1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:08,410 It's good to be here, I should say I'm a kind of Ron Howard's up in the world of narratives and certainly a narrative quality. 2 00:00:08,410 --> 00:00:19,050 And I kind of came to this come to this through a project that I've been running now for several years on contested narratives of the globe. 3 00:00:19,050 --> 00:00:27,540 I know what I'll do is to try and fulfil some of my free, which is to talk about the powers and the perils of narrative. 4 00:00:27,540 --> 00:00:37,020 But I also do want to say a little bit about the role of the globe, and I particularly want to pick up the point that people to make. 5 00:00:37,020 --> 00:00:44,640 Last night in his recollections of the 1940s about the sense of the increasing marginalisation of Europe yesterday, 6 00:00:44,640 --> 00:00:51,390 and in so many times when I listen to people talking about Europe, the internal sense, 7 00:00:51,390 --> 00:00:58,410 the I think the inadequate attention that is given to the role of the other, the external, 8 00:00:58,410 --> 00:01:05,100 the global in the stories that Europe does tell and perhaps even more in the stories 9 00:01:05,100 --> 00:01:11,190 that Europe needs to tell and should tell if they're going to be convincing stories. 10 00:01:11,190 --> 00:01:14,160 So the power of narrative, 11 00:01:14,160 --> 00:01:23,730 socially imagined ways of socially constructed ways of imagining the world narratives have complex texture that made up of ideas, 12 00:01:23,730 --> 00:01:25,500 discourses, performances, images, 13 00:01:25,500 --> 00:01:35,580 messages that are carried by a whole range of storytellers that you can accommodate world views that fluctuate over time, 14 00:01:35,580 --> 00:01:42,960 whilst at the same time still supporting essential elements of the same script that can't power. 15 00:01:42,960 --> 00:01:53,610 Clearly, as we heard yesterday, comes from some combination of politics and emotions they often take on loans rather than logic and consistency. 16 00:01:53,610 --> 00:01:55,890 The power is built around the idea. 17 00:01:55,890 --> 00:02:04,380 Of course, we find this expressed in in lots of people just because to me, I think Charles Taylor is the most powerful exponent of this. 18 00:02:04,380 --> 00:02:08,820 But human beings make sense of particularly complex, contested, 19 00:02:08,820 --> 00:02:18,150 multicultural phenomenon by telling stories, stories in particular that link past, present and future. 20 00:02:18,150 --> 00:02:21,840 These stories have enormous power, and this is where the strategic communication, 21 00:02:21,840 --> 00:02:28,770 literature and narratives and fluidity comes in and helping us understand the power of political mobilisation. 22 00:02:28,770 --> 00:02:37,350 Everybody seems to be reading. I've done across different disciplines, pulls out different things that they particularly like about narratives. 23 00:02:37,350 --> 00:02:42,330 Will they find it useful for their purposes in the discussion of narratives? 24 00:02:42,330 --> 00:02:44,820 For me, in the sense kind of thing can make sense. 25 00:02:44,820 --> 00:02:52,080 We're trying to use the struggle for narratives as a way of making sense of different ideas of the global employability. 26 00:02:52,080 --> 00:02:59,100 It is the explicit role usually explicit as it can be, but often very explicit, very important anyway. 27 00:02:59,100 --> 00:03:07,860 Role of time and space in narratives and political narratives and ideas of purpose change. 28 00:03:07,860 --> 00:03:11,940 The possibility of transformation. 29 00:03:11,940 --> 00:03:20,610 It is those ideas that teleological character to many political narratives that gives them this great power of mobilisation. 30 00:03:20,610 --> 00:03:26,100 Of course, not just on the side of those who are pressing narratives of change can equally 31 00:03:26,100 --> 00:03:30,090 well be on the side of those who are contesting those narratives of change. 32 00:03:30,090 --> 00:03:39,620 The revival we've seen in recent years, particularly from the right of contesting notions of liberal progress sometimes. 33 00:03:39,620 --> 00:03:44,580 And I think interestingly, just now as it was in Central Europe in the 1920s, 34 00:03:44,580 --> 00:03:51,960 ideas that seem to be harking back nostalgic, looking back to a previous time that are often themselves revolting, 35 00:03:51,960 --> 00:04:02,010 that builds on a particular understanding and application of what is wrong with with the liberal and narrative matter normatively. 36 00:04:02,010 --> 00:04:09,030 Roger Smith talks about political stories, economic stories, but he likes particular emphasis on ethically constitutive stories. 37 00:04:09,030 --> 00:04:15,210 And it seems to me those stories are the ones that really matter politically, and they also matter normatively and more. 38 00:04:15,210 --> 00:04:20,400 So a little bit on the table. What about the perils or at least the recurring issues? 39 00:04:20,400 --> 00:04:25,110 So the four things I've got to say first is this whole question of how deep, how just, 40 00:04:25,110 --> 00:04:30,510 you know, the narrative things that actors stories that actors tell for their own purposes? 41 00:04:30,510 --> 00:04:37,890 Are they just things? This is one view. I mean, the older sort of philosophy, history, literature and the representations. 42 00:04:37,890 --> 00:04:42,240 They have things that particularly historians, but not just historians, in a sense, 43 00:04:42,240 --> 00:04:48,780 have struggled to impose some sort of coherent order on a historical reality. 