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I think the politicians privilege, which sort of says, now this is the question you ask,

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but on reflection, you might have asked me to put up an ultrasound by a simple sort of reflection.

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I can't exactly date the first time I walked into this lecture theatre and it was in January 2009,

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and it was part of a series of all parliamentary engagement and peace coming that he's going to face.

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Weeks and hours was on who, who needs democracy and real life,

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and we actually a lot of people decided to delay the start of the election on the

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basis of the news that nobody would turn up with all these polls at that time.

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And the reason for that was the clash with Obama's inaugural speech.

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So we kind of decided that there was no time to compete with Obama.

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But of course, so January 2009, all of us were reconfirmed in the basic belief that,

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you know, that today is better than yesterday, but tomorrow it did better than today.

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That is true. Progressives will always end up with something better.

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And, you know, if the Labour Party in 1997 used to think single things can only get better and Obama for

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us was the demonstration of that progressive belief and then try and find something,

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and Obama has adopted them from the pulpit.

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So what's the point? So I think my point is that probably Obama also wasn't what he thought he was up to today because it

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basically advised that sometimes heckling is what happens when you wait till you finish the sentence,

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because then they make the point it will bring to it like a couple of his ideas.

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So when something happens and what do we do? Do we have that moment to stop and reflect as to what's happened to the body politic?

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No, we didn't. We started smearing. We started to do that when we started saying this was just absolutely awful.

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And we did not reflect at all. And the reason why I'm putting this little story is because it's like Oprah.

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But also, I think if I want to get a religious, I think it's the most Matthews seven three,

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which is why you need to respect that is in your brother's mind. But then I've noticed that a lot of new overnight.

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And I think when you talk about hero protests, the visions of it.

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Matthew, seven, Maybe quