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So have been given this broad topics of Europe as seen from the outside.

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And it wasn't an easy job approach to any contradictory reasons, one because of course, Europe has been the dominant historical presence.

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But surprisingly, particularly India is actually makes a little self conscious reflection on Europe.

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That's something I do want to talk about in a second. Oh gosh.

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There's some diplomatic strategic studies writing it, the new free trade agreements and so forth.

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Even if you go back very few restrictions, actually what the European experience is, in fact the only one significant one I came across.

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And I wonder if you think of it, that it's a literary reference in the spirit of this is the great Hindi writer Damon Varma,

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who is one of the guardians of modern Hindi literature.

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And he writes about Europe in two different registers states, and I want to begin with those two ministers and then mention three others briefly.

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So his first novel way of doing just those days was actually set in the Czech Republic.

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It's the only northern first in all that actually set a unifying adventure.

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And interestingly, it's it's Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia,

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and he sees Europe through the history of Czechoslovakia, which it said was the interesting choice.

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And the central theme of that novel is that the history of Europe.

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Recent history of the early stages of trauma is the second of the Holocaust and a lot of the argument.

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Northern Israel about how yet in accessible experience of the Holocaust is treating the protagonist.

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One of this is actually this is true the occupation of Iraq, which she writes, called another another knowledge.

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And it's extraordinary, thought God, as he travels across Europe.

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The dominant image of modern Europe is a series of successive traumas Holocaust invasion of different countries,

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particularly Czechoslovakia boardwalk bombings.

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And at one a.m. and says, look, this might provide the opportunity for some kind of a shared universalism beacon on suffering.

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But he what he finds extraordinary is despite the fact that trauma and suffering is a universal experience,

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each nationality understands it through its own particular historic concerns and interests.

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And that's the paradox he actually plays on that.

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This history of suffering in cricket Central Europe, which could be a stupid idea, actually doesn't become one.

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And he doesn't do like, you know, every group is kind of concerned about that particular trauma and how easy it is to

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actually render other people's traumas invisible or just enjoy it and stop us from this.

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This paradox of a kind of a potential history of common suffering, actually not translating into a kind of common interest.

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The second major strategy to read more right about here, which is much later in his career.

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So the last days of his life,

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and he actually took a much more conservative tone and he writes a book called India Europe and it's in a very Hegelian frame.

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It's kind of the idea of Europe and the idea of India, but.

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With the bombing, you just said it's not this the potential ethical power of Trump, the dominant attitude to Europe is resentment,

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and the resentment is that Europe has colonised intellectual space and in that sense, the colonisation still continues.

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There's no thinking outside of Europe because Chakrabarti can say provincialism Europe what he want,

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but Europe still needs a reference point in 24 to internalising it.

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And that's the resentment whereby she talks about it.

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And for him, the history then becomes the contrast between Europe and India, Europe and Asia branches that.

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For Europe, history's about a possible future.

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So the best Europe is the Europe. For Asia, it's about recovery and easiest sense, right?

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So the best idea was the idea of fostering in the conceptual sense, right?

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But. His critique is, in a sense or that you do towards Europe, is that the colonisation of, in a sense intellectual discourse still continues,

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and that resentment is something that in a sense constitutes that engagement even when you don't acknowledge it.

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So this trauma, this resentment.

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The target sister, which you see a lot of I think in the last 20, 25 years is this kind of strange combination of hope and schadenfreude about her.

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And it has to go back to the question president asked in the slightest, which is for most Indian intellectuals.

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Europe was identified with inventing the political competition state,

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and the Indian nationalist movement was very peculiar because most of its dominant figures were deeply suspicious of information.

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Steve Garvey. Even happiness in his own kind of sort of strange way that there is something

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about this political form that is not quite appropriate for countries like India.

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And the fascination of the project of European integration was OK, has the imagination of a new political fault?

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That overcomes that you should state now. You know, you heard yesterday the nation state was Chewbacca, but he's a definition student.

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The schadenfreude thing was in order to do that to Europe would have to become like India.

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The political future of Europe is India, which is 20 different languages.

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You have the problem with what's the common language English of a cultural sensibility that actually guns,

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which they get complexes is in daily life, quite natural around ambiguity in some senses.

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You don't ask questions like who civilisation? This is the Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Western, you name it.

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Right. And Europe will have to actually construct it, said best.

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Such fascination of the EU is that it is that grand experiment in inventing a political form that actually.