44 00:04:48,780 --> 00:04:58,800 But it's a school the idea of narrative misrepresentation versus a much stronger notion that narratives are really the means by which we come to know, 45 00:04:58,800 --> 00:05:02,710 to come, to understand. Come to make sense of where we are in the world, 46 00:05:02,710 --> 00:05:12,940 so that narratives in that apology really are far more strongly than of our social identity and that sort of debate divergence runs through it. 47 00:05:12,940 --> 00:05:18,790 Me, my have to weigh a lot of the literature obviously speaks to much bigger issues in social theory. 48 00:05:18,790 --> 00:05:23,410 Secondly, in related agency, the overwhelming thrust in political science literature, 49 00:05:23,410 --> 00:05:29,140 certainly on topics like nationalism, was to make everything very instrumental, rationalist agent centric. 50 00:05:29,140 --> 00:05:33,700 And slowly, we've seen a sort of pushback, not least by those who say, Well, of course, 51 00:05:33,700 --> 00:05:39,610 yes, you know, loads of instrumentality, obviously, but there are some stories that work. 52 00:05:39,610 --> 00:05:44,140 And what we need to understand is why certain stories work and why others don't. 53 00:05:44,140 --> 00:05:52,090 Why they get institutionalised in particular places, why they disappear, why they reappear, and obviously why there are multiple stories. 54 00:05:52,090 --> 00:06:00,640 There's never a single story that always made these stories. There are many stories of people who are absurdly unless maybe you'll come up during 55 00:06:00,640 --> 00:06:05,550 the day when we saw the movements of the people who really do the narratives, the historians who tell stories. 56 00:06:05,550 --> 00:06:09,400 Sort of this question of of everyone is bound up in these narratives. 57 00:06:09,400 --> 00:06:15,310 Political scientists pretending that they can sort of produce universal knowledge of themselves 58 00:06:15,310 --> 00:06:21,520 endlessly working off and through the big narratives that someone else has constructed for them, 59 00:06:21,520 --> 00:06:24,700 whether in another part of academia or in the world. 60 00:06:24,700 --> 00:06:31,570 And that tension between what we kind of see in the world and how we think about the narratives is really crucial. 61 00:06:31,570 --> 00:06:38,950 Just one example, which I came up yesterday. You know, we're very much back in a world where this idea of, you know, 62 00:06:38,950 --> 00:06:45,190 cosmopolitan nativist, you know, the cleavage between the national and the something else. 63 00:06:45,190 --> 00:06:50,980 This is the major cleavage. This is the sort of dominant way we make sense of shifting identities. 64 00:06:50,980 --> 00:06:53,590 And yet again, the historians can correct me. 65 00:06:53,590 --> 00:07:01,210 One of the things I think that we now see much more historically were the very close connexions between nationalism, 66 00:07:01,210 --> 00:07:09,610 internationalism, cosmopolitanism and regionalism. These things merged together and come together in complex ways. 67 00:07:09,610 --> 00:07:14,920 And so some of the puzzling things, why do you think there's an outsider which is seen by other people as not from Europe? 68 00:07:14,920 --> 00:07:19,420 Is this artificial construction? No, true. But you'd better believe it. 69 00:07:19,420 --> 00:07:26,800 And yet you seem to be real nationalism in some transoceanic sense of identity gathering peoples across different parts of the world. 70 00:07:26,800 --> 00:07:29,880 That's somehow natural. Well, that's pretty bizarre. 71 00:07:29,880 --> 00:07:36,940 And my fourth point, and I'm just going to say very few words the globally structured tomorrow, we're going to have few smout elsewhere. 72 00:07:36,940 --> 00:07:45,970 But of course, stories identities are constructed, not just these are the specific numbers, but within broader structures. 73 00:07:45,970 --> 00:07:55,270 Here, of course, this is where Europe's place in the changing global really does kick in and kicks in a very difficult place for Europe to see itself. 74 00:07:55,270 --> 00:08:03,430 In what many ways was the site of a particular kind of universalism maternity that was destined to go global through time. 75 00:08:03,430 --> 00:08:05,800 This was the source of its great power. 76 00:08:05,800 --> 00:08:14,110 So when that sense of arriving at position with that is no longer true, Tim talked yesterday about the problems in the writing and the problems. 77 00:08:14,110 --> 00:08:19,930 The writing looked very different from within and from without arriving within. 78 00:08:19,930 --> 00:08:27,880 We've done many things, and many of our problems are the problems of success, enlargement deepening and all that kind of stuff. 79 00:08:27,880 --> 00:08:31,480 But the problems left something in the writing in 1989 was very different, 80 00:08:31,480 --> 00:08:38,170 and I do think for all week, so endlessly, quite rightly think that focus on 1989 in Europe. 81 00:08:38,170 --> 00:08:43,210 We do need to get away from 1989 when we think about Europe in the bigger picture. 