I was once introduced by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, who has recently been in the news, and he said Timothy Garton Ash is,
of course, a valuable man, referring to that college, which famously produced left wing intellectuals and politicians.
And I said, No, no, no, I wasn't a penguin. I was an excellent college and without missing a beat, Scruton said.
Objectively, you are a very old man. So if you look at Tim Snyder's CV, you will see that, according to the text, he started at Baylor College Oxford.
But objectively, he's a fan down to live now, and there's a little more,
a little more basis for that claim than there was in the Scruton case because Timothy Snyder
was a student in the early 1990s in a wonderful seminar in the immediate afterglow of 1989,
which you will well remember an amazing group of people, including Evan Kruschev.
I then had the great pleasure of supervising his doctoral dissertation on Kashmir's Carlos Kraus, together with the great poet of scholar Lewicki.
And we're very proud of what he's done since.
Which is in the first place to become over a period of about 20 years, probably the leading historian of Central and Eastern Europe in his generation,
culminating in the book which you will all know Bloodlands Europe between Hitler and Stalin,
which catapulted his work into a wider public debate in a very important way,
and I think has become an absolute reference point for both historical and political discussion and then catalysed,
I think it's fair to say by the advent of Donald Trump.
He stepped more into a public intellectual role with a small Best-Selling book called On Tyranny.
His most recent book called The Road to Unfreedom,
and he's currently working on what sounds like a fascinating book on the future of freedom, apropos Gandalf and his work.
But for this evening, we have tempted him back to European history as it relates to today.
Please join me in welcoming this year's John. So it's it's a it's an ambiguous pleasure at best to begin by agreeing with the person who introduces
a bit of it's there is something to the claim that objectively I am a student of sentencings,
as I was as I was listening to the recollections last night.
It was it was all too obvious what I would have talked about because I spent my early 20s in this place.
Or rather this was the place from which I escaped to Poland and Ukraine and the
Baltics and Czechoslovakia and the other places that I really wanted to go,
which means that I was a student here. Oh, we grew up there and north was was worth it.
And I appreciated this at the time.
As much as anyone in their early 20s fresh from the United States can appreciate it in retrospect and with a bit of age.
I now appreciate much more just how difficult it is to unify a life in politics,
public policy, academic institution and, above all, intellectual life as well.
Ralph there a dwarf. I'd like to begin this lecture, though from a moment of might not understand me from there.
So both of my both of my usual tutors are in this room to supervise my dissertation.
My moral tutor, as it was then called and I hope still is. Martin Conroy is also here.
And so they will remember a young American coming to Europe for the first time.
Americans coming to Europe for the first time face certain interpretive difficulties.
One of them has to do with the senses of humour. So in general, it's the case that we think the British are joking when they're not.
And with the Germans, it's the other way around, which means that we're confronted with the August figure of Ralph Deardorff.
I faced a special kind of interpretation problem because here you had a man who was both at the same time.
So a quarter of a century ago, I was in this room, but I was occupied.
Not this war, but rather the role of the students I was.
I was a paid assistant, organising a conference or helping organise a conference on a very similar topic.
And of course, the rough groundwork was was running around as well,
looking after the various East Europeans who had come with their luggage and so on.
And there was a problem with the East Europeans and their luggage.
In particular, one Romanian had lost his suitcase and were out there on board, said to me, Let's establish a principle.
Everyone should be responsible for his own luggage. I could not tell if he was joking or not.
Was this a sincere communism extending down to the smallest aspects of life?
Was this a moment of exuberant overconfidence about our ability in the West to project our values for our neighbours?
I wasn't sure at the time, and honestly, I'm still not sure thinking about it.
Twenty five years old, Ralph Defender was not only the director of the LSD, as many of you will know, he wrote a biography of the LSD.
It's very characteristic of him to vote,
to do something that reflects upon it at the beginning of one of the chapters of this biography, this microphone working at all,
or if I just at the beginning of one of the chapters of his biography of the other S. There's a passage where again,
I'm not sure, but I think it's supposed to be fun. You could.
You could help me. He's the chapter is about the 60s in the LSD,
and I think much of what we're talking about is actually a kind of return to the late 1960s or as I experience it anyway as the next generation,
a kind of last hurrah of the late for the debate to the 1960s.
In any event, Derek begins this chapter by describing the annual reports of the director of the LSD and the text drugs like this of.
Annual report in 1960 1961. This has not been a year of great changes.
1959 to 1960 this year saw no major developments or important changes, 1952 to 1959.
This year saw development on lines already established in 1957 to 1958.
This year witnessed no major new developments from 1956 to 1957.
This year's saw no major events. Now, in fairness to Sir Sidney, he was describing the LRC.
But what is tempted to think about this and Ralph there, of course, is one in this direction this chapter of this book.
To consider this more as a comment on the United Kingdom at the time.
In the late 1950s, early 1960s, one could just say, we're just moving the ball on.
Soon, you will never have had it it. But of course, in 1957, things were happening.
All of you who are here for the Conference of the European Union or at the edge of your seats, I know raising your hands.
You want to say Treaty of Rome, Treaty of Rome, but I would like to start so right.
We all still remember the treaty. Yes, we do. Yes. But I want to start somewhere else, which is the late independence.
1957 was the year of the late independence. Coincidentally, Sir Sydney Kane had actually been the vice director of the university in the leg.
Now why do I want to begin with this? I got a secure connexion because it seems to me that this is where we have to begin if we
want to understand the model of European identity and the model of European integration.
