Brexit to see Brexit and Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.
Stop it. In case you're tired of hearing this word, I thought I'd start with saying it five times.
But of course, Brexit is part of the backdrop to this conference when we started planning it.
We thought it would be after Brexit. I'm very glad to say it's not after Brexit.
The Brexit, I hope, will never happen. But it does, I think, reflect on our topic in at least three interesting ways.
First of all, it's absolutely clear that the victory of the Brexit vote had a lot to do with the power of narrative in an age of populist politics.
In this case, the very powerful narrative told of the plucky little freedom loving Ireland resisting wicked, federalist oppressive Europe.
Secondly, if it happens again, as I say, I hope we can prevent it happening and it will seriously impact the sort of central EU narrative,
which is, of course, a narrative of integration, unification, enlargement and progress.
And the impact of Brexit would mean that suddenly we have the story of disintegration, contraction and regress.
And thirdly, for those of us who are trying to keep this country in the EU, the question is really urgent, say Typekit,
how you tell the story of today's Europe in a way which is compelling for British voters who are trying to
make up their minds in the European elections in a few weeks time and then possibly an effective referendum.
So it's very relevant to this background. I get to do all the formalities 10th anniversary of lecture and colloquium all the appropriate
facts in the more formal session tomorrow often do in advance of the 10th anniversary lecture,
I want to give a quick introduction to the shape of the conference.
And first of all, this is a conference about narrative or narratives which people talk about a lot.
But what are we talking about? What is it? What is narrative?
How does it differ from story of history on plot?
Who is doing what to whom? When we talk about narrative, what are the disciplines?
How do we study narrative? One of the things we're trying to do in this conference is simply bring together people from history,
political science, political theory, but also literary studies, communications and media studies, social anthropology.
To see how these different disciplines think about narrative and what are the methods
that we would use if we're actually trying to study narratives of any degree of rigour?
Biography proof of the intellectual history, contextual and textual analysis,
in-depth interview and drawing on, say, for anthropology or oral history.
Like the really excellent project.
The Oral History of the Sixties, the 1968 generation with Robert Kennedy, our colleague here and others were involved in public opinion polling.
Deliberative polling. We are here at the museum as we have talked about it.
I even discovered that there's actually in literary studies,
a sub discipline called narrower tolerances and anyone who had never publicly stated the
fact that we hasn't learnt colleagues in the thought order that I confess I hadn't,
but I do now. And of course, don't forget journalists, which I then make, which would be snippy about.
But so that's that thinking about narratives in general, how we studied them.
And of course, the two narratives about Europe and the sharp eyed amongst you will have noticed that in the very first versions of this project,
it was called What story should Europe tell?
Is now called What stories does Europe tell? And the difference is entirely different because, of course,
the classic way in which this question of European narrative is if comes in the form, what stories should the EU cover?
So if you if you think of Hagos famous lectures on the philosophy of history where he says he doesn't.
Rarely, history until it becomes a history of a state that's augmented by history,
and what this does is to put the EU in the place of the state at the centre of the narrative and the people who spend their lives studying this.
And this leads to some extremely superficial, not to say boring discussions of European narrative,
mainly consisting in politicians playing around with some big abstract nouns.
So to give you an example, I was at a conversation with Tony Blair and Mary Robinson the other day,
and Tony Blair said the European narrative used to be about peace now.
It's about power. Then Mary Robinson spoke up and said that it's not about peace of a car, it's about values.
And so it goes on playing with these large abstract nouns.
And we actually have a wonderful example of how not to do this, which is.
The project started under the presidency of Jose Manuel Barroso, an official Brussels project called The New Narrative for Europe.
If you want to see a perfect example of how not to do it, go look at their website.
It is top down their own bar from Brussels out draughted by a committee very badly designed website visited by almost nobody.
A declaration called the Mind and Body of Europe, which is just at the moment of waffle, which means nothing to nobody.
That's exactly what we don't want to do.
And interestingly, when it was launched at the launch event with Barroso, Angela Merkel said quite bluntly, Are you sure you want to do it this way?
She said, Wouldn't it be a better idea to maybe just go out and ask some Europeans what they think about Europe?
And that seems to us quite a good idea. So that's a part of what we're going to do.
So in the new title, what stories does he ever tell you have to do?
It's no longer should it starts. So if you look at the research document, our research team have prepared a document which is in your folder,
which is a powerful summary of some of the relevant initiatives,
and we've divided it into normative, prescriptive on the one hand, descriptive and on the other.
And we're very much at the moment in the descriptive analytical pack,
which is what this first panel is also about is an initial stocktake of what we can say about what Europeans never care about.
The other difference is, of course, if we just added one letter to the story, it's stories plural, not singular.
An excellent beginning in this direction is the book, which I commend to you.
Edited by Justine de Klerk and our colleague Alex Nicolaides called European stories intellectual debates on the other two national contexts,
which is one of the best books on the topic so far.
But the question then becomes If we're really thinking about diversity, why just for national frameworks?
What about my knowledge? What about unrepresented nations and peoples?
What about different languages? What about different sexual or political orientations?
What about generations? What about individual Europeans?
And there is a real sense in which there is not just one European story.
There are about seven or eight hundred million European stories,
depending on how many people do you think that in Europe, every individual has their own Europe?
Tell me your Europe and I will tell you who you are. So it's very much the plural.
But then the question becomes why only ask Europeans?
Identity always has two sides. It's what I think, who I think I am and who other people think I am.
So if we go with public myself as other, then we think about have to think about what others think of us,
which is something I think Europeans in this context have done far too that we tell this beautiful story about how
Europe is spreading norms of international governance to the rest of the world and all cash invasions of the event.
It is without thinking about how the rest of the world which has experienced the impact of Europe for centuries.
Not always in the nicest possible way might actually receive that narrative.
So I'm very glad that we have to have the whole of Saturday morning.
Firstly, on your outside of those who maybe have come recently to Europe,
those who represent different communities going to smuggle Turkey into that tunnel inside, outside question mark iSEC and you'll be able to tell us.
And then the panel on Europe seen from outside these narratives are, of course, always contested.
That belongs to that nature. And so rather than starting with theory, the second panel this afternoon wants to give you a sense of that conversation.
We had someone who was a chairman of the Leave campaign, the Vote Leave campaign and the British Brexit referendum,
a conservative Hungarian scholar, someone from Vault or PA and probably should our policy from a politician so floral in political context.
But beyond these dichotomies, normative, descriptive, singular floral, there's that tension between narrative and history.
Or, if you will, between myth and reality. So the classic statement on this is, of course, an enormous, great essay.
Yes, it came national in which he says famously nations that communities of shared memory and shared forgetting every French citizen he says,
must have forgotten, said Bartholomew's Day massacre.
It's a wonderful formula, albeit so you have to learn about it and then you forgot about it.
And so he says historians are a danger to the life of nations that they subvert the comfortable left by which nations live.
Margaret Mellon, who will be with us on tomorrow, says historians should be Mythbusters not taking all these considerations.
The empirical look oral history reverses this narrative.
There is now a new school of thinking about Europe's showpiece, which goes in a sense to the opposite extreme from the classic.
What story should Europe tells narrative to the classic version of it takes the kind of model of a nationalist historiography and repeats it.
At the EU level. Right.
So instead of our own story, it is from Charlemagne to the Europe, which, by the way, is the title of a real book from Charlemagne of Europe.
Now what French historians have done is, in my view,
to go to the absolute opposite extreme and to produce a series of books which are programmatically kaleidoscope,
which break this history down into a thousand slivers and fragments and elements, a mirror, says the classics here.
Book, edited by Francois Thomas, 78, called All Panopto Histoire and one by edited by Christophe Scholl.
And then their book called Also for Babies that week.
The former has one thousand three hundred eighty five pages, the latter two thousand three hundred in seven,
as one of them says in the introduction, Not this market is dead on any move at all.
Going large or large indeed, and it just has this absolutely kaleidoscopic colour or even a colour, which is in many ways magnificent.
But in my view, goes to the other extreme.
This is a point that Mark was made recently in a review essay in the AFP,
talking about the diversion of this on French history edited by Typekit push on and he said,
I agree with him, but maybe while something is gaining, something is lost, which is any sense of any shared history at all.
So I think if it doesn't, then deliver on the promise that is made even by those who have in the schools,
as some of you would have seen the op ed by Thomas Serviette,
which was published in a number of European newspapers, including the Guardian, presenting this approach.
And she says, we need, he argued, we need to have memory work.
But the question really is when you look at those volumes where it's so it seems to be, what we have is the seller of the EU Commission led watchdog.
This is Europe's new narrative and the Charybdis of this completely centred kaleidoscope.
And what we have to do is to steer, of course, between the two.
And that's what we're trying to do, both in the research project behind this conference and in the conference itself.
So we start by exploring the full cacophony of the stories and many stories that Europe does tell.
But then we look for politicians inside that cacophony.
And it's interesting to me that I spontaneously came up with this German politician.
But actually, in the book The Calypso and Justine the word polyphony appears on the last page and also in the book by Profiles and 78.
And that's what we'll do in the last session. In case you think this is not possible, let me give you one example.
And with this, I'll conclude, and we're going to have the work of the day of where I think one can detect the polyphony in the top office.
If you look at the way the pro-European case was made in multiple European countries from the 1950s all the way through to the 1990s,
it looks, at first glance, very different.
But then when you look more closely, you discover a common basic structure and that basic structure goes like this.
We were in a bad place. We want to be in a better world and that better place is called Europe.
Now, everyone had their own bad place. Europe has no shortages of bad places to come from for Germany,
with the shame and horror of narcissism for France, of defeat and occupation for Britain,
relative political and economic decline for Spain and Portugal, fascist dictatorship for Poland, Hungary and other countries.
Communist dictatorship But the basic shape of the story was the same.
We were in a bad place. We want to be an event of honour that everyone is Europe.
The problem comes when you have arrived and instead of travelling, hopefully you're in it, and the reality never gives up to the dream.
And that sort of forward movement of hope is calm.
And indeed, for some younger Europeans today, if you are a young Spaniard or Portuguese or Greek.
The curve actually goes the other way instead of being upward from a bad place to a better one for Europe.
You had a much better place 10 years ago before the financial crisis,
and then the eurozone crisis hit southern Europe so hard back then you would need a doctoral student and I hope for my career.
Now your always and I hope it. So that goes the other way.