82 00:08:43,210 --> 00:08:50,860 1989 inaugurates a very bizarre blip in the picture of the bigger world and where Europe thinks 83 00:08:50,860 --> 00:08:56,780 it inaugurates a period where Europe's narrative of the global regulating global capital, 84 00:08:56,780 --> 00:09:05,800 liberal global capitalism, coming up with normative power fit with the way that the world seems to be going in a particular moment in time. 85 00:09:05,800 --> 00:09:09,520 But of course, it is a particular moment of time, which is very old. 86 00:09:09,520 --> 00:09:14,230 If you think about Europe's position in the bigger world and the longer periods of the 20th 87 00:09:14,230 --> 00:09:21,160 century where that notion of what happens when what have been the core region becomes the second 88 00:09:21,160 --> 00:09:27,640 free region in the global system actually is the factor that works that underpin many of the 89 00:09:27,640 --> 00:09:33,550 great tensions and contestations in the stories that we're trying to tell about Europe now. 90 00:09:33,550 --> 00:09:38,200 So that means that that particular narrative of the global liberal global capitalism, 91 00:09:38,200 --> 00:09:42,740 globalisation technology, managing what regulation administration, 92 00:09:42,740 --> 00:09:50,050 all the stuff that dominated so much of the 1990s and for which Europe is global, of course, looks very different. 93 00:09:50,050 --> 00:10:00,160 If you tell a story of globalisation of the global, which lays much more emphasis on the geopolitical so that the piece story the killing of hope. 94 00:10:00,160 --> 00:10:06,760 Internally has to be shifted to a story of how can we recreate hopes externally, 95 00:10:06,760 --> 00:10:12,040 how this story can be a different kind of story in a much harsher and nastier world. 96 00:10:12,040 --> 00:10:15,970 And of course, the story of global capitalism as structure? 97 00:10:15,970 --> 00:10:20,320 And how is this match? And here I think the point I was speaking briefly yesterday. 98 00:10:20,320 --> 00:10:31,480 My question to Gisela Stuart is the part of the real problem is that it's not the narratives of Europe themselves, 99 00:10:31,480 --> 00:10:36,160 but are because they're important and they need to be discussed. But narratives of the alternatives. 100 00:10:36,160 --> 00:10:39,670 And at the moment, many of those alternatives flip very freely. 101 00:10:39,670 --> 00:10:40,990 They sound great. 102 00:10:40,990 --> 00:10:51,220 The family of self-respect, it's restored nations non universalist globalist connectivity without deep institutionalisation all sounds long, 103 00:10:51,220 --> 00:10:57,190 except that it really is very difficult to work out what those things mean and couldn't be. 104 00:10:57,190 --> 00:11:00,460 And if you think like that, when you think of the offs, 105 00:11:00,460 --> 00:11:07,000 the structural trade-offs Rodrick gave us the trade off between globalisation, democracy and sovereignty. 106 00:11:07,000 --> 00:11:10,780 He was down to the liberal economists identity of military security. 107 00:11:10,780 --> 00:11:16,840 You put those five back and you end up in a range where the range of alternatives is not so great and where the 108 00:11:16,840 --> 00:11:25,480 liberal narrative of Europe as a model for managing those trade-offs is the most successful narrative that we get. 109 00:11:25,480 --> 00:11:38,160 Thanks very much. Last night, as I was listening to inspiring stories, starting with Peter, I was looking at the room, 110 00:11:38,160 --> 00:11:48,870 seeing how all of us were itching to tell our own stories, or at least that we had imagined our minds scape in a bubble of Davos. 111 00:11:48,870 --> 00:11:57,150 And I was trying to imagine what was happening and the interaction a hole the size of the bubbles where they bumping against each other, 112 00:11:57,150 --> 00:12:04,940 where they are becoming intertwined, where they connected with the threads of colours. 113 00:12:04,940 --> 00:12:14,990 So in a way, that's the conversation we're having with our silences, as well as what we say in this room as in all over Europe, 114 00:12:14,990 --> 00:12:21,380 the question yes, of course we have as many European stories as individuals in Europe, but how are they connected? 115 00:12:21,380 --> 00:12:23,570 How do they create clusters? 116 00:12:23,570 --> 00:12:38,030 How do they echo between each other in sharing some shadows, the long shadow of history and the kind of show that he just developed so grandly? 117 00:12:38,030 --> 00:12:42,800 And indeed, I'm here to tell you a bit about this chap. 118 00:12:42,800 --> 00:12:52,730 Tim asked me to tell you about this book that he very kindly mentioned yesterday, and I'll put it here for anyone who wants to look at it later, 119 00:12:52,730 --> 00:13:02,240 which was actually published almost 10 years ago, just after the 50th anniversary of getting you to remember the great celebration. 120 00:13:02,240 --> 00:13:10,480 Finally, Lisbon Treaty was passed, and the European Europe crisis was not seen yet, just around the corner. 121 00:13:10,480 --> 00:13:19,790 And we had for the first time a European flag and this very definitive and and that that was quite a big thing. 122 00:13:19,790 --> 00:13:28,160 And indeed, everyone was going around in Europe like Diogenes. Remember that this is living a full day like those around and with the light. 123 00:13:28,160 --> 00:13:32,490 What do you do now? I'm looking for a man who can provide. 124 00:13:32,490 --> 00:13:38,900 I find him and everyone was looking for those European stories how we have changed since then. 125 00:13:38,900 --> 00:13:43,760 So part of the question is how and what's happened in the last decade since this book. 126 00:13:43,760 --> 00:13:49,640 But I also would like to raise with you. But let me just say some things about the book. 127 00:13:49,640 --> 00:13:55,430 Let me add was there was the product of a five year long euro project called Icon, 128 00:13:55,430 --> 00:13:59,760 bringing together all sorts of disciplines, but very much a political philosophy book. 129 00:13:59,760 --> 00:14:08,630 So this is unapologetically. And you put asking about what are your what are European stories as seen by intellectuals in Europe? 