Now, one of the one of the constant themes of the earlier panels and lectures and interventions has been empire.
We must integrate the history of Europe with the history of Empire. We must bring in.
We must bring in the earlier history of liberal capitalism as well as formulation.
We must be able to think reflectively about Europe's role in the rest of the world.
We must consider the first globalisation and not just the second.
I would like to put this in a much more straightforward way as New Girl Adams, Margaret McMillan have already done and simply use the word empire.
It seems to me that the way to maintain the level of European self-generation
make sense now is to speak sensibly about the continuing history of empire.
Now why? Why would you insist on let me now talk about what is in there?
It is very easy to play with narratives to which one is not actually personally attached.
It is very easy to contest someone else's narrative to see the holes in it, to understand how it's self-serving for them.
It's very easy to look on as we have been doing a bit of this conference at a kaleidoscopic
field of mutually contestable and contesting narratives and to catalogue and to analyse.
But when does a narrative of a narrative matters when it's so deeply within you that you do not know it,
or to apply a second test, a narrative that matters which when its existence is pointed out to you, it hurts.
This process that we've been calling deconstruction is only real if it hurts.
If it's not painful to realise that you have been inside a narrative that it was not even meaningful narrative,
then we are just like, So this is the kind of surgery which I would like to try to undertake now with Europe,
because what I would like them to, but I'd like to suggest is that the reason why it's so hard to bring the history of
empires back into the history of the European Union or back into the history of Europe.
The reason why we have these scattered calls all the time to bring in the rest of the world and talk about the global south,
we aren't able to actually achieve. This is a narrative, and it's not the narrative of the bad guys that we don't like or you don't like.
No, I'm not European. It is the narrative of the good guys.
It is your narrative, your narrative, the narrative of the good guys.
The supporters of European Union is an imperial narrative.
This is the case that I want to make, and because it's an imperial narrative, it itself is what prevents you from bringing your history straight.
And I'm going to suggest that this has political consequences now for our time, which leading up to.
Leading to the problem of the digital world, so green, how how am I going to make the Western narrative?
Let me to find a second term. What do I mean by Empire? That's another word which is easily tossed around.
Let me throw out a few features. Colleagues can, of course, disagree,
but let me just put this up for this purpose of argument and empire is is is a political entity in which there is a centre and there is a periphery.
It's a political entity in which there is the rule of law, but law is applied unevenly.
Some people are full subjects of it. Some people are not in practise,
especially in war making empires or political entities that do not recognise other political political entities as equal.
So, for example, the United States did not recognise native nations as nations, or Germany in 1939 did not recognise Poland as a state.
In that sense, an empire will tend to aim for all Turkey.
That is true to imagine that the economic unit would be carved out over territory, which will allow for self-sufficiency.
And Empire will tend to believe that technological superiority, which allows for conquest,
is actually the result of racial or some other kind of superiority,
and it will keep on believing that it until the technological superiority no longer holds.
The final thing that empires do and they do it beautifully and they do it well, is that they have no great empires, no rate.
They know better than nation states. They innovate better than Europe.
They innovate fantastically well.
Which is why when we try to think of the great European literature, we very often run into literature, which has to do with empire one way or another.
Joseph Conrad would be an excellent example for me here, because here we have a British writer who is notionally writing about British Empire,
but who was in fact, a Polish writer, but not even exactly a Polish writer because he comes from the part of Poland, which is in fact, Ukraine.
And his first and first experience of colonialism is actually Polish colonialism in Ukraine,
which is why we can have a book about Ukraine by Ukrainian author,
which is called Poland's Heart of Darkness and how that made perfect sense, which in fact it does of the empires narrate.
And I would to force those concepts together because when we talk about empire here,
we very often mean something dark and distant, and certainly not us because we gave.
But when we talk about immigration, that's something friendly and polite.
But I want to claim that empires narrate and that they narrate better than we do, and that your best narrative,
the one that's close to you and the one that's going to hurt is an imperial narrative.
OK. What is what is that on the European there?
The one which is too close to critique, right, goes like this.
The European narrative says there are nation states.
These nation states are terrible.
They've existed for some very long time, and these nation states learnt they've learnt over time, in particular after the Second World War.
These nation states learn. That war was a very bad state, and as a result,
these Nation-States came together in a programme of economic cooperation with the goal of lead to political cooperation,
which would make war impossible that I believe is the closest thing to a standard European Union as Europe has clocked in history.
And this year is commemorated on practically every occasion.
If you are European, the person is perhaps pronounced less likely at least 10000 times in your life.
And to challenge it as I'm going to do it, I imagine is going to feel a little bit tense.
One must challenge it. And here's why it is over.
It is absolutely not true. And here I am, not addressing narrative as narrative.
I'm not going to say that's your narrative. I have a different narrative.
I now want to speak as a very conservative historian who say this is simply tasteless, conceptually and empirically.
There is nothing to it. There are two old European nation states and the European powers that fought the Second World War,
which were not nation states, by the way, did not learn from the Second World War that peace was good and the war was bad.
That never happened. If you have a European integration process, it had to come from somewhere else.
Now, let me try to let me try to make the factual case here.
So one. So this narration, which I called fable of the lies, the narrative that you carry inside of us Europeans,
is the fable of the wise nation, a nation that's old and that's increasingly wise on the fable.
A divided nation begins from this axiom that there were a European nation states.
So what ask where in when were there European nation states and what did that look like?