How do you tell the European story event? So what we're thinking of concentrating on in in the research project?
But that's that's what these two days are about. He's looking at the generation that I call the 1890s.
We had over 13 ideas. We had the 60 eighties. Now we have the age and ideas,
which are roughly speaking people who are between 20 and 40 today for 10 years
outside of age nine and trying to discover what their stories of Europol.
And the question is, how do we do that? What are the methods?
And then at the end of the project, rather than the beginning to bring that back to the question of the EU?
But then the question to the EU may not be what story would you tell how you said it?
But actually, what are you doing right? Maybe you need to be doing something different or not doing something.
It's not simply a question of salesmanship. So that's what I wanted to say in introduction to what we're doing in this project to this conference,
we are all ears for what you all have to say, and at the end of the two days, we may.
Do something completely different in this project, but in the meantime, thank you very much for coming.
I'm looking forward to hearing you will get to work.
Thank you. You know, I got I got a call very late last night from New York and my editor was like, We need your help.
Tomorrow on a story is very important. It's faced with some great potential, really when I said I can't go.
I'm going to this three day conference on Europe and what it means.
And he paused and then he said, OK, I guess that's much more important now.
The significance of this is that a few years ago, he would never have said this, especially in America.
I mean, Europe was not something that anyone cared about. I remember a German official who told me about a meeting with an American diplomat.
This was prior to the financial crisis. And he said he got frustrated.
He said, Why is it that Americans are so ignorant and so indifferent when it comes to the EU?
And the guy said, I don't know, and I don't care. That could have also come out of the mouth of a New York Times foreign editor at that time.
But it's changed, and in some ways, that's the good news. Europe and the European Union is no longer rewarding.
The bad news, of course, is that Europe isn't in fact or speaking as a journalist.
You know, the journalist's motto for simplify, then exaggerate. Europe may face the most existential threat.
Yes. And I actually sort of mean that what I'm observing when I'm talking to people around Europe
at the moment and I'm talking to a lot of people who wouldn't usually come to Oxford,
who make their voices heard here.
But people, ordinary people, teachers, nurses, car mechanics, young people, the waiters in Berlin and Madrid, et cetera.
What I'm getting there is a sense of deep frustration of resignation,
a sense that there is a sort of yearning for a narrative, a yearning for a European story.
But at the moment,
they don't necessarily feel there is one which leaves a vacuum in which stronger narratives than are actually very successful and resonate.
I cannot give you a scientific sort of overview of what Europeans think.
I can only give you a few snippets from different corners of Europe,
snippets that struck me very much and that I think while not representative does say something about Europe at this moment.
The most shocking thing, probably I heard in the last few months was in Strasbourg on the Franco-German border,
and here I spoke to Bernard Cortes, a car mechanic. His family has always lived in the region of Alsace, but not always in the same country.
His grandfather, his great grandfather, rather fought for the Germans in World War One.
His grandfather fought for the French in World War Two.
Today, nobody is fighting anymore, and Mr Cortes lives in France and works in Germany and crosses that border his ancestors died fighting for.
He reckons about 500 times over here without even noticing. So he, you know, he has his dentist in Germany, he has a dermatologist in France.
He buys his clothes to basis its food there, and he jokes about, you know,
people in Strasbourg still keeping the German street signs in the basement just in case.
But then he turns serious, and he says this here in Strasbourg, Europe is not a slogan.
It is everyday life. It is banal, he said. And it is miraculous.
I was shocked because you just don't hear that kind of very positive view anymore outside the very educated, privileged.
You know, it means, shall we say, that at the moment would be in this room.
What you do hear a lot more is a sense that the EU has forgotten the little people and that it only works for the rich.
So for Sophie to say, for example, the single mother of two whom I met outside of Paris,
she just makes ends meet fairly with some odd jobs and social benefits.
The EU is the face of financial capitalism and ruthless globalisation.
Sophie has been demonstrating with the yellow vests for months now.
This is how Sophie described the life she and her children need. We deprive ourselves.
We don't go on holiday. We skip a meal when we cannot pay. I don't dare to look at my bank account.
I try not to spend just trying to buy food and pay my bills. And this is how Sophie describes the EU.
I don't like the EU today. It is an EU of finance. It is an EU of industry of oligarchs and big companies.
It is anything but a human social Europe that thinks first and foremost of the interests of the people.
Europe is opaque, she said. We don't know how it works. We are only told about Europe when it comes to making people insecure and reducing wages.
Now, the yellow vest movement is a very fringe phenomenon. It's often written about as such.
But actually the grievances expressed by those people are very European, and in fact, they really reminded me.
What I heard on the streets of London when I did a big project about London's Cabbie Wars and I spoke to the black cab drivers,
most of whom I interviewed many at the time, but so 17 had voted for Brexit.
There was only one guy and they didn't. And for most of them, Uber with its immigrant drivers,
its low fares and its Dutch tax base was very much shorthand for everything that's wrong with the EU.
I want to quote here Grant Davis, the chairman of the London Cab Drivers Club.
He recounted a meeting to me with a minister in the Conservative government at the time.
This is a quote I said to him. I'm from a working class family.
I grew up in social housing. I believed in the conservative ethos.
Work hard, better myself.
I don't want no benefits, but what you've done is you're killing us for an American company that's paying taxes in the Netherlands.