130 00:14:08,630 --> 00:14:13,880 Of course, we mused about the relationship between us and the oil pipeline. 131 00:14:13,880 --> 00:14:17,840 Is there a connexion? But above all, it's about intellectuals. 132 00:14:17,840 --> 00:14:24,650 And indeed, the first question that we asked was Why is it that for so long, 133 00:14:24,650 --> 00:14:32,510 European intellectuals who care about the European Union after the reforms of the 50s? 134 00:14:32,510 --> 00:14:40,760 Nothing was written really. And so very quickly in the intro, we developed three reasons. 135 00:14:40,760 --> 00:14:47,660 The first was simply that Europe and European story had been perverted, obviously. 136 00:14:47,660 --> 00:14:51,350 The second was diversion. 137 00:14:51,350 --> 00:14:59,300 The big problem of our age, which we've come back to, was the Cold War was the structural division of the world that we could just die tomorrow. 138 00:14:59,300 --> 00:15:04,700 Who cares about what's happening in Brussels? All the more than the third reason was disillusion. 139 00:15:04,700 --> 00:15:08,820 This is a technocratic thing. Call it still trade. Who cares? 140 00:15:08,820 --> 00:15:16,730 That's not the kind of thing intellectuals think about that kind of us, European studies, people or nerds, and we care about little regulation. 141 00:15:16,730 --> 00:15:22,520 But then something happened, and we all know that Maastricht is not just a benign, but possibly not. 142 00:15:22,520 --> 00:15:23,300 And. 143 00:15:23,300 --> 00:15:33,560 And the sudden realisation that this thing, this animal was not just the kind of trade thing, there's more than that staked in the making, whatever. 144 00:15:33,560 --> 00:15:40,670 And so in the next two decades, loads of debates around Europe and what it is and then came more crisis. 145 00:15:40,670 --> 00:15:48,020 And that's the after the post book. But let me say something about the content of the books, not the content of the book. 146 00:15:48,020 --> 00:15:59,600 First of all, you may ask Tim raised yesterday this about national debates around Europe amongst intellectuals, and the term debate is very important. 147 00:15:59,600 --> 00:16:06,050 This is not about national stories, about national contestation and disagreements, as we're talking about in this file, 148 00:16:06,050 --> 00:16:11,990 and we have these four groups of countries, the founders to join us at every turn as the outliers. 149 00:16:11,990 --> 00:16:25,850 And each of them in a way have some consistency in their discourse and narrative of Europe invented, possessed really far in the core. 150 00:16:25,850 --> 00:16:33,020 But then the joiners, it's it's been other than that appropriated and unlisted in these. 151 00:16:33,020 --> 00:16:40,700 So this was join us. And then the returners revealed divide. 152 00:16:40,700 --> 00:16:46,070 And finally, of course, the archives are they in? Are they? I sure will come back on this. 153 00:16:46,070 --> 00:16:51,230 So we have these clusters and they have different ways of appropriating the EU. 154 00:16:51,230 --> 00:17:01,690 And indeed, part of the question of the book is is what's happening between people clusters group lost in translation now. 155 00:17:01,690 --> 00:17:10,540 Of course, David talked about him yesterday. The book is a company of ideas and provocation. 156 00:17:10,540 --> 00:17:20,260 Europe is all these things at the same time object of desire, but in Romania, ethical hazard, normative power, but also just this giant supermarket. 157 00:17:20,260 --> 00:17:25,120 The city does very much in the East and it was starting to take. 158 00:17:25,120 --> 00:17:29,980 But what do we make of this multiplicity, if not tackled? 159 00:17:29,980 --> 00:17:35,170 Are these stories these national debates in their own national linguistic ghetto 160 00:17:35,170 --> 00:17:42,070 that are important or are there echoes that do live in the air to air pollution? 161 00:17:42,070 --> 00:17:46,000 So the way the book proliferates, the debates poetry, 162 00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:54,040 but we ended up and this is a complete chapter finding that there were across all these countries. 163 00:17:54,040 --> 00:18:02,800 We have 49 countries in the book four kinds of debates, and then we can ask whether the public crisis. 164 00:18:02,800 --> 00:18:09,190 That's true, this debate. So we have four types of debate. I'm just going to very quickly give you the bullet points of each debate. 165 00:18:09,190 --> 00:18:22,000 So the first debate is about identity in Europe identity and above all, seeing that every country sees Europe through its prism. 166 00:18:22,000 --> 00:18:28,300 What has Europe done to my country that has Europe down to my future? 167 00:18:28,300 --> 00:18:36,400 So but then there are other prism, the kind of regional Nordic social and cultural prisms. 168 00:18:36,400 --> 00:18:46,390 And of course, there is also the stories of the periphery. We were very fascinated by the first, the different versions of peripheral angst, 169 00:18:46,390 --> 00:18:54,880 and this very ways of self assertion that peripheral countries had cultures of the underdog. 170 00:18:54,880 --> 00:19:01,090 The night our nation is at the core, very much whether you go in Poland, Greece, Romania. 171 00:19:01,090 --> 00:19:07,210 We each have our different ways of saying at the core and contesting it all. 172 00:19:07,210 --> 00:19:10,780 So that was the the relational debate. 