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In the ICU in 1947. Right? So that's that that's the point.

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On the other hand, I think for India, in a sense, Europe is the future of India.

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Because the team hadn't invented in 1947, there was any kind of a common market, right?

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So in that sense, there's a kind of crossing of these two different political imaginations where in the political cultural sense,

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Europe begins to look more like an electronic sense. India begins to look more like, you know.

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So this is the moment to hold. Then there's the moment of seise, the moment of cynicism comes from this fact, which is in European debates,

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there's often a great deal of investment in saying that Europe is not just the invention of political form,

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it's also the invention of a new conception of justice.

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And it's interesting both protected the right latch on to the European form for their own reasons.

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How hijackings think this is going to be a new and propia Harvard law?

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Students think it's going to be a social democratic thing,

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and it's interesting to see this kind of identification of a political force with a substantive project of justice.

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In its outward projection, Europe is what is projected itself as this social Democratic copper machine project, right?

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This is the environmental project. This is the anti-American capitalist monster project.

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This is the alternative to American Empire project, and that has been the European set presentation abroad.

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And the moment of cynicism comes from the fact that this story is completely unbelievable to anybody outside of Europe on issues like capital,

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mobility and globalisation.

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Turns out, Europe was actually more American than America on the virtues of excessive capitalism and finance and credit guns out.

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Europe was more American in America, even under a shorten intervention as recently as Libya turns out.

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Europe is more American in America. So this construction that what holds Europe together is some distinctive economic and

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political ethos that comes with this pretty song invites a great deal of scepticism,

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and I spoke to a large number of diplomats ready for this conference.

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It's the one thing that they actually find deeply sanctimonious about.

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You know that the gap between the representation and what the actual reality of Europe is.

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So that's the cynicism that there's a story being told that is actually a kind of implausible.

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And finally, just to register, you might say, which is, I think the current register, the register of indifference.

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And this just has a particular form, which is to say that is Europe actually going to be an actor on the world stage.

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It is a significant presence. It's India's largest trading partner, ActionScript its EU as a whole.

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So in that sense, it's a very visible presence. But.

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Because he does not have a unified foreign policy and most diplomats to think of France and Germany.

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I think that Orthodoxy said he wanted to speak to Europe.

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I think still still holds true,

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but very frankly deep scepticism that Europe in this new political agency can actually act as a blind historical agent in

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relation to the United States or arguably even Russia and particularly China of sucking doesn't have the military unit to study.

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He doesn't have a strategic we should study certainly doesn't have a bandwidth to be able to engage

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in wake up to the fact that the distribution of the powers in the world has been substantially.

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And in that sense, I think, you know, particularly in India,

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I think most people think America is miles ahead of Europe in actually thinking deeply about how the world has actually changed.

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But more importantly, besides,

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how do you assess the lack of an energy bar that makes it a difficult thing for me to act in a certain sense of unreality?

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And I just end with this point is that yesterday we talked a lot about sort of Europe as a kind of antidote to American capitalism,

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things like privacy and the power of Facebook and big companies like, you know what, the rest of the world thinks of that.

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These are very good arguments.

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But if you ask the question, is it going to be more exciting for people, young people to engage with a country that thinks of regulation?

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Or is it going to be more exciting for young people to engage with a country that says which are the

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countries that are going to innovate to invent the internet of the future experiment with A.I.?

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Or in fact, I think the answer is unfortunately, it's actually going to be much more relaxed that in a sense, this is something that, you know,

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it's it's it's it's it's a form of virtue signalling,

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but it actually doesn't quite confront the hard realities of technological power ships that are actually doing this.

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So in that sense, the fear that Europe is actually becoming a little bit more inventive or to

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turn the full circle back when he said at the beginning of the 19th century,

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it doesn't matter what China thinks. I mean, the danger. It doesn't matter what you do things.

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So that's very much it's it's a real pleasure to be here.

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I mean, lots of people have said that it's really true.

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And to them, it's also challenging the massive because of the presentations that have to see this light.

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And it was hard talking to it's even less sexy that that has been said before because I'm dealing with the image of the European Union,

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all this technical thing. This is some research I have done for some years and covering a series of countries.

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And in the end, I mean, I completely with with the publications.

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The latest of which is was in 2014, which means that I have to update to a certain extent on what has been done.

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Meanwhile, my others in the field.

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Fortunately though, there is a wide and very large research group, but in the U.S. led by Intelligibly Mike in Holland,

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and they have been very productive and a few other studies that have been going on for some years.