That's what Europe is. Look at all those cab drivers we have from poor families.
I want it to be my own boss. I've done everything you said I should do, and you've pulled the rug out from under my feet.
I found that very striking and I was I've been struck since.
How many times I've heard Echoes not quite expresses eloquently. Is this across the continent?
Now let me take you back to my own country, Germany, which is where I'm based now.
I'm fairly recent there, and being from the western edge of western Germany, I always find it extremely interesting to go to the east.
And so in Saxony, I recently reported a story about Wolves the return of the wolf, which has been extinct for about 100 years,
and I was surprised how much I learnt about the European Union and what people think about it in the process.
It turns out that under communism, wolves when they came across the border from Poland, were just short.
The farmers who had sheep and calves and so on.
They just shot them as soon as the wall fell and communism fell and EU law began to, guidelines began to apply.
The wolf turned into an endangered species.
And so over the last few years, the wolf has been circling back in eastern Germany and occasionally eating sheep, German sheep costs and so on.
And the interesting thing here is that the EU has become this indeed insecure situation for eastern Germans.
Who cares more about Wolves than it cares about them.
The wolf is the endangered species for the EU, as one of these farmers put it at different moments out in lousy shape next year the Polish border.
He said We are the endangered species, but the EU, the people in Brussels taking more care more about wolves than they care about us.
And of course, what has happened is that the AfD, the far right party that is very strong in Saxony,
may even come first in regional elections later this year has turned to walk into its new favourite scapegoat.
And when they talk about wolves, they sound very much like they're talking about immigrants.
And what's wonderful is that the spokeswoman on Wolves for the AfD, there is such a thing is actually called Philco Grimm.
I'm taking you very briefly because I think it's another striking example, albeit not super representatives.
This this fine example is about young, far right activists really to the right of the AfD generation identity.
You may have heard of the marching zone.
That's the sort of leader in Austria who recently received a donation from the guy who shot 51 Muslims in New Zealand.
And these people are activists. They're far right, but they've really cleaned up their image.
They don't use outright racist language anymore. They kind of look like you guys, you know, civilised and polite and angry and so on.
But in terms of what they propagate, it's really the same old excuse of racist theories of old.
And what I thought was fascinating when I went to a Christmas market in Harlem
before before the focus was in December was just how normal these people seemed.
It was like a kind of and how European. And that's kind of the point. They were Czech people and Austrians and Germans and French.
They were dating and working and studying across borders.
A lot of them were very intellectual, reading Gandhi and gene sharp, non-violent protest and so on.
And if you didn't talk about migration with them, they really seemed fairly normal.
It was a kind of Erasmus for the far right. But as soon as you talked about migration, they sort of showed their true colours.
And one of the things that I was struck by that I'm coming to an end is how they
saw themselves in the tradition of Europeans protecting the European homeland.
That seems very popular. Our ancestors protected Vienna, said Martin Zelma.
To me, now it's our turn. Basically, they celebrate these European battles.
They're the. The symbol for the movement is the Greek lambda,
which is said to have marked the shields of Spartans when they fought back Persian invaders in 480 B.C. and every September in Vienna.
I actually was there with my friends out on the street. They marched in honour of Prince Eugene, who beat back the Ottomans outside Vienna in 60 93.
So here we have a movement that is young and activist, and that puts itself firmly in the history of Europeans.
It's a narrative that has become, in my view, very attractive to young, far right people.
Always challenging to follow up, a very eloquent journalist whom I like to read, by the way, I read the story of a couple of days ago.
Thank you very much for having me in this super highly interesting set up and the fantastic line-up, actually.
I'm a political scientist.
I studied the topic politicisation of European integration causes and consequences of how intense it gets debated in conflict.
But I don't want to. I can talk about this later, but I don't want to present your individual research project.
I became recently very interested of how political I call him.
Geopolitical representatives present European integration.
And this is not so much about what stories Europe tells, but how the political executives tell it like it's about to hold here.
I'm also happy to speak about the conference later on. So what?
I want to show you some very long term, some very aggregated trends here, which I think are worth pondering.
So what I do is a little of what I did for love for the conference and in a couple
of my projects is a little text planning exercise of the all related language.
And I want to show you evidence of essentially four criteria.
First of all, frequency how often domestic political representatives speak about the U.
So I do this with a number of technically very flexible dictionaries that you can also,
if you want to use it in your projects, download from my website and in political language.
I extract just a three sentence window around references to the EU or its policies in this text, because I then look at three indicators.
First of all, language complexity. So I use the flash reading score here, which is a simple, weighted index of sentence length and term length,
right that is used in education sciences to measure cognitive mobilisation that you require to understand the message right?
I will come back to this in a minute. The second thing is emotionality.
Yeah, use the so-called noisy emotional lexicon,
which is a set of fourteen thousand terms which Unicode us have rated to speak to one of eight basic emotions or trust, anger and so on.
And yeah, just look at how emotional the language is by estimating the shape of words that are associated with the EU.
And finally, the tone, just the sentiment with the lexical sentiment dictionary.
Um, how positive all negative is. The language can audit when political representatives speak about the EU, and I do so in two datasets.
The first one is plenary speeches or parliamentary speeches, public parliamentary speeches in an 18 year period 1995 to 2013.