173 00:19:10,780 --> 00:19:22,430 There's a question about how neighbours pairs of dual pairs in Europe interact, how they are present and what happens between them. 174 00:19:22,430 --> 00:19:31,420 Now, the second debate I'm going to go very quickly is is not as a civilizational civilizational debate and we heard yesterday, 175 00:19:31,420 --> 00:19:39,210 especially with our own Gary and colleague. What that means, but not only. 176 00:19:39,210 --> 00:19:39,720 And, of course, 177 00:19:39,720 --> 00:19:51,120 this civilizational debate and he just mentioned it's about progress and how different countries debate the contested process of modernity, 178 00:19:51,120 --> 00:19:56,190 is Europe its nemesis or is Europe about the pathologies of modernity? 179 00:19:56,190 --> 00:20:06,480 How would this Christianity stand in this? What is the source of our European self from enlightenment to secularism and hegemony? 180 00:20:06,480 --> 00:20:15,870 And indeed, how is the moses of modernity debated across countries, including around globalisation, 181 00:20:15,870 --> 00:20:20,830 but also the very question of community and the loss of organic solidarity? 182 00:20:20,830 --> 00:20:25,890 Very big at the time. Third, debate is the political debate. 183 00:20:25,890 --> 00:20:32,040 What is integration? What is this part of the contest, the promise of liberal democracy? 184 00:20:32,040 --> 00:20:40,200 Not in this group to say much about this, but of course, already done or has done more than 10 years ago. 185 00:20:40,200 --> 00:20:49,080 It was all about liberalism and its discontent and about what is liberal impartiality. 186 00:20:49,080 --> 00:20:57,480 And finally, liberalism. What how do we define in our countries the contours of liberalism? 187 00:20:57,480 --> 00:21:03,240 And finally, the fourth debate, of course, is that is the definition. 188 00:21:03,240 --> 00:21:08,820 What is the definition of Europe? The definition as finale to the end point? 189 00:21:08,820 --> 00:21:17,070 What is the nature of the European polity? And there, of course, was five different definition of contestation in every country. 190 00:21:17,070 --> 00:21:24,600 If we use the word fragile, what we contrast it to is it contrasted to continental or to empire. 191 00:21:24,600 --> 00:21:33,420 Our past, our future. Is it about federal union versus federal states, all the isms that ends, you mentioned? 192 00:21:33,420 --> 00:21:41,400 And indeed, we had a bias as editors of the book with Justin Ikhwan, Jenny Panopto because we were interested in the third way. 193 00:21:41,400 --> 00:21:50,640 We were interested in the extent to which these national debates would raise the question of whether between nationalism and supra nationalism. 194 00:21:50,640 --> 00:22:00,180 Origins of the nation trope, an image that was emerging amongst our conscious debates in trying to shape a third way for Europe. 195 00:22:00,180 --> 00:22:08,160 And I can say more later. So once we had all of these debates mapped out, the question for us is what do we do with these debates? 196 00:22:08,160 --> 00:22:11,610 What do they create? What is the glue that binds us together? 197 00:22:11,610 --> 00:22:17,040 And we end up in the book and in the conclusion that's the title of the concluding chapter, 198 00:22:17,040 --> 00:22:28,770 crazy narrative diversity and all of these asking what echoes can be productive for European integration? 199 00:22:28,770 --> 00:22:38,400 What is the tone of this coalition? And yes, the European Union is a bubble, but it has kind of simultaneous translation. 200 00:22:38,400 --> 00:22:47,820 It's not all lost in translation, but under this big superstructure of integration, 201 00:22:47,820 --> 00:22:52,920 of cooperation of institution, what is happening to the people of Europe? 202 00:22:52,920 --> 00:22:55,350 Because of course, that's my own bias. 203 00:22:55,350 --> 00:23:03,570 If I was going to tell my story yesterday, I would have talked about being raised in hybridity to Greece and France and Germany and France, 204 00:23:03,570 --> 00:23:09,090 and how that makes you obsessed with mutual recognition between people, how deep, 205 00:23:09,090 --> 00:23:16,780 how empathetic, how engage, how limited to come talked about an enlarged vision. 206 00:23:16,780 --> 00:23:21,990 Can we do that? Not really, but we can just play with our realities. 207 00:23:21,990 --> 00:23:25,530 So this was the question we were asking by the end of the book. 208 00:23:25,530 --> 00:23:32,160 And I'd like to say in conclusion that of course, since the book we've seen the crisis, 209 00:23:32,160 --> 00:23:40,230 we have seen the denial of recognition we have seen in Europe through prejudice and insult as well as material suffering. 210 00:23:40,230 --> 00:23:44,400 But what do we do with it? Well, what we did with it, with some colleagues, 211 00:23:44,400 --> 00:23:52,410 was to write a little book of the Greco German affair and asking about whether mutual recognition was lost. 212 00:23:52,410 --> 00:23:58,920 And indeed, the finding that in every story, you know, I'm not one to say that in every story, 213 00:23:58,920 --> 00:24:04,350 we have a silver lining and the silver lining of this euro crisis that we've gone through. 214 00:24:04,350 --> 00:24:11,490 Is that an end of the day, even if this engagement has been about denying the other an insult, 215 00:24:11,490 --> 00:24:16,140 it's also in that very way a way of knowing each other better. 216 00:24:16,140 --> 00:24:22,200 That's what we find between Greece and Germany. And I think that's what we found amongst Europeans of the crisis. 217 00:24:22,200 --> 00:24:25,450 So I would like to appeal to us when we think about Europe, 218 00:24:25,450 --> 00:24:31,980 who are European stories and how they mingle and contest each other to remember that there's always a silver lining. 219 00:24:31,980 --> 00:24:39,990 Thank you. I'm coming at this from the angle of literature, 220 00:24:39,990 --> 00:24:48,750 which might be quite a bit different feel for a lot of people in the social sciences and in politics, but anyway, here it goes. 221 00:24:48,750 --> 00:24:52,740 So a few words then about the narrative from a literary point of view. 222 00:24:52,740 --> 00:25:02,100 So we've got this term narrative ology, which means basically the study of narrative, and it is a huge field. 223 00:25:02,100 --> 00:25:08,640 I'm not going to touch on anywhere near the different concepts that are being discussed in our ontology. 224 00:25:08,640 --> 00:25:11,580 I'll just touch on a very few aspects here, 225 00:25:11,580 --> 00:25:21,960 and I'm going to use three of three examples of German language authors from three different centuries to just touch on a few questions here. 226 00:25:21,960 --> 00:25:30,840 My focus with this is the question of how literary narratives establish identities, both personal and collective ones, 227 00:25:30,840 --> 00:25:38,820 and how they discuss the issue of borders and boundaries in a personal collective and a geographical sense. 228 00:25:38,820 --> 00:25:45,510 So throughout history, literature has always been connected, concerned with the relationship between space and identity. 229 00:25:45,510 --> 00:25:53,640 On the one hand narrative as a way for a culture society to assert its own identity is full of their place in history. 230 00:25:53,640 --> 00:26:01,080 And on the other hand, and perhaps more interestingly, you've got literature which challenges these boundaries and identities, 231 00:26:01,080 --> 00:26:05,940 tries to shift blur or collapse boundaries and distinctions. 232 00:26:05,940 --> 00:26:11,940 Now, fashionable term in literary studies today is transnational literature. 233 00:26:11,940 --> 00:26:18,660 So this is literature which transcends the national and linguistic boundaries, whereby authors have long national literature. 234 00:26:18,660 --> 00:26:28,320 Write about other cultures, languages and experiences, but also literature written by authors who don't neatly fit into any one national category. 235 00:26:28,320 --> 00:26:31,740 I hope you're going to touch at least on two of those office. 236 00:26:31,740 --> 00:26:40,380 So something which has always been the purpose of literature, but since the start of writing is the trope of the quest and the journey. 237 00:26:40,380 --> 00:26:44,370 So this is something that goes back all the way to the ancient epics. 238 00:26:44,370 --> 00:26:51,210 So it's the idea of narrative transporting us into different valleys and space is taking us on a journey, 239 00:26:51,210 --> 00:27:01,900 which is often, of course, then a journey of self-discovery. So writing about the foreign, the exotic, the unknown shows us something about ourselves. 240 00:27:01,900 --> 00:27:07,170 So there's always a kind of dialectical relationship between the other and the self. 241 00:27:07,170 --> 00:27:12,300 So on the one hand, you've got narratives which familiarise the exotic and the unknown, 242 00:27:12,300 --> 00:27:20,890 but you also have conversely narratives which show us that the familiar is really strange, perhaps uncannily perhaps exotic. 243 00:27:20,890 --> 00:27:28,950 So it's that sort of dual relationship which which is at stake in much of good literature, as I would see it. 244 00:27:28,950 --> 00:27:34,800 And that sort of exploration doesn't necessarily require people to be very well travelled. 245 00:27:34,800 --> 00:27:40,170 And my first example is the Austrian 19th-century writer about that shift or not. 246 00:27:40,170 --> 00:27:44,190 Perhaps one facet have a list of the literary canon. 247 00:27:44,190 --> 00:27:52,750 I imagine many more journalists won't have heard of him. So not a very, very eventful life of a very unhappy life in many ways. 248 00:27:52,750 --> 00:28:01,500 That's very strange and wide-ranging stories. And I'll just mention his breakthrough story, a novella called upThere, 249 00:28:01,500 --> 00:28:07,560 which he published in 1842 and was a huge hit with his Austrian and German readership. 250 00:28:07,560 --> 00:28:12,810 So Obvious tells the story of a North African Jew living in the desert, 251 00:28:12,810 --> 00:28:22,200 who has a number of devastating blows felt to him and then makes the journey through the North African desert to the Mediterranean, 252 00:28:22,200 --> 00:28:29,610 travels by boat, by ship across and circles of all places in a remote Austrian Mountain Valley. 253 00:28:29,610 --> 00:28:34,740 So it's a story about seeing the sort of the exotic, the foreign in so many ways, 254 00:28:34,740 --> 00:28:41,100 religious ethnic ethnographic coming into what some shiftless racist would have been the familiar. 255 00:28:41,100 --> 00:28:46,770 So it's about looking at the familial through foreign eyes. 256 00:28:46,770 --> 00:28:54,180 My second example is another writer who accused for part of his life would have counted as Austria and then later, 257 00:28:54,180 --> 00:28:59,490 of course, as Czechoslovakia, and that is Kafka. 258 00:28:59,490 --> 00:29:08,610 So Kafka, as you know, grew up in the Habsburg empire, an interesting example of a multi linguistic, 259 00:29:08,610 --> 00:29:16,110 multi ethnic kind of conglomerate of nations within one nation state. 260 00:29:16,110 --> 00:29:24,030 And interestingly, when Kafka writes about Europe, he doesn't really mention specific spaces or places, for the most part. 261 00:29:24,030 --> 00:29:28,350 There are a few examples where Kafka mentions national spaces. 262 00:29:28,350 --> 00:29:32,550 He mentions non-European spaces, mentions Russia. 