This is interesting because the place and time were in fact, European nation states of is the Balkans.
That is to say, the crumbling borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, the first and second and third quarters of the 19th century.
This is where the Nation-State is born, not just in Europe, but but in the world, right?
Not in France, which was never a nation state. Ever in a modern period.
But in the Balkans. In the Balkans. We have, interestingly, the first decolonisation, right?
We categorise colonial history as beyond Europe, right?
This is a this is a mistake. This is a mistake that allows the narrative to go on.
The first decolonisation of Greece and Serbia and then Romania and later Bulgaria.
That's the first decolonisation. And these are the first nation states.
These nation states. As all, because all of you were historians of your own don't have certain inherent problems of one of their inherent
problems if they don't have access to a large market leading an empire and leaving a large market.
Another of their problems is they don't have access to the sea. They handled this problem with a political economy of nationalism.
The political economy of nationalism says since our only tax base is land, the people who live in the land across this river are our people.
And then you come up with other arguments that are linguistic or cultural historical, as the case may be.
This is the history of the Balkans. In one sentence in the 19th century,
a series of wars and the militaristic countries that are nation states ethnically that are
unsustainable and their unsustainability arrives in a package which we know as the First World War,
which is in fact the Third World and the first one of 1912.
The second one in 1913 and the first with the Balkan States defeated Empire in the second one,
the Baltic states by themselves and in the third energy of one Balkan state, Serbia has turned against the house or monarchy.
And then we have the event known as the First World War. So that is one part of the career of the European nation state.
The second part of the career of the European nation state, I would venture to say it's even less glorious after the First World War.
The solution to a war which was initiated by a small nation states turns out to be the creation of more small nation states,
which are Austria, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia.
So six states are created from former empires, more or less ex nihilo and then a number of other states Hungary,
Hungary, for example, are performed in different boundaries. But the principled response to the First World War is more Nation-States.
These are not going to go into the reasons for and against that.
Of course, there were historically intelligible reasons why this happened, but I'm just going to make the simple, chronological technical.
That these interviews do not last for very long. All six of the newly created nation states Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland,
the three Baltic states ceased to exist completely by the middle of the Second World War.
Their entire career as nation states lasts for about two decades.
We heard the case of one of them, which is the Office of Austria.
Last night on all, that's a special that's that is one example of the general public.
Austria has a sort of shoes. The Texans, Slovaks have a betrayal in Munich, the Poles in the Baltics have it all together for now.
There's a national story for the national story of covers up the general truth,
which is that all of the new nation states were destroyed after the Second World War.
The territory of all of this new nation states and the territory of the Balkan nation states.
Almost all of this territory then falls under Soviet domination, right?
Which is not really a career as as a nation state.
So that's the history of the European nation state. That's it.
I know some small exceptions here and there. That's pretty much what you've got.
Now you might be thinking, what about the great national unification of the 19th century Belgium?
Belgium gets through one Leopold, but the second Leopold buys this stretch of real estate in the centre of Africa,
which remembers the Belgian Congo, which is an integral part of Belgium for the central part of Belgian history.
Italy Germany are not founded as nation states.
That's a retrospective projection by people who think that nation states are normal.
They're founded as national monarchies, as kingdoms, as empires.
So we're like does have an operational meaning. The German state from the very beginning was imperial, not just with respect to its own population,
but very quickly with respect to its whole new territories in Africa and the Pacific.
Italy also ventures as quickly as it can into Africa.
These were not meant to things, nor were they the nation states in the 1930s, under fascism,
imperial game, imperial nature or the imperial aspiration to Africa is particularly clearly pronounced.
No. I have now pulled the history.
Briefly, I know of all of the founding members of the European Integration Project, if you will just spot me Luxembourg, please.
This is the history of all of the founding members and the history of the countries that joined in the first enlargement or to be very brief about it.
Germany in the 1940s, right?
If we think of the European integration project beginning in the 1950s, in the 1940s, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Britain to the Netherlands.
These are all empires. They see themselves as empires.
They see one another as empires. So into the 1940s, every single one of these entities is an empire.
And so it begins to ask when that moment could have been with the West European nation
states realised that war was a bad thing and begin the process of European integration.
That moment didn't happen because it could not have happened because these entities were never Nation-States.
Let's attend, then very briefly in the post-war years and the beginning of European integration.
And let's begin with with the most important case of which, of course, is is Germany.
The general case that I want to make is not that war is a good thing.
I mean, unless I misunderstood what my American accent be taken the wrong way.
The case I want to make is that Europeans did not learn from the Second World War.
That war was a bad thing. Not in any straightforward way.
There are a number of ways to make this case.
One is to point out to people who suffered the most from the Second World War were Jews, the other Russians, Ukrainians and Russians.
And however, one wants to evaluate this.
You wouldn't want to say that some kind of call for peace prevails amongst the national memories of those countries, right?
So it's that's one way to make the awkward I'm going to take you go in a different way.
And that is, the major participants are not learning from the Second World War.
The major participants West European, Central European art, losing colonial wars and exhausting themselves.
That is what they have in common. Crucially, that is what they have in common.
To make this case, I have to begin with Germany because Germany is the most important example.
And as in so many things, Germany here is the leader of Germany as the leader in the narrative production.
Germany is the leader in a half true at best account of itself during the Second World War,
which by its nature, not only shelters Germans, but shelters other Europeans.
How do I do this? The Second World War is at its essence in Europe.