This is also publicly available to state, and for today, I show you evidence from four countries,
four European countries amongst them, the UK and the House of Commons here.
This is roughly two million speeches, and for some of the indicators,
I draw a sample to compare how actually Europe behaves in comparison to all other political issues that might come up.
And the second dataset I want to show you is public speeches of European executives or
national leaders and European commissioners during the beginning of the euro crisis period.
This is data from high tumour, heart disease cover and colleagues.
So what aggregate patterns do we find? First of all, how much and when do national champs?
And I think national champions are important because these are the ones that claim to represent the people of the century.
How often do they speak about these? The work is also published if you want to read it up, but I want to show you this data,
and this data gives you the chance that an individual turn in a and p speech.
If an EU reference right for the value for the UK essentially means that you have
roughly one percent chance that an individual title is a reference to the EU,
you might think this sounds low initially, but the speech is about an average 200 words at all,
and they have a lexicon of one million words to choose from, roughly in English language, right?
So this is quite remarkable.
But the more important message is that I want to show you here is that there is quite some variation across countries, so not really a harmonisation.
And more importantly, in all of the four countries that are for you, it's primarily the government that speaks about feeling right.
So the EU was the governing thing or the probability to speak about the EU.
It's much higher when your party is in government. And again, we this is eighteen years.
So the government had very different colours right in there. We also analysed there's lots of variation.
Of course, we analysed this in the paper. That's too much to tell you at once, but I want to highlight two findings.
Positive from a democratic perspective is that actually the amount of debate EU debate that this office follows the EU authority.
So the more power that you get. Over time, over the individual treaties, the more debate is often the more debate is offered essentially right.
Also, it's more European laws are published. We see more debates or if we have European summits, that's probably the strongest effect.
But there are also downsides. For example, during national elections, actually, the amount of debate increases rather,
systematically and more importantly of the European elections have no effect.
So it's not more or less during election times.
But the most striking thing to me, the most negative effect that we find is the more public Euroscepticism we have in public opinion,
the less than you speak about the EU, right? Probably in those times when it's needed.
Actually, no debate is on. How do they speak about it?
Language complexity for length of sentences and complexity of individual atoms.
Black dots are random speeches. The blue dots are the three sentence windows around European integration references.
And you see in all four countries that the complexity also level of confidence intervals.
They are so small you kind of almost can't see them in all four countries.
The language on Europe is much more complex than the average parliamentary speech,
and the average parliamentary speech might contain debates about national health insurance, about taxes and so on.
Right. But your European integration is always something that comes with more complex language.
The picture looks different. If you look at the emotionality, you receive it in almost all countries and hopefully robust for the German case.
But in the other countries, you've language about Europe is significantly less emotional than the average complimentary speech, right?
We could talk about individual emotions later, but on average we have fewer emotions and talk about your aggression.
Again, this holds across the board the whole 18 year period, right?
Like the complexity, tone and sentiment.
We have one outlier. On average, Europe is presented with something more negative for the language is more negative
than the average parliamentary speech that doesn't hold for the Dutch case. I'm actually not sure why I need to dig.
I need to dig into this. But here behind this figure, we have much more variation over time, especially in the UK and especially in Spain.
So in Spain, after the euro crisis, the sentiment attached to Europe declines dramatically.
Right. In the UK, we see this as well, but it's much less dramatic than sunscreen, OK?
And now you might say, OK, Europe is something very complex.
Europe is probably something that is not very emotional. Yeah, people are hearing this.
But my strong hunch is that these language patterns that are showing you the actual strategic choices of political elites.
And I just briefly want to show you evidence from another project on the euro crisis,
which is hopefully coming out in the summer and has been just accepted where we
analysed how National and European Commission was responding to public euro scepticism.
So euro scepticism of public opinion in their home countries and the strength of euroskeptic challenger parties.
And this is a bit more complex. So this is an index graph on the from a regression model.
But I just want to show you this here. If you are below the zero line means that public euro scepticism on the on the y axis in public opinion.
So the more people save our membership than the European Union, it's a bad thing, the more negative national leaders speak about European integration.
So they follow the crowd, essentially, which means if you have a very sceptical public already,
the national elites also sends more negative signals whenever average right, which we know that elite queuing affects public opinion as well.
So this might lead to a vicious circle. But interestingly enough, we were surprised by this, to be honest.
Here you see the strength of Euro sceptic challenger parties. And then there's the stronger they get, the more this effect vanishes.
We call it the macro story. Our interpretation of this is as soon as there is a euroskeptic party that absorbs the eurosceptic public,
the national leader has no strategic reason anymore to undermine European integration further.
Right. So they might go back to defending. If you see it, it's not.
Statistically, it's not fully robust effect just vanishes. But there's a positive case.
But we see when euroskeptic public opinion gets stronger, they send K€ messages of lesser complexity.
But as soon as euroskeptic parties get stronger in electoral competition, the language becomes much more complex.
Right.
We interpret this as sort of the human, so elites try to hide their stance on European integration by using language that becomes much harder to.
On the stand, Sentry, just quickly before I finish off the same picture for European Commissioner,
here we see they always tend to defend European integration.
They are always above the zero line and increases also when euroskeptic challenger parties become stronger.
So therefore, that position is defending European integration in their public speeches.
But like nationalists, they do the same thing when eurosceptic challenger parties become stronger at home.