263 00:29:32,550 --> 00:29:39,900 He mentions the Arab descent, and he mentions China and talks in Chinese once. 264 00:29:39,900 --> 00:29:44,910 Kafka once wrote to his fiancee in the letter I included in here. 265 00:29:44,910 --> 00:29:51,450 He needs it. And this fascination with China, from the eyes of someone who lived in Prague, 266 00:29:51,450 --> 00:29:58,500 a small but multicultural city within the hotspot empire, is then transposed into several stories. 267 00:29:58,500 --> 00:30:02,610 We have got the most famous the longest one building the Great Wall of China, 268 00:30:02,610 --> 00:30:07,770 which describes how this wall is in fact an impossible project that can never be built. 269 00:30:07,770 --> 00:30:13,350 But what they do instead is that they build early parts of the wall, not even joining them up. 270 00:30:13,350 --> 00:30:20,250 The reason they build parts is simply so that the people involved in the project can get a sense of closure. 271 00:30:20,250 --> 00:30:25,140 So walls in this story are not functioning borders or barriers. 272 00:30:25,140 --> 00:30:31,200 They are psychological constructs and that the story within that long go on building the 273 00:30:31,200 --> 00:30:37,950 Wall of China story tells the story of an invasion from the north of savage nomads, 274 00:30:37,950 --> 00:30:42,720 invade the capital and destroy the culture of that country of China. 275 00:30:42,720 --> 00:30:48,750 So you can see how, taken together, these two stories really show both how boundaries are futile. 276 00:30:48,750 --> 00:30:54,690 Ultimately, in a measure that perhaps a psychological crutch sort of cross thesis. 277 00:30:54,690 --> 00:31:01,980 And yet they also absolutely vital, because if we don't have boundaries, then terrible things will happen. 278 00:31:01,980 --> 00:31:08,370 In this diary, Kafka reflects very interestingly on what people's mind of literature, 279 00:31:08,370 --> 00:31:14,350 and by this, he means literature written by a minority group within a dominant culture. 280 00:31:14,350 --> 00:31:23,820 So for him, Kafka as a German speaking to within in Prague, this was a kind of form being an outsider within the language and the culture. 281 00:31:23,820 --> 00:31:31,950 And this Kafka says minor literature is characterised by many things, but above all the things, it's characterised by being more political, 282 00:31:31,950 --> 00:31:40,930 more politically critical than the literature produced by authors who feel more at home within that language. 283 00:31:40,930 --> 00:31:46,630 Now, coming back to the question of narrative that entertained voters and so on, I think we should add another question here, 284 00:31:46,630 --> 00:31:56,620 which is the question that the voice of the writer, whether this is a personal first-person or an impersonal what we call omniscient narrator. 285 00:31:56,620 --> 00:32:01,000 So the writers are, of course, vital to the stories that we read. 286 00:32:01,000 --> 00:32:07,810 And as readers, we have to to some extent put our trust in these narrators because they are the ones telling the story. 287 00:32:07,810 --> 00:32:15,900 But then, of course, as you know, the single is the only reliable narrator has been a very effective literary device for many centuries. 288 00:32:15,900 --> 00:32:24,770 I'll just mention one famous, slightly pop literature example, which is Agatha Christie's al-Kurd for her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. 289 00:32:24,770 --> 00:32:32,650 I wanted to give away the twist if you haven't read it, but one of the most spectacular examples of unreliable limericks. 290 00:32:32,650 --> 00:32:41,860 And so you're talking about the writers. I'm coming to my final example, which is the German Bosnian writer Sasha Stanisic. 291 00:32:41,860 --> 00:32:49,060 So scholarships shot to fame with his first novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, 292 00:32:49,060 --> 00:32:58,210 which is set in his native Bosnia during the Bosnian War and then tells the story of a boy's wartime experience and flight to exile to Germany, 293 00:32:58,210 --> 00:33:11,080 which is where Stanley six lives now. His second novel for First All, translated by Anthea Bell Before the Feast, is very different. 294 00:33:11,080 --> 00:33:13,970 It's set in an East German village. 295 00:33:13,970 --> 00:33:24,160 A sexual East German village called Foulston settled in the East German Brandenburg province of We'll come up and people think of writing like this. 296 00:33:24,160 --> 00:33:28,690 Why doesn't he write about Bosnia again? So the German Jewish can't take maxim? 297 00:33:28,690 --> 00:33:34,600 Villa wrote a very scathing article. I think so, saying that's of the Scottish, which is basically selling out. 298 00:33:34,600 --> 00:33:40,300 They're trying to integrate into the German mainstream and try to logical East German folklore, he says. 299 00:33:40,300 --> 00:33:46,510 And as a migrant German writer, you should capitalise on your album as you should write stories about where you come from. 300 00:33:46,510 --> 00:33:54,940 Not about German topics. I would say that very simply, the novel isn't as straightforward about German identity as you might think, 301 00:33:54,940 --> 00:34:00,640 and this is why I think Scottish, which is such an amazing writer and such an interesting example. 302 00:34:00,640 --> 00:34:08,170 What's interesting about the novel, amongst many other things, is that it's told by a first person plural narrator so that we know, right? 