Of these eight colonial war that the war aims of Hitler or above all, Ukraine and secondarily, oil in the Caucasus.
Hitler describes this absolutely clearly as a colonial war.
According to every classic definition, the interchangeability speaks of it as being like the conquest of America,
the conquest of India, the conquest of Africa. But he's making it abundantly clear that he's thinking about a frontier empire the
way that Germany fights the war that is not in Poland and the Soviet Union as
states and not recognising what it's doing in legal terms as an occupation and not
recognising the peoples of that zone as having the rights of occupied peoples.
Those are all mainstream traditional European colonial practises.
And by the way, Amy Suffi and possano and hung around a number of people.
I don't know why, but that's how I say the French accent. They they pointed this out at the time,
right after African American and Afro European intellectuals had a way of making this point about making more or less half as hard.
This was a colonial war, above all.
And if it's understood as as a colonial war, then one begins to see a larger pattern in the way that war is remembered.
So the Germans do remember the Second World War. I don't want to overstate this case.
And Germans do more than anyone else have a culture of reflection about the Second World War.
However, that culture of reflection is startling. I would say shockingly A. Geographical, insofar as Germans remember the Holocaust,
they started with the camps, which is not where the Holocaust happened.
They focus on the German Jews, most of whom survived, who were three percent of the victims of when there's a secondary four victims.
It's the Russians as though one could kill lots of Russians without killing more.
Ukrainians on Ukraine and Belarus sort of forced the territories after Jews, the places where people suffered the most.
And by the way, the Holocaust, as it happened, is unthinkable in a number of ways.
Without the colonial aspirations of.
Europe, because it is the colonial aspiration to control Eastern Europe, which brings under German control the places where Jews actually live.
So the the canonised Germans minimisation of the Holocaust,
as well as the more or less complete wiping out of Ukraine as a colonial object during the Second World War are not specifically German.
However, this is the way it goes. In general, the story of European reconciliation is a story which allows the call a huge history to be ignored.
All right. So when Germany turns to France for post-war reconciliation?
This is, amongst other things, a diversion.
The Second World War, much as much as I appreciate my call, Merkel leading the Second World War is not centrally about Germany and France.
Germany was only concerned to get France out of the way so we can destroy the Soviet Union.
The war was not simply about France.
For most of the Second World War, Vichy, which was a legally legitimate French state, was not in the way of German.
More plants and more French citizens fought on the side of the axis and fought on the other side,
which is why there will never be a relicensed oriented operative.
But this is why there will never be an official French history of the Second World War.
So in those conditions, treating Franco-German reconciliation as as a kind of proper memorialisation, the Second World War is a kind of diversion,
and it's the first step towards the larger desertion, which is which is the fable of the of the wise nation, the Netherlands.
And nothing that reminds you that the Netherlands, of course, as you all know, are a major European imperial power before Brazil,
until they lost it to the Portuguese until the nine year war, when they lost a great deal for the French and the English.
They were maybe the only one of the major maritime major powers into the 20th century.
There are still some old Dutch colonial territories, including most prominently, the Dutch Incendies during the Second World War.
It was common. It was common sense in the Netherlands that the only way we could have a post-war
recovery will be with the help of the Dutch East and is a starting other ones.
At the end of the Second World War took for granted that the Dutch, you said this would help the Netherlands.
We called immediately after the Second World War.
The Netherlands begins fighting for the recovery of the Dutch East enemies of one hundred and forty thousand Dutch troops.
One hundred and forty thousand US troops fight from 1945 to 1949 in the Dutch EastEnders.
Now, no, like Germany. This is not a nation state.
There are no nation states here. This is not a country which has learnt from the Second World War that one does not fight wars.
It immediately fights of war after the Second World War, and it only leaves that war because it's losing because the Americans will help.
And that's that's that's the story. France.
After the Second World War, France fights colonial wars more or less and uninterrupted for 16 years.
And it does not do so as a nation. It does so as an empire when France fights in when France fights in Indochina.
Three quarters of the world casualties that the French army takes are not French people.
It is fighting as an empire for an empire for 16 years, more or less uninterrupted.
First in Indonesia, as you will know where those world casualties are about 75000.
Very serious number, right? Although most of the not French, then Algeria in Algeria, the Algerian war between 1954 1962,
the time to notice how in French political rhetoric at the time, the word the on the.
So it's actually quite striking that you're coming to it from today's point of view of the customer,
of course, because of course, the old LPF into class, the old means at the beginning of the Algerian war into interglacial means that the French
army is responsible for integrating the Arab population into the French state by 1961.
The dominant means the debacle is that the French in Algeria will be integrated into the emerging Algerians.
But that's what the classical meds in the time and the place as late as late as 1961.
And as you all know the story, although I'm telling you the slightly different way it is empire,
which makes the Republic a republic difficult, or its empire, which brings that version of the French Republic to an end.
Its empire is the problem with the goal is meant to solve, and which does, in fact in which he does in fact solve.
But how does he solved right? Is there a moment where the gold magically says now is the French nation state?
That moment never arrives. That moment simply, never happens. The goal recognises that the French Empire he would never use.
These words, of course, is no longer sustainable, and he chooses Europe of the the.
The visit to the German officers in 1960 to the Treaty of 1963,
which Tony Judt calls the decisive turn to Europe, are also the decisive turn away from empire.
There is no moment for the French Nation-State making the decision.
There is a French Empire which is choosing Europe as as a substitute.
That's probably the most important them. Now what does this choice of Europe mean for the Europeans involved?