They use language that is harder to decipher for the wider public, right?
So this is about cooperative mobilisation.
The effect that we see here roughly is something about four school grades that you need to pass before you understand my contract.
So in summary, it's really just question. But what I want to show you is that probably political emphasis on the supply
of political debates about Europe has increased with more E.U. authority,
and it's exercised through European laws.
But it's primarily driven by governing actors and declines in election time, and it declines with increase in popular Euroscepticism.
European integration is presented with more complex and less emotional language compared to the average political speech,
and national representatives tend to undermine European integration in public.
Why commissioners tend to defend it against public euro scepticism.
So, and, of course, partisan Euroscepticism induces even more complex language.
So I would be somewhat cautious with generalisations here.
But what I read from this is that this in the political discourse is rather technocratic way rather bloodless,
whether terror integration to use the language of the project here.
And I'm I'm a bit worried whether this is conducive actually to pro-European mobilisation.
So in my other work on politicisation, we can show that the public politicisation increases no matter whether it's warranted or not.
So the question is now, how can the project be defended, actually?
And my fear is that the patterns that I find here actually speak to this anti-establishment sentiment that populist parties essentially run there.
That's what I wanted to say. Thank you for your attention. Thank you.
Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. It's a real honour to be here and to present our work and to discuss actually our findings.
And so what are your plans? No question of the panel and what do they have?
And the short answer coming out of our work is that you care and you do know more than actually used to people's general attitudes towards Europe.
It's not universe dimensional, but multifaceted.
Europeans do pay attention to what is happening in European politics, and they do have high expectations when it comes to what it should take.
However, they're not very happy with the reality of what happened.
So before I continue talking and and trying to make a few but stark statements for the
for the for the sake of the discussion and maybe also the kick-off of the conference.
And I would like to talk very quick about our work and debate in these statements.
Actually, however, I oh, you can.
You can you can get a visual impression. Actually, I do not have a PowerPoint presentation.
I'm just trying to. This is our website.
It's it's our project that projects college opinions,
and I co-founded and started this project with actually a Catholic priest, Professor Catherine Priest.
She is a professor of political behaviour now in the Free University of Amsterdam.
But obviously what she was has if he had asked her to before that, and she's a fellow.
I believe that at Lincoln College, at least a couple of the studies project in two thousand fourteen, actually.
And we ever since we collect data on European public opinion several times a year, ever since two years now, four times a year for every three months,
we run a spin that a survey and a questionnaire that that is that we actually split in certain sort of science.
And that is that is represented in training data and the question we kind of we keep asking
this question touch upon and political sentiment when it comes to the European Union,
when it comes to nation state and what has the personal life of people.
And then we have a question is that a particular have a way for running and out of these questions,
we actually analyse and write up studies and we we take a deeper look and actually public opinion.
We have an overall interest for the past two years, and that is understanding polarisation and radicalisation of of Europeans within this European.
Our view is always where we start from this from the EU wide, a data collection.
And so we do interview in every European country and of a European language.
You and I, we just have, I should say, to be correct.
And we thus we kind of go into a subset of those like national assumption and also all socio economic sub.
But the EU figures always of us and I think there for the sake of our discussion here, the three main findings that we take out of the data we seen.
First of all, the pernicious consensus was not followed by general scepticism.
But what we actually see is that Europeans are more ambivalent when it comes to European integration in European politics.
What do I mean by that?
I mean that what we keep seeing constantly is that we we ask questions touching on principle and potential of the European Union.
We get very positive and steady positive answers,
largely about the majority of people supporting questions that touch upon principle the potential of the Belgians.
However, when we ask about the state of affairs of European politics, if we are,
we ask about short term projections, which mean, So what do you think, how it will be in 20 years time?
Then the image flips and the answers become very negative.
So principal and potential, very positive state of affairs and short term protection rather than negative.
I think when you when you look at when you look at a political discourse in the news,
when you look at how how those political forces can have a strong interest in
polarisation in polarising the political discourse you just used to say you can see that,
for example, natural frosh.
And it was an absolute monster in playing with this ambivalence when it comes to European puppet, to public opinion in European politics.
It is one of its key front sentence he used to reuse was the European Union was really good idea, but it just does not work.
So if you're ever wondering how he can use this ambivalence to make politics out of it?
Think of Nigel Farage because he's just targeting exactly that point and then pulling basically people on from my point of view right now.
And now I think the purpose of this conference is to be like,
how can you hit that point in important, maybe to to to the other side of what we actually do?
See, this would be my second point is that there is not much difference in the discontent when it comes to European politics on national politics.
Whenever we can get to ask the same question about national politics, about politics.
And we do not see a difference.
So I think I want to emphasise it at this moment that to focus only on European politics at the moment of crisis would be going not far enough.
I think it's important to understand that this is much more a moment of crisis in general, politics and our political systems.
And I think we risk to miss a point if we only focus on European politics.
And a third, my third point is the fear, as we have shown in numerous studies, to a decisive,
decisive factor driving dissatisfaction with the state of politics in the state of societies today.
It is amazing basically attitudes towards the future, the personal future and the future of society.
And whether you have a positive or negative outlook on that future that will determine the likeliness in which you will have sympathies,
but radical political parties or parties on the extreme off the political spectrum.