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But what was the context within which this field of research started, which is a rather recent one, is about 15 years.

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The current US, with precisely that of the idea of the distinctiveness of the European Union,

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was those years in which we were talking ourselves within Europe that the EU

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is so distinctive its normative collar is a soft follow US civilian power,

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many types of adjective ized power so that we have so not.

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And also the EU documents were full of this reference to this type of set for a presentation,

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always mentioning the rules, the historical roots of this distinctiveness.

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Now, of course, this also meant to better power. And so the debate went on inside.

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At a certain point, someone started to think, Well, let's see whether the other's body argument and what they think about the European Union,

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because this is also relevant in order to understand whether the EU is is perceived to be legitimate, is perceived,

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set to be credible and hence has more chances to have an impact outside in this transformative power.

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Europe, the oxygen to us, the outside.

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So the literature started very rather fabricated to the bulk of this is very systematic in the way in which data are collected.

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Other research is more focussed on a specific country,

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so it goes deeper into the history of the country's territory, the storytelling of the in the country, et cetera.

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But only now, regardless of that of the methods that were used and even the actors.

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So whether it was a state actor or was not allowed to enter Confucian negotiations at the WTO, at the World Bank or at the UN General Assembly,

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more or less we can identify a set of results that can be very, very synthetically summarised.

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And then what we do in a very short one lie. So as summarise that in 2014, and then I thought, Well, something must have changed.

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A lot must have changed because of the three crisis that the European Union has gone through in the recent years of the economic crisis.

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That led to a view to the euro crisis, the so-called refugee crisis and then Brexit.

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Brexit is the fragmentation prise, the prise itself the ideal of Europe as being a will that go always in one direction without going backwards.

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So my expectation was the damage being done to the perception, the perception of the European Union now having to leave some of this later to,

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I guess, I hope most of the literature that has been produced.

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Meanwhile, I came to the conclusion and that is what I will argue that this is only partially true.

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And the reason why this is only partially true is because the damage the assumes that the image before was a positive one.

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Why? To the contrary, there were many elements of weakness that were detected and mentioned,

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also in previous research that has been seen in a simple way, overcome by the more recent causes.

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And the second thing I want to claim is that contrary to what I expected,

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the crises of those that have made sense to me, the biggest damage is not the economic crisis.

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It's not the euro crisis. And sorry to say here it is not to blow the Brexit crisis,

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but is the refugee crisis and for what it represents in terms of the values of the European Union that has all.

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This projected itself as a value driven actor, and second, in terms of internal solidarity,

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because the internal lack of solidarity in the case of the refugee crisis was probably even more striking,

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the that that was manifesting itself in the case of the economic crisis and the management of the Greek crisis.

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So this is where I will go. What were the funding that have really just squeezed because I have so many help in my time?

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First of all, the first important thing to notice is that the EU is largely unknown.

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So we think that we go abroad and everybody knows about the European Union.

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But this is, of course, naive to think people don't know about the European Union inside Europe.

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So why should you expect the people in Brazil or South Africa really know and tell the Europeans?

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So they tend to mix up Europe and the European Union is very also interesting.

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In many incidents in Russia, the high percentage of respondents need to know whether Russia was part or not of the European Union.

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I don't know whether it changed after the Ukraine crisis, but those were the results of the.

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So that's the first thing. So do not expect that people rely on the European Union really knowing what you are talking about.

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Secondly, I mean, I'm talking about the large public.

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Of course, we have the elites on us, but of course, the elites are more knowledgeable and in general, it tends to be appreciated.

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It's not as guy who, with exception to a certain extent of the Arab countries where the the traditionally the perception that has being more

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called very limited media coverage limited to very specific issues that are relevant to the country in which we are,

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of which we are talking about.

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And the reason for this was very, very young and was told by a journalist told Al Jazeera, interviewing one of the reports this one on Al Jazeera.

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And they tried to have a for some months.

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They're trying to have a report on Europe. Prime time and they had to shot it.

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It was, they said, the European Union is difficult to tell.

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It tends to be boring. There is. There are no sexy stories to tell about the European Union.

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So that was prior to the crisis that have made it more attractive.

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But so it's difficult to sell and it's difficult and still particularly attractive for the old story.

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So there are limits to media coverage.

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Also, most of the reports are not through direct journalistic that are present in Brussels, but it's more through press agencies.