Well, let's think of another group of refugees. Let's think of that.
Let's think of the millions of Germans after the Second World War,
the hundreds of thousands of people who are on the tens of thousands of Dutch who are coming for lack of a better word back.
What are they coming back to? Are they coming back to a nation state?
In the case of the Germans who settled in western East Germany and Austria,
and a number of other countries, which one of those was the German nation state,
exactly for the one who settled in Belgium and Switzerland in France, but also all over Europe for the Dutch, many of whom this family are Jewish.
Are they really suddenly a Dutch nation state? Is there a nation state that's reading them there or as they returned in the 40s, 50s and 60s?
Are they perhaps returning? Is also the wrong word for these people?
Are they in fact arriving in something which is not really a nation state, namely an emerging Europe?
The interesting thing about the 1950s and 1970s, if one thinks of imperial history and this is the part which is most shocking,
most surprising and therefore most taken for granted is the economic recovery that from 1950 and 1970.
In Europe, average rates of growth were four percent a year after previous decades, when the average was one percent.
That is the shocking thing. It's shocking that a whole number of levels high levels like if you fight a Second World War like this,
should you really be recovering this quickly and this and this? Well, but more profoundly,
if you are losing the technological advantage to the rest of the world that was brought to you by the industrial revolution,
which is what's happening, right?
The thing which is enabling empire and the advantages of industrialisation is feeding precisely in those two decades.
How can that be the time when your growth spurts off?
How could that be the time which is remembered as the glorious years at the time when never had it so good?
How can that be? And the answer, of course, is Europe, and there are people who are looking upon this phenomenon and recognising it for what it was.
There were people who were looking upon with the Germans and the Dutch and Price were
doing and recognising that this was how you go from Empire precisely into something else.
And those people were called the British political.
So in the late 1950s and early 1960s, from the point of view of London, this story that I was telling was then clear, right?
Maybe not every detail, maybe not on Ukraine and so on.
But the general outline that you need a place to go after Empire and Europe was that place that was generally smoke.
I would go so far as to say that with something like common sense.
Of course, the British escape from Empire was not this straightforwardly bloody categorical with an end date,
as it was with the Germans, the French and and the Dutch.
The key moment might be 1956 as an imperial humiliation at Suez, rather than rather than playing God in 1957 or even India in 1947.
But the general lesson was as we moved for an empire, we need a substitute in 1961 on the ocean.
The House of Commons, as I'm sure everyone will remember too,
to join the European Economic Community passed by the three hundred and thirteen to four.
So out of the argument, the argument that I'm making more or less trivial part of the problem in the
sixties for Britain was that the empire was still mixed into the question.
There wasn't a categorical movement, as there was for the Dutch or the Germans and for the French,
which meant that you could still defeat Commonwealth versus Europe.
And the British press was still loudly debating that, which helped the goal as he prepared his arguments for the veto.
By the end of the nineteen sixties,
it was harder to make that argument because the balance of trade was then clearly favouring the continent over the Commonwealth,
which the art, which which was the argument for applying again.
Britain applies for a second time in 1967 and in one of these non coincidences, which helps bring these, I think,
to events that are one of the events together in 1968 that Wilson brings back all of the British forces east of Suez, right?
The moment of applying for the European Economic Community is the moment of conceding that the British Empire, in its traditional form, is over.
It is the same moment, and at the time I would.
I would say that was seldom the story in the rest of the emerging countries.
And this in is, first of all, is that we're sorry in the second enlargement, first of all in Spain is very similar, right?
Portugal is a major European empire by by the 20th century.
What remains is chiefly Africa.
Portugal stays out of the Second World War, but Salazar governs all the way through orients Portuguese ideology and the economy around Africa.
African cotton is crucial to Portugal after 1968, how long the Portuguese colonies would remain.
He said it's a question of centuries. He later in Europe, 500 years of OK, you know that that's wrong.
But what's interesting about how it ended that time? He says this.
In the late 60s, early 1970s, 80 percent of the Portuguese argues that Africa Europe had 80 percent of your arms on another continent.
Maybe you're not a nation state in 1974. What's striking about your Portugal is the way that everything happened at the same time.
If you're following the European integration narrative,
you will notice that the people who come out of the recreation revolution are talking about Europe right away.
Yes, they were. If you're following a democratisation narrative, you'll notice that they were talking about democracy.
Indeed. But they were also talking about colonisation. And what's interesting is that they were talking about all three things at the same time.
And I believe correctly identify them together because after all, you can't really have a democratic empire.
And losing the empire was a condition of joining Europe, and Suarez was making these points in single sentences at the time in 1974.
Spain, interestingly, follows the same pattern. Spain, the Spanish empire, has also been reduced to Africa, mostly North Africa, by the 20th century.
The Spanish Civil War, which precedes the Second World War, is a colonial war in interesting ways.
Franco is a colonial officer who fights the war on the Spanish mainland,
according to what he himself characterises as colonial methods and in large measure, it's Typekit slot by African troops.
That is, not only Spanish troops who are veterans of African wars, but by Africans themselves on Spain.
Right? So Franco is himself a creature of empire, and he identifies Spain with him.
It's another one of these non coincidental coincidences that Spain loses its last claimed empire,
the Spanish Sahara, within a few hours of Franco stuff.
And again, it's not.
Incidents that the process of losing Empire, the death of Franco Democratic transition, as we used to say and the application of European Union,
all happen at the same time,
the application to the European European sort of European community takes place three weeks after the first parliamentary elections.