And I think the important or interesting point here is that we have measured this
when it comes to the personal economic situation of people positive or negative,
the outlook of the state of society, whether it's positive or negative.
And we see that the second factor, actually. So not the economic issues at this point in time right now,
but the way in which you look at society and whether you think that the future to society's future itself
is going to be positive or negative and you basically you position within that within that society.
It's a it's a very significant indicator to understand whether you feel comfortable,
comfortable within within the political system, whether you find that it is working,
whether you, whether you support pockets, more of the centre ought to right and whether you look at a cure at your own and your own political future.
So maybe it's the last point. And if I have maybe a minute left and we have actually looked,
I was very interested in the stories you were telling and and how people who are very angry,
very frustrated are very fearful, actually put forward at a certain put put in a basket.
Globalisation and digitalisation in the European industry. It's all the same individual against, right,
whether it's a taxi drivers of the yellow vests and these are people actually guilty of all of our misery.
It's the system, basically us. So we actually put out a study.
It's called globalisation in European integration, a threat to opportunity where we were just looking.
Just the fact whether statistically we could prove that the majority of people actually put in the same basic globalisation in European integration.
And the short question short answer is no. So.
For us, it was really interesting because I think when you when you go around Brussels,
you find that this is a very deep sided fear rife within European operatives that they fall into that category.
So what we actually could see is that those people were optimistic about globalisation,
thus about their own future in their own capacity to cope with the future.
And these people kept these people very content with the state of society and state politics.
If you very fine with their lives, their meeting and the world around them and the people who are fearful that these people are very homogeneous,
becoming any homogeneous and Beyonce's Typekit interesting. But the people were fearful, actually split.
You had those who were also rejecting globalisation and European integration and had seemed to have a very ambivalent tendency
basically to retreat and to shut up and to shut down sorry and to to to to to to not to be in a cooperative kind of modus.
But there's also the other half of those people who actually were pro-European and Croatian and who
formulated expectations to be protected in that world of criminalisation that they find us troubling.
So I think it is when it comes to our work and actually our our results.
And it is very important to keep in mind that out of these people who take issues
with where the world is going and whether their place in it will be a good one.
There is significant amount of people who actually do have expectations towards the EU in order to make happen that this is not just not working.
I'm not an expert on Natale. Changes will be my last, my last point.
However, when I look at stories of identity and stories, people tell themselves either in words and in.
In speech or in writing, and it it seems to me that there's also always the challenge, always a struggle and then in outcome, right?
So it is about how we set out.
We went on a journey. There were difficulties. We got through it.
And then most of the time with the positive outcome we won. Maybe not entirely, but we want something.
We're in a better place now.
And I, for me personally, I think that we had a moment of time right now where this narrative is created all to us and crew.
And I'm very I'm looking forward to this conference and learning from you what you think about the spending that.
Oh, hi. I'm not from Chatham House.
I was not part of this study. Oh, I'm part of a student at Oxford and I'm part of the research team.
And we felt that this was a study that was important enough to try and find a way to feature despite the absence of its author.
So I'm going to do my best to ventriloquists. Her job was to go with the technical skills.
Exactly. So what is the tribes of the Tribes of Europe?
Is a survey that Chatham House conducted from roughly between 2016 and 2017, an online survey in 10 European countries Austria,
Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom.
So important to the mind. This is a fairly limited set to begin with, but within those countries it's not limited at all.
They actually reached ten thousand one hundred ninety five individuals on online surveys and asked those individuals
eight questions which boil down roughly into three general themes how people feel about immigration and refugees,
how people feel about the relative strength or weakness of the EU, and how people feel about feeling European and separately.
I'll come back to this. They also interviewed in person roughly one thousand eight hundred and European elites
who they classified as people who had to work in a significant sphere of influence,
either on a local, regional or European level.
This is just the breakdown that they offer of interviews. You can see it's roughly 1000 per country pretty evenly distributed.
And what they found in those interviews using an analysis called Latent Class Analysis,
which some other people are going to be able to explain my study,
I found they distilled the answers from from the answers to those questions distilled six tribes as they called types of Europeans,
hesitant Europeans, contented Europeans, interview rejections, frustrated pro-Europeans, austerity revolts and federalists.
And I'm now going to go through very quickly the profile of each of those tribes so we can get a sense of how they break those down.
So in order of in order of significance, that is to say, you know,
there's class size hesitant Europeans who first by far 13 percent more in total than
any other class of 36 percent of all of those surveyed fell into hesitant Europeans,
which means that they are the least likely.
If you're hesitant European, you are least likely to feel that your country has benefited from integration.
You consider yourself a political centrist. You're fairly indifferent about the EU.
You don't love it, but you don't hate it. And then you can see the metrics that sort of put up on each one that are associated with each group.
Not necessarily the views of Europe.
These are who people who have hesitant views that represent the meaning of contented Europeans with 23 percent of class size.
I feel like I'm announcing rewards are tend to be young potential students.
They're very happy with Europe's current status quo.
They have a positive view immigration, and they think that the EU is quite democratic.
They also tend to have high life satisfaction above average income, a profile that would fit many people at Oxford.
I took the survey and I'm happy to say that I'm contented, although not many others with me in England.
Probably we will find a lot of EU rejections in England.
As you can see the country, this region where they found 14 percent of the class size, so they come in third.