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So they tend to be very standardised in terms of the message that that is delivered in general is not that visible.

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I mean, I expected that development cooperation being such an amount of money that the European

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Union and the member states spent in countries which make the European Union more visible.

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This one is very interesting to note.

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The 70s there discovered also through recent interviews in South Africa, that what is more visible locally is the agent that is using this morning.

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There would have to implement the project as frequently is a national agent.

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So this is in South Africa. The agenda came more to the discourse was Gee, I'd say that the German gets it and they're using EU money.

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But what becomes visible is the national face.

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The perception tends to be in general, very much influenced by historical memories that we were seeing for.

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And colonialism is new. One is the future that plays the most relevant role.

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Also in the sense of the shaping the sort of colonialist image of the European Union in the sense of being the overlapping with the colonial

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country that we are more knowledgeable of so socially shaped perceptions of the perceptions of the global order and more contingent variables.

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The personal physician, the type of relations with the European Union, the type of interaction in general.

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There are a series of rather positive images, but they are all objective ized or they are old,

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but with the vast following the first and is shared by all it was that of an economic giant.

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But this economic giant recognised by all people interviewed is lacking leadership.

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So there is a lot quieter potential of leadership which the European Union is unable to use because of an inconsistency in policies,

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because of control, because a area of the. Divides adapted to the inside,

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which makes it also not flexible because once an agreement is making so it is very difficult that they can change this agreement is a negotiation,

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some compromise that is and also subordinated by the two other actors in general,

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even when it is considered that if this is the second point as a beacon of multilateralism,

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the most frequent criticism here is that it tends to have a patronising attitude towards the obvious and hear

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the interviews at the levels of the negotiations for the economic partnership agreements that Edstrom doing,

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for instance, are very telling in this respect. This criticism of being patronising, dominating, not listening and teaching is very frequent.

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You always find that in interviews with the leaders in the other parts of the world,

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particularly not in the US, but in the south, in that part of the world as a model of regional integration.

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Again, introducing the African Union demands the fact that the EU is trying to export to set an idea of regional integration,

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which does not take into consideration the local context.

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So it gets patronising when it comes to democracy promotion and relegation.

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It's also recognised to have a role, but always with about double standards.

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So it's never something that is fully bright.

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How did the three clauses make a difference where they had enhanced some of the criticisms that were already there,

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so internal fragmentation became more clear.

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Interviews in China China is a very, very keen observer of the European Union that they need to level intellectual levels.

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Lack of coherence and patronising attitude became particularly clear in the case of the management of migration and its like,

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and I will spend a few words here. They reconstitute as a mediator, also with notice in the case of mediation,

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in the case of Ukraine and the recent analysis of the Eastern Partnership countries and perceptions in the Eastern Partnership country.

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Tell the story of a potential leading actor that is not leading and is capable of performing

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a mediating role in the job of the EU as an economic power has been weakened at the beach,

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but not to the extent that I expected. According to the research that is available, of course, crisis is very interesting literature.

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Obama's recent change of use in Australia tell the story of the military that has not been compromised that much amongst the need.

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It's also, to a certain extent, the case of China publication of think tanks in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine tell the same story.

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What are the images? The most damage that is in the area of the EU was normative power when it comes to respect of human rights.

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And here, the perception that has been protected into the mega region is particularly telling

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and the both at the level of NGOs Agios and and at the level of governments.

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In the case of AIDS prevention organisations and NGO global NGOs indeed interested and says local NGOs.

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The criticism is the greatest criticism has to deal with the lack of respect of human rights for

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the migrants and attention to the local context when externalising migration and borders control.

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And in the case of governments, the greatest criticism is one of patronising attitude into requesting policies that was made.

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Aim is to control the borders outside of the European borders, so this external analyzation of migration,

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management and border control linked to securitisation is very much damaging the image of the

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European Union and its absolutely making not credible the EU as a normative power and anything that.

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And I want to reiterate what has been said before, it's a pleasure and an honour to be here.

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Thank you very much for inviting me. I want to say something personal first that I'm proud of and going to address obvious reasons.

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I'm an academic. I'm a historian of the 19th century Middle East, and this is what I would possibly be talking about.

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But I'm also for lack of a better word than activist.

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I was lucky enough to end up in my home country, Egypt, when the uprising happened in 2011, and I found myself in the thick of it.

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So I have something to say about you in these two capacities, so maybe I'll stop by my academic one.

