law mechanisms? 437 00:54:48,240 --> 00:55:00,180 Why isn't it more effective? Because it is is a member of the European People's Party, the biggest centre right European Parliament grouping. 438 00:55:00,180 --> 00:55:11,520 And because those groupings have been given significant power in the European Union chairmanships of committees, 439 00:55:11,520 --> 00:55:15,690 the Spitzenkandidaten procedure and so on. 440 00:55:15,690 --> 00:55:22,650 They're desperate to hang on to every single MP to make them the largest group so that 441 00:55:22,650 --> 00:55:30,450 while Fidesz has been dramatically violating European standards for the last few years, 442 00:55:30,450 --> 00:55:36,750 the EPP is still using its funds to secure its majority. 443 00:55:36,750 --> 00:55:48,320 So the joke here is that the partial politicisation of the EU has a directly counterproductive effect, right? 444 00:55:48,320 --> 00:55:59,640 That is to say, the European political parties, which were intended to increase democracy at the EU level are precisely the thing that 445 00:55:59,640 --> 00:56:05,700 are preventing the EU from more effectively defending democracy and a member state. 446 00:56:05,700 --> 00:56:19,140 So in my view, the EU as such is substantially malfunctioning when it comes to the defence of democracy in these countries. 447 00:56:19,140 --> 00:56:25,020 So is it time for a new liberation? 448 00:56:25,020 --> 00:56:28,530 That was my subtitle. 449 00:56:28,530 --> 00:56:39,960 One of the student leaders of the demonstration against Norwegian Salmon addressed this question directly at a big demonstration. 450 00:56:39,960 --> 00:56:51,600 Here you can see it in Prague on Lech now earlier this year, because obviously there was such a strong opinion of the Velvet Revolution. 451 00:56:51,600 --> 00:56:57,420 And he said this and I quote We're not making a revolution. 452 00:56:57,420 --> 00:57:03,580 We embrace the legacy and values of 1989 and want to further them by actively striving. 453 00:57:03,580 --> 00:57:10,960 And for a better future. But the situation is different now we are warning against. 454 00:57:10,960 --> 00:57:15,640 We are warning against the course of change in our country under vibrations. 455 00:57:15,640 --> 00:57:21,850 We are warning against the taming of Justice in the media and the use of patient power by a few oligarchs. 456 00:57:21,850 --> 00:57:26,560 We are warning against democracy being stealthily stolen away from us. 457 00:57:26,560 --> 00:57:32,140 And that seems to me exactly what these countries have had the revolution. 458 00:57:32,140 --> 00:57:35,050 They've had the fundamental change of system. 459 00:57:35,050 --> 00:57:46,840 And what is needed now is a kind of liberal democratic reform initiative to defend what has been achieved against terrorism 460 00:57:46,840 --> 00:57:56,920 and to address the deformations that I've been talking about earlier that have come through the nature of the transition, 461 00:57:56,920 --> 00:58:02,140 the very difficult attempt to turn the fish soup back into an aquarium. 462 00:58:02,140 --> 00:58:07,900 I'll be very happy to talk about individual countries in the discussion period. 463 00:58:07,900 --> 00:58:12,430 Broadly speaking, Slovakia is a great beacon of hope. 464 00:58:12,430 --> 00:58:18,300 Having just elected a young female liberal pro-European president, 465 00:58:18,300 --> 00:58:27,730 Susanna Terapeutica remarkable achievement in a country with a massive post-communist corruption and socially conservative and Catholic. 466 00:58:27,730 --> 00:58:31,930 The Czech Republic a little way behind Poland again. 467 00:58:31,930 --> 00:58:39,070 I hope we can talk about it in discussion, but in the balance between liberal and liberal democracy, 468 00:58:39,070 --> 00:58:48,580 a government that would very much like to follow the old path and Jaroslaw Kaczynski may turn out to be an old man in a hurry. 469 00:58:48,580 --> 00:58:57,160 But on the other hand, strong independent media, strong local government, including big city governments, 470 00:58:57,160 --> 00:59:10,090 strong civil society grouping constitutional patriotism and very significant opposition parties who can compete in relatively fair and free elections. 471 00:59:10,090 --> 00:59:25,030 Right. So the challenge there is actually to find the programmes, the leaders, the campaign, the unity to win the next election. 472 00:59:25,030 --> 00:59:29,960 Does that sound familiar? I think it somehow does. They have our problems now. 473 00:59:29,960 --> 00:59:41,200 But Hungary is by far the most difficult case because as I argued at the beginning, it's beyond the decade form, which I call the liberal democracy. 474 00:59:41,200 --> 00:59:50,820 So it's very difficult to argue. That in a national election in Hungary, you really going to have a fair and free election. 475 00:59:50,820 --> 00:59:54,660 But the opposition parties really have an equal chance of winning. 476 00:59:54,660 --> 00:59:58,860 And this is my very final point. This is where Europe comes in. 477 00:59:58,860 --> 01:00:05,190 For me, this is a great test for Europe and specifically for the European Union. 478 01:00:05,190 --> 01:00:13,110 Germany said a dictatorship can exist in Europe, he said, but a dictatorship inside the European Union. 479 01:00:13,110 --> 01:00:17,580 This is impossible. What is Viktor Orban going to prove him wrong? 480 01:00:17,580 --> 01:00:21,120 Are we going to let Viktor Orban prove him wrong? 481 01:00:21,120 --> 01:00:34,050 Are we at long last finally going to make that connexion between the Europe of values and the Europe of money, which is a key connexion to make? 482 01:00:34,050 --> 01:00:40,200 Is there the political will to do that? Can we bring Ursula von der Leyen to take this seriously? 483 01:00:40,200 --> 01:00:44,400 Big question if Donald Tusk becomes head of the EPP? 484 01:00:44,400 --> 01:00:53,910 Will he take this seriously? I would argue, ladies and gentlemen, that this is not just a critical, 485 01:00:53,910 --> 01:01:03,210 even an existential issue for Central Europe, for the new member states I've been talking about. 486 01:01:03,210 --> 01:01:10,860 I would argue that this is a critical issue for the whole of Europe and the European Union. 487 01:01:10,860 --> 01:01:16,200 We have a project in the dona€t programme called Europe's Florence. 488 01:01:16,200 --> 01:01:24,990 It's about the European narratives, what stories we want the EU to tell convincingly, of course. 489 01:01:24,990 --> 01:01:31,860 And I would say that the story that means so much to me and to many people in this room, 490 01:01:31,860 --> 01:01:42,420 which is how Europe has helped the cause of freedom in country after country from Greece to Portugal to Spain to 491 01:01:42,420 --> 01:01:52,590 Central Europe to southeastern Europe over the last 50 years is one of the best stories that Europe has to tell. 492 01:01:52,590 --> 01:01:58,860 But what's going to happen in the early 21st century? Are we still going to be able to tell that story? 493 01:01:58,860 --> 01:02:09,330 Or is it rather going to be the story about of how the EU actually let freedom fail even in its member states? 494 01:02:09,330 --> 01:02:21,965 That, I think, is a question before us. Thank you very much. I look forward to this discussion.