This is perhaps the profile that is most familiar to us in some ways because of how we see it in the press.
Anger or fear. Pessimism towards the European Union. They believe it's undemocratic.
It's too powerful. There should be more power returns to each of the sovereign states within the EU.
Immigration is bad. Interestingly, they're mostly middle aged too old, and there's a note on this that I'll come back to.
Mostly men and they are of mixed income.
Chatham House notes that most fell into a sort of working class background, although there's also.
A quote, significant number of wealthier, absolute rejections, frustrated pro-Europeans.
This is perhaps the most complicated with nine percent. They are actually quite similar as Bob was just discussing.
They don't are not happy with how the EU is working for them now,
but they believe in the project to the point where they'd actually be in favour of giving more power to the European Union than it currently has.
They also think that richer countries should take more of a role in in the distribution of immigration coming into the EU,
and they see it as moderately democratic right now.
So discontented with the EU today wanted something new and perhaps perhaps to grow stronger.
Austerity rebels, the penultimate group also coming in at nine percent.
So the same as frustrated Europeans, they actually don't like the EU.
So this is kind of the inverse of frustrated Europeans.
They tend to be lower to moderate income. They tend to come from countries that have been hit particularly hard with economic crises.
They want more powerful member states.
And I do believe, however, that the same as the frustrated Europeans that richer states should bear more of the burden in all EU policies,
but especially immigration. They also tend to be older. And lastly, at eight percent of the Federalists who are overwhelmingly male, 66 percent.
If you've been looking to see that most of the breakdowns are somewhere around the range of 50 50,
the highest female category is actually hesitant Europeans with 57 percent female.
There's a 66 percent male. It's overwhelmingly old.
They tend to have high life satisfaction of high income, and they believe essentially that Europe is doing well and should keep getting stronger.
More power to the EU, more connexions between countries.
They tend to come house notes that they can speak lots of languages and identify pretty much international friendships and travel often.
They have a positive view of immigration, but they actually tend to be split across the political spectrum.
If you've broken down that, and that's actually a good note to transition because there are, of course,
other ways to break down the data that challenge those of just two of which I'm going
to discuss here because they note that I think that was interesting for our panel.
The first is if you break this down by number five or by elites versus what I call the public.
So this is a comparison between the 1300 interviews that they conducted with the Brits and the Sun, ten thousand interviews with the public.
What they found was that there's actually a fair amount of agreement on some of
the questions that they ask those eight questions between them and the public,
in particular attitudes toward feeling European.
Of the well over the majority of both the public tend to feel either quite proud or very proud of being European.
They also found agreement on a separate question that they asked, which was what achievements the EU has managed to make over its tenure.
Peace, genuine freedom of movement, single market and single currency in that order were the same for elites and public as a survey.
However, there were differences. The most notable one?
Seventy one percent of elites surveyed said that they had benefited from the EU.
Four percent of the public would echoed that sentiment, and the public breaks down one third, one third, one third between benefited.
So that strongly agree and tend to agree ambivalence, either agree or disagree and disagree that they have benefited from the European Union.
Within the public, there was also a striking divide, Chatham House found that by far the most determinative,
the greatest determinant for what would drive your opinion of the EU between being anti
and pro was whether someone was what they call authoritarian minded and the title,
of course, from the dawn of a study on the Apocalypse Now in the 50s, which this harkens back to.
So they see authoritarian mindedness as favouring order, having a deference to authority and resistance to change.
If you believe that, you are very likely, much more likely to be anti EU.
So from this three takeaways that Chatham House offers us,
that I will try and sort of provide my own slight spin on these and mostly come from the studies that they've done,
so I'll try to remain consistent to them. The first is that this is not a binary debate, and this is what the study set out to try and demonstrate.
So, they write, several of the tribes cannot be lumped simply into a pro EU or anti-EU category,
and that, in fact, talking about those categories tends to lead us toward the extremes of the tribes.
Think Federalists for an EU rejection. But those tribes are actually underrepresented relative to the amount that we tend to talk about.
They also found that there are more tribes than there are political parties who represent them.
And that's not to say necessarily that there are, you know, there are six political parties in Europe,
but it's to say they want to say that the tribes don't map well onto the political parties that are available right now.
And so perhaps this is why we see part of why we see more emphasis and more influence from some of the
lesser represented tribes because the parties have gotten onto their beliefs on the Federalist belief,
for example, and onto an EU rejected belief, then on to something more complicated, like a frustrated European.
And the third conclusion of which is more minor there is that if you look at this data,
you got a sense that Europe or perhaps the European narrative is quite up for grabs right now.
Look, the plurality here is hesitance, perhaps ambivalence to be a similar way of categorising it.
So put it in terms of this panel's title, it's possible we could say,
can you say to that one third of Europeans fall into a group where they don't actually quite know what to make of Europe, but it's equally possible.
And the Chatham House acknowledges this, that those hesitant Europeans are hesitant,
not because they're on the fence about Europe, but because they just don't care that much.
So it's unclear whether this is a question of what these Europeans are making or not
making a judgement or a question of whether they're caring or not caring about Europe.
Either way, Charles points that EU leaders should be engaged and that this is the focus as they move forward for determining
European narratives will be to reorient ourselves to focus on what they think is the range from the hesitant Europeans.