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I prepared to with nothing very significant, just some pictures and I'd love to be talking about.

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I actually studied here, my Ph.D., my nephew was here.

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Technically, it's Peters. But objectively at that time and in the middle centre here, we had a project and the project was in a sense,

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how to listen to you because that was the paradigm of the dominant paradigm.

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When I came 25 years ago, there was this famous 1798 deadline.

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But upon cutting spending like the printing press and the first lady just coming to the region via the French,

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and that became a very dominant paradigm.

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And the question was how to listen to it.

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And uh, a lot of the scholarship was taking place about how to challenge the notion that enlightenment, but you meant enlightenment.

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And it was the spread of enlightenment.

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Ideas of liberalism and the rule of law has been there was reported first as a trickle, then esteem that a flood.

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If you were working on the 20th century other than the 19th century,

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the paradigm shifted a bit and it's the paradigm of both realism and and conspiracy.

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The question was, in a sense, how to make sense of this amazing dramatic transformation of the map and into the Middle East, the Middle East itself.

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Being a European coinage, the term and the countries that these borders were drawn by European military and police and officials and in in the West,

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resulting in up to the First World War after the press conference and the establishment of the bandits,

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resulting either in the French state of violence or in a place like Syria,

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or the more subtle but equally disturbing one of indirect form of finding someone who can serve the interests and to own,

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as it's been called empire by a treaty.

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This is a particularly interesting picture because this is Spicer who was supposed to be king of Syria, who ended up across the street.

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Syria ended up being king of Iraq. And here he is, put on the throne with the British national anthem playing in the background.

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So this is a very familiar story in the Middle East.

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This is the story of Sykes-Picot is a story of conspiracy, and it is literally the household sites.

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People is not an academic jargon that the mess we're in now is because of what Britain and France did to us back then.

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And it's this the form of conspiracy.

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Now, if you're doing intellectual history, we had this very powerful paradigm to cope with,

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and that one is to be performed in the different age, which is the intellectual history of the so-called Panopto.

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We haven't been in the songs basically measured against the European yardstick or what European

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yardstick and economically it was the paradigm of the integration in the world economy.

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This is a perfectly famous study.

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Now, of course, since then, the field has been completely radicalised and because mostly of postcolonial studies, has been completely put forth.

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And Europe has been centred. But I think a lot of the scholarship, because of its interest in this entering Europe has lost sight of the colony.

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Yet somehow they want to share with you maybe a couple of interesting angles

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through which people have been approaching and revisiting these questions.

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One is this business about what I've seen in Egypt and the French, and to actually study what this printing press was thinking.

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And of course, it was not. Printing will tell you it was printing military communities.

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This was the technology used for imperial plus purpose.

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And then there's now a huge amount of literature on this moment, as I'm sure many of you know, because this is something, for example,

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books is as working on Skip this and I might want to work on you but know intellectual ideas, but the scientific ones is interesting.

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This is the founder of the medical school in Egypt is the beginning of modern medical science.

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This is a prolific guy himself and his literature about what he does.

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This is your typical white, enlightened European men coming to spread science to a bigot, to the superstitious religious society.

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Islam is the only obstacle to modern science, and his goal is to halve how to harness Islam.

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Response for the lack of time will just skip this.

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I actually was interested in his students and how they think about science, but also how they think of him.

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And so I worked on some of his students and then how they understand modern science.

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And for them, you know, this whole dichotomy between modern science, especially the pro-peace argument that Islam stood in the way of dissection.

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And that is why we've not really found the proper modern medical establishment was completely bogus as far as they're concerned.

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It's a dichotomy that exists only in his mind.

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There are Muslims who and who they saw no compunction whatsoever in opening up bodies and practising B.S.,

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and they ended up actually dissecting his own language rather than have it.

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And that was the problem rather than I understand this part with an interesting field of work.

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Now again to visit is literally thought argument, which is the dissertation that I just read a couple of days ago in Harvard.

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These are two famous travellers to Europe in the 19th century.

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The one on the left is very, very famous for us. He's the main translator.

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He went to Europe in the ninth in the 1830s. He ended up coming back to Egypt,

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founding the School of Translation and spreading specifically French legal ideas and the principle of separation of powers into Egypt,

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a major intellectual force politically and and intellectually.

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But the scholarship now about him is is,

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is that of someone with a deep sense of unity of context as opposed to the guy on the right who's now being pre-selected.