Three parliamentary elections in in Spain. No.
When I was at that first conference 25 years ago, Spain and Portugal were reference points for Eastern Europe.
Spain and Portugal had joined the European police so that the European community just become the European Union,
they have democratised after a dictatorship. So these were these were Corcoran's for Poland and Czechoslovakia and and all the rest.
But something else that happened by the end of the 1980s, early 1990s,
and that is that this very West European people realise nation had already crystallised by then each
of these nations individually and all of them collectively had to build up this story about how we,
as European nation states, learn lessons from war in the middle of the century, and hence we have all joined together in this project.
That story was already there. By the time the East Europeans emerged from communism back up and then the Europeans came along.
This is important, and rather than disrupting it, because why would they affirmed it?
Their story was. Yes, of course we are of nation states recently liberated and we would like to return to Europe, a very powerful scene at the time.
Now that whole notion that here we have more European nation states looking for a home is unchallenged because the
failure of the wise nation has already the fact that these places had not really been successful nation states ever,
or that when they had been nation states, that was the thing that tended to bring about those world wars, which you were supposed to be.
This isn't really noticed. This one might have done at the time is look under their re-affirming rhetoric because to some extent,
they were self-consciously affirming the West Europeans in their own illusions about the way history works.
If you look under, if you scratch the surface and you find that you get their intentions,
you see that like everyone at the moment with Empire Falls apart, there is an understanding of what the purpose of European integration actually is.
Later, we forget and the East Europeans here are no exception. But at that moment, they returned to Europe.
What you mean is we know perfectly well from Munich and 19th in Munich and Yalta, and also we know perfectly well from 1956.
We know perfectly well from 1981. We know perfectly well that we are not sustainable as nation states.
Now that is not what you say out loud, but that is about the return to Europe actually meant.
It meant that we know that we need a larger body in order to be state's right with pharmaceuticals.
You spoke yesterday about independence being that shipment of the European Union.
That might have surprised some of you, but that is what is left of.
It is precisely the people understood at the time, and some pollsters think this way is precisely the European Union, which makes the state possible.
No, this is a story which in some way coincides with overlaps with the idea of the European rescue of the nation state,
which UN resolution cited earlier in. I believe it is true European integration saves the state, but there's a very important qualification here.
It wasn't the Nation-State because there were no nation states to rescue.
You cannot rescue something that has never existed. And it wasn't exactly a rescue, either, it was a transformation because there wasn't a period.
In all of these examples. There was an imperial state. And what the European project did was allow that imperial state to become something else.
But there was no nation state to rescue. So that can't quite be the right way to formulate it in Eastern Europe.
What we have, very interestingly, is the second kind of integration in the first kind.
What you have are one sort of imperial of in metropole.
I mean, the bit around the bit around Lisbon or the bit around London, the bit around Paris.
These are the imperial metropolis of what were once much larger empires until very recently were so substantial.
These are the metropoulos there. These are what remain after a certain kind of internal disintegration.
So up until the 1980s, what Europe does is it brings together Frankfurt.
The metropolitan fragments of it from its great success after 1989 was to join with the metropolitan fragments, also the France.
Because these state is not particularly successful.
Nation states are all imperial fragments of the Habsburg and the Romanoff, or, to some extent, the German Empire.
So that is what they are. And the great and interesting success of the European Union in the early part
of the 21st century is that it solves the problem not in the Second World War,
but of the First World War, the First World War. And that's it's not actually the piece.
It's not. It's not the piece itself. A piece of Britain after the Second World War.
It's a peace agreement after the First World War. That's what these national questions arise.
And it is in 2004 2007-2013 that these national questions are merged into the European Union.
Right? OK, now. So the enlargements of 2004 should also 2013.
You might think in the history of Empire, at least in Europe,
but not quite what I've said before that when you are just about to join the European project,
this argument that I'm making is fairly clear, although you might be hitting some other terms that are a little bit kinder to yourself.
This argument is fairly clear.
Once you were inside the European Union, the scale of the table of the wise nation is totally and basically everybody goes for it.
But when you are outside and you want to get in. The purpose of the European Union is absolutely clear.
And this is the strange thing about the great misunderstanding between Ukrainians in 2013,
precisely and many Europeans, because the chief Ukrainian argument for joining the European Union or for one thing,
to sign association agreement was we are perfectly aware that our post-imperial state is deeply flawed,
but we know that other post-imperial states became less flawed because of economics and the integration process.
I'm not making this up. This is what opinion polling of Ukrainians shows.
This is what it was about. Meanwhile, in Europe, inside the European Union, because of the fabled realised nation.
This makes no sense. If you don't understand that your state was also at one time, probably an untenable post-imperial fragment.
You don't understand the point of view of another untenable post-imperial friend.
There's another group of people now in 2013 who understand this the way that I understand it, and that is the Russia.
But they draw different conclusions. There were three historically possible answers for what to do after Empire and Europeans of supply.
All three there are three possible answers. One of them is the nation state, which I've already talked about as a short career.
The second is European integration, which is the solution without a name because we all know that it's happening.
But as far as I know, it's very rarely referred to as what you do after Empire.
The third thing you can do after Empire is, of course, more empire, and that is what Russia openly proposes in 2013.
And here again, we have a major misunderstanding between this time the Russians and the Europeans,
because the idea that moment want you go back to Empire when Empire has been totally
displaced as a category of discourse and analysis doesn't really make sense.