303 00:34:08,170 --> 00:34:15,610 So which is quite unusual, I think, for novels by and large. So on the one hand, you of course, have to ask, who is this we? 304 00:34:15,610 --> 00:34:24,760 The first line seems to be simply a kind of selective village voice, but then fissures and cracks seem to appear within this collective identity. 305 00:34:24,760 --> 00:34:29,410 So the way seems to be sometimes explicitly male, so therefore very gendered. 306 00:34:29,410 --> 00:34:35,470 It also seems to be very hostile towards both towards outsiders to the village community, 307 00:34:35,470 --> 00:34:43,570 people from foreigners, strangers and also hostile towards certain people within the village community. 308 00:34:43,570 --> 00:34:52,450 So I think what Scottish hipsters novel shows us, then, is that narratives really are both to assert identity, 309 00:34:52,450 --> 00:34:59,410 perhaps to draw us into a sense of community as belonging that is obviously one of their functions throughout history. 310 00:34:59,410 --> 00:35:07,660 But they also very softly to show off the mechanisms by which we actually get drawn in by means of narrative. 311 00:35:07,660 --> 00:35:17,050 And then thirdly, to house, perhaps for us to take a critical distance from these strategies to be able to see through the strategies, 312 00:35:17,050 --> 00:35:23,050 or perhaps to at least have a critical sense of distance. So in the case of some exceptions, for instance, 313 00:35:23,050 --> 00:35:31,570 the way narrative gradually and draw the area reveals a the violence tendency so that the novel is set 314 00:35:31,570 --> 00:35:39,290 during the night before the face that is mentioned in the title and repeatedly the narrative we voice. 315 00:35:39,290 --> 00:35:47,680 And that hints at some terrible violence that might be part of this age old feast that the village community are celebrating, 316 00:35:47,680 --> 00:35:57,130 as the narrator tells us early on. We are glad Anna is going to be, but the sentence will be carried out at the feast tomorrow. 317 00:35:57,130 --> 00:36:01,600 Yeah, one more sentence. Anna is in fact, a character within the novel. 318 00:36:01,600 --> 00:36:08,980 She's a young woman who goes through a run in the night, and we find out that she's going to move to also began studying medicine tomorrow. 319 00:36:08,980 --> 00:36:11,470 But throughout this nocturnal narrative, 320 00:36:11,470 --> 00:36:18,790 we're never quite sure whether Anna is really going to be a victim of some sort of savage ritual that goes back centuries, 321 00:36:18,790 --> 00:36:26,200 or why long sentences such as tomorrow is going to be her final days have a much more harmless dimension 322 00:36:26,200 --> 00:36:32,950 that I think is precisely that power of narrative to on sexual confusion question our own attitudes. 323 00:36:32,950 --> 00:36:39,380 That's why I think the purpose of literature lies and why students still study facts that are old but also have. 324 00:36:39,380 --> 00:36:51,780 He texts that are what I. Thank you. Timothy asked me to say a few things about how someone who comes out of the field 325 00:36:51,780 --> 00:36:57,440 really communication research might think about the power and perils of narrative. 326 00:36:57,440 --> 00:37:02,490 Now forget a moment of sort of programmatic advertising, if you will. 327 00:37:02,490 --> 00:37:08,310 For those of you who are not familiar with the field of media, communication research doesn't exist in Oxford, for example. 328 00:37:08,310 --> 00:37:16,560 It's an interdisciplinary stela research that's concerned essentially with the question of how people share symbols across time and space. 329 00:37:16,560 --> 00:37:21,240 In my case, my chairs and global communication. 330 00:37:21,240 --> 00:37:22,290 The central question, I suppose, 331 00:37:22,290 --> 00:37:27,780 to the role of communication in the fundamental political question is whether these are a box of recognised institutional, 332 00:37:27,780 --> 00:37:32,790 established political actors or more broadly, the existential fundamental political questions. 333 00:37:32,790 --> 00:37:37,740 Who are we? How do we live together? Who gets what, when and how? 334 00:37:37,740 --> 00:37:39,300 So this is sort of the field, if you will, 335 00:37:39,300 --> 00:37:47,310 and the origins of the field is in social science and psychology and the grassroots with rhetoric in particular in America, 336 00:37:47,310 --> 00:37:54,480 speech, communication programmes and some of the greatest scholars in our field. Originally, a captain, James Fallows, came out of that area. 337 00:37:54,480 --> 00:38:00,660 Now, as I thought about the question to me, he put to me of how we think now as a field without narrative. 338 00:38:00,660 --> 00:38:10,320 I realise we don't really very much because I think like many other fields, thousands of our feet become primarily social scientific endeavours. 339 00:38:10,320 --> 00:38:15,990 I suppose we have become rather impressed with numbers and with quantification of various forms. 340 00:38:15,990 --> 00:38:18,180 And I wholeheartedly embrace that, 341 00:38:18,180 --> 00:38:26,280 though I suppose it saddens me sometimes that we don't think so much about narrative as we perhaps should in the sense that of course, 342 00:38:26,280 --> 00:38:31,350 there is a world disclosing insights here that are not as productive Carolyn or anyone else on the panel, 343 00:38:31,350 --> 00:38:40,620 but I think are sometimes forgotten from from the terrorism scientists about think about communication not as the transmission of information, 344 00:38:40,620 --> 00:38:44,400 but it's about the creation of meaningful relations. 345 00:38:44,400 --> 00:38:50,697 So as a relational thing, as a pragmatic thing and not simply a question of the content of something and the effect.