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He also travelled to, but not to Paris. He wasn't just a pitas, but not to learn French, but to teach Arabic as a professor of Arab interlocutors on.

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Less than four point for this one eastern one from Hungary and Russia.

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And lo and behold, we now discover that there is many jobs, including a Europe that is trying to catch up with another Europe.

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And this guy on the right understood all of this and his resolve to the outcome of his

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scholarship and his writing now is something much more complex about these different rules.

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It's not simply an imperial Europe, but a divided Europe and Europe,

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meaning different things and read in different ways by different actors in the region.

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I think I have four more minutes to be generous.

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Let's get. I.

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And with the comment for me, as I said, I ended up in Egypt personally.

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There's a picture I took on the 25th of January, the day that finally happened.

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And I remember the weeks and months later we were approached by a very well-intentioned European and American experts in transition to democracy,

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the ecologists advising on how to transition to democracy.

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And they kept on saying, You have to do the station. You have to get rid of the old Pluto and you have to.

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And yet we know all of this, but it's more different here.

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It's difficult. Yeah, we know. We understand we've been there before.

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We understand that Hungary was different from eastern Germany and East Germany,

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and so we understand the argument that we admit that we've heard that before.

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We said, no, it's we are not another colour revolution. It's this sense here.

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It's long 1989. So they would say, OK, maybe 1848.

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There's no law enforcement effort, so it's a different paradigm.

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Please listen to us. And one of the main differences is that we do not have the European Union to which we want to join.

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We have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is the main power of the action of the despotism in the region with its enormous financial power.

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We have Israel, we have the United States and we have you to deal with.

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You are opposing a huge amount of damage and and distortion, and that was a very difficult message to say.

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But the main thing to they want to end up with is that we ended up obviously discovering that we are talking

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to the wrong Europeans and the other Europeans who he ended up dictating the terms of the politicians,

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not the human rights activists and the journalists and the academics who were concerned, as we discovered,

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like what we've been talking about over the past two days with migration and and the migration crisis just to.

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Yeah, I've been following, according to the Independent.

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There is now a budget to a negotiated budget, becoming one for the European Commission 2021 to 2027.

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That is a proposal to increase the amount of money devoted to border control from 15 billion euros to 35 billion euros.

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That shows the scale, and the issue is that we activists, human rights activists, academics and of course,

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we have no say in this, but that this course is now manipulated and very cleverly by our leaders,

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especially by someone like Sisi who is basically telling Merkel and me and my goal don't push for openness or democracy in my country.

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Because if you're free, if you're afraid of what happened with Syria, just imagine the scale and the flood of refugees out of my country.

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So effectively, he's holding us ransom, plus Egyptians to undertake his own reforms and of course, reforms, quote unquote.

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And of course, the Europeans are getting along with with the last bit.

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Uh, to in a sense, uh, the dispute broke up with regards the military might of you.

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Uh, yes, maybe you does not have a unified military policy, but you're not always appealing to the huge supply of arms to this region.

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Um, the call to arms imports off by Middle Eastern countries increased 87 percent over the past four years.

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Uh, in this period. Four of the largest importers of weapons in the world are from the region Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq.

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And while the United States, this is a big supply of arms all over the world, Europe, not the EU, but European powers became independent fact France,

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Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the Netherlands are inching in collectively to replace the United States as the main supplier worldwide.

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But with regard to the region, it's actually, for example, in Egypt now.

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France is the main supply of arms for Egypt, not the United States, despite the 25 to 40 years of of of.

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So French arms exports to the region over the past four years has increased by 260 percent.

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German exports 125 percent. Italian 75 percent.

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British 30 percent. When they do this, they turn not only apply to violations of human rights violations by all of these Middle Eastern despots,

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but they also violate their own priority of border control.

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Because what do these weapons do?

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They end up being used in wars that cause more and more displacements of population, creating the problem that Europe wants to maintain.

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So it is. I mean, we've given up on human rights.

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We've given up talking to Europeans about human rights and democracy. We we thought the we too are concerned with stability.

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If you are concerned with your own stability. Stop sending these arms to these disputes.

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There's nothing called enlightened despotism. That's a contradiction in terms.

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These cases and the essays, and that they are a huge cause of instability on the long run to the region.

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So the problem that I would end with this is that it's not the conspiracy.

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Oh, so it's pretty cool what we are now being ruled by.

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It's a collusion. We are. It's a conspiracy, but also the collusion between European, uh, players and local despots.

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Thank you very much.