Even though if you look at the basic documents of the foreign policy concept of the Russian Federation published in February 2013,
it is absolutely clear that they have made a turkey which is explicitly imperial is precisely the ways that I've described.
There are now centres that. Referees law no longer applies. There are other countries around us which are not fully fledged countries.
This is clear not just in the rhetoric of Mr Putin, the Russian ideologist, the stated Russian foreign policy in 2013.
So the Empire comes back in 2013 between Russia and Ukraine, and strikingly, it comes back as narrative, amongst many other things,
becomes that traditionally it comes back as the argument of centres and peripheries about who is central, who is peripheral.
It comes back to the Russian argument that Ukraine is not really a state.
It comes back in the argument that one state can define the ethnicity of citizens in another state.
These are all things that are very familiar, and it comes back as generation as very powerful, I would say.
Almost hypnotically powerful narration.
And the reason why the narration was so not important was that there was something new about it, which was that it was targeted.
So and now we're moving closer to the subject of the digital world. When Russia tried to persuade you that invading Ukraine was a good idea,
that wasn't happening anyway, that's the way that they ended upon who you work, work.
If you were known to be on the British left,
your social media in 2014 told you that Ukrainians were all fascists if you were known to be on the British farmers.
It did not know that these narratives contradicted because in the digital world, we don't actually have personal contact.
All that matters is that the narratives reach you and disarm. You were just in how were you the way that they are meant to do?
But what's interesting about this is that narrative returns this time self-consciously.
So I would I say that narrative is imperial. I'm not just making a playful claim.
I believe this to be the case. I mean, is imperial in its internal intellectual sense,
the way that no matter what it is that you argue for whatever academic or other position it can be described as your narrative?
Right? That's that's impure. That's imperial right down to two plus two is four, which is where Orwell tries to draw the line.
You can say, well, that's the two plus two is for sister narrative. Right?
I mean, I thought another narrative and I've got a way of identifying with two, which two feels like two is more than two.
And the other two feels like a little bit down today, you know? So the thing that's interesting is that this kind of narrative is self-conscious.
So the young Russian Studies programme and its wisdom during the beginning of the Russian
invasion of Ukraine divided the Russian ambassador to come together and explain it,
which he did and his explanation. I mean, beautifully stay clear of anything which might resemble a fact.
And at the end of it, a Yale student raised his hand tentatively and asked,
What about the Russian troops that are actually right now on the territory of sovereign territory of Ukrainian state?
And the answer was, you have your narrative and I have my narrative and there is a self that was deliberately set right.
And there is a feeling that there is a self-consciousness about narrative here.
And one when you think about this is that, you know, is in the famous story, which is probably not true,
that we only say the stories are a bit of the famous story about the lead in Bertrand Russell.
When he says, you know, she says it's turtles all the way down. It's narrative all the way down.
It's narrative all the way down, which which brings me to where to where I want to close.
What it what is the European Union, really when we get away from your stupid, self destructive fable for Live Nation?
What is the European Union, really and what is it?
What is it, in fact? And you're able to recall what brought there and more so at the end of that conference or as a student,
I want to recall the toast that you raised at dinner on the last day, which I only half understood at the time.
That was still comes back to you regularly in different ways, he said.
Above all, I wish to see the end of class Clash of Clans.
What does he do? And then last night after dinner, I was talking to I was talking to generals, I suppose.
And I also said, who has narratives? Public relations, people and ethnographers narratives are about not states.
And this gets me thinking about where a narrative might actually be leaving us because and an imperial narrative that goes all the way down,
which which has no other option but to lead you astray from the institutions that you already have,
European institutions are the most important example, maybe leading us back to a place which is a lot like clan life and what is what I want.
I want to propose here is that it is your it is the stable of a wise nation that is making this possible.
OK, so what is the European nation? What is your opinion? Really, the European Union really is something fascinating and new.
The case that I would make the European Union is not ready in case it is an example of mentality.
It's an example of people creating something new in the world.
There's never been anything like this before, and it has, as a result, surprising origins and also surprising potentialities.
And both the origins and the potentialities are overlooked when we stay within the familiar narrative.
It's not a collection of nation states because those Nation-States didn't exist.
It's also not an empire,
because the way that it treats is they treat its own constituent elements and its citizens has to do with with an overemphasis on law and equality.
But what I want to say about this is that this and this is how so and not just against America, right?
I'm against narrative here. If one does not understand that historically, if one sees it as narrative and one of the things that historically,
then what is exposing it to to weakness in the creation of the European Union, understanding that Empire was coming to an end was crucial.
But that is what made the European Union possible. Of course, you make good decisions for one reason that you forget about them.
Right? I mean, but that's what made it possible.
I'm going to submit that getting that history right now is probably just as existentially important because if one gets the history wrong,
if one if one accepts the Fanzone of the Nation-State,
I think where you end up going is chasing the Phantom of the Nation-State right into the imperial of this,
because the thing about the people of the wise nation is that it creates a huge problem
in domestic debates and therefore a dynastic policy because the people civilised nation,
the narrative of the good guys precisely opens up a tremendous opportunity for the bad guys.
I'm sorry, I don't mean that you're a bad guy. I mean that each referenced yesterday.
It opens up. It opens up an opportunity for those who wish to bring European Union to an end.
Because there is an axiomatic consensus about what the European Union is,
the axiomatic consensus is that it is a group of nation states who in their duration and wisdom learnt that war without it, right?
That is very convenient for people like the European Union, and it is also in quotes the good guys and bad guys.
It would be. It's all very convenient for the good guys because you can say we have learnt that's very positive.
You can say we're smarter than the Americans, right? That's the undertone the Americans have learnt the world is bad and we learnt that almost that.
And most because it allows you to suppress and displace that history of empire.
The history of the Treaty of Rome suppresses and displaces the history of life in general.
This whole story of European nation states learning and the fact that the action
takes place on the continent of Europe allows everything else to just go away.
It's more narrative, the narrative, the good guys, which allows the colonial history to vanish completely.
But this creates a risk in domestic policy for the people like European Union because the opponents of the European Union simply
have to accept your terms of engagement if they if you say the Nation-State was always there and it learnt stuff from war,
then the opponents, in your opinion, you can just say, Well, the nation state is always there.
What can possibly happen if we leave the European Union?
And no one has a counterargument for that because they've accepted your terms of engagement, whereas in reality,
there is no particular historical reason to believe that any of the existing entities inside
the European Union would survive recognisably as states if they left the European Union.
It is, to put it mildly, an open question. I think in the case of the existing United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
the chances that it would survive as a state under that name for more than years a prisoner.
But it's a general to the general point.
Now it opens up this problem of domestic discourse and policy, but it also opens up a huge vulnerability in foreign policy.
And here are to. Because the way that digital foreign policy works is that it plays on pre-existing vulnerabilities.
When Russia intervened in the American elections, these were things like fear of black people,
fear of Muslims when Russia intervenes in Brexit, which it did.
I await the British voter report and pay the price when Russia intervened, intervenes in Brexit or intervenes in Germany,
after which it does or intervenes on behalf of the financing of France, which it does, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Interesting. The vulnerability that they play on is precisely the fabled realisation.
One of the main lines of Russian digital propaganda is to say, Well, yes, of course you always have a wonderful nation state.
Putin himself even formulated this personally during the Brexit campaign. Are you sure the British?
That all would be well and the Great Britain had always existed and none of its commitments, wherever binding?
Right? He went out of his way personally to affirm the people, the wise nation they are on tune who they see as his vulnerability.
What you think is true, right? They see his vulnerability, what you think is true.
And that's what a narrative is.
And there is the thing that you don't see which hurts when someone else goes for it, either by trying to explain it or by trying to exploit it.
Now the reason why this matters so deeply is that the people the wise nation allows the whole category of empire to be put somewhere very far away.
Right. So even in our efforts to say we have to bring back the global south or British history or talk about,
you know, the first globalisation and empire is a thing, it's still very far away.
Europeans contesting whether they should be in the European Union or not are not thinking empire.
They're thinking nation state. And this is the trap.
This is the trap. The idea that you're going to go back to a nation state is purely a result of the logic of the people of the nation.
Purely as a result of nothing else, it's not a result of the history of Europe for sure, it's a result of the fabled wise nation.
The idea that there's a default category of nation state and all you have to do is peel away the artificial layers of European integration,
which lie on top of it. All right. That's the feeble. There never was a Britain, just like there never was a France or Netherlands or German.
There never was a nation state on which this all accumulated.
Instead, you had a post-imperial unit which became a European Union.
And the difficulties of the British Parliament has with Brexit or, amongst other things,
a reflection of this fundamental reality of the reason why it seems so strange is
that the thing which is being talked about is not in fact exist and has never,
in fact existed. Now why does it matter?
Because it matters so deeply, because out here in the rest of the world, out here in the EU, world empire never stopped, never stopped.
And Empire is here waiting for you and the people.
The people who are working so energetically are usually working on behalf directly.
Too often, I should say, working directly or indirectly for one of these empires tomorrow, the Russian one, the Chinese one, the various digital ones.
Why is it exactly that? Digital technology is so prominent in the effort to break up the European Union?
Could that possibly have something to do with the fact that the European Union
is the only entity which seems able to do anything about digital rights?
Could that possibly be the case? Could there possibly be a connexion there?
Chinese, American and Russian efforts to disrupt the European Union lean heavily on digital technology,
and I'm stressing it's not as a matter of technique because I want to close this lecture by trying to get a sense of what the empire out
there is actually what the empire out there is not just Chinese power investors and Russian powered investors and American power investors.
The empire out there against which the EU is imperfect, the only known projection is also a digital empire.
It's an empire in which various kinds of entities, corporations, corporations,
individuals and states are using a technology which allows you to be seen in terms of your preferences or really your vulnerabilities.
It's a technology which takes advantage of psychological practises,
namely behaviourism to categorise all of us into groups and then define the ways that the most,
most fruitful react to stimulation from funnel who was a psychiatrist.
As you all know very much a and conservative colonialism rights in black and white masks that the problem with his profession in
colonial settings for imperial centuries is the way that it allows humans to be transformed from wild creatures into how creatures,
which is one definition of what imperialism does. Some of us are white creatures, but the rest of us, the colonial objects or how creatures.
I can't go into this more deeply, but I want to suggest the West on all this.
Thinking about traditional imperialism also applies to the digital imperialism which is out there, which is and which is active.
So my, my, my, my closing, my closing thought is that the way that the EU is historically interesting that it is a soft landing after empire?
Is the same way that the EU has a future that is a buffer and a protection
against the empires which are still there and which are forming up in different,
in different ways. In this sense, you can say that the EU is a fool.
But my argument is that the Phoenix, if it wants to revive, has to know the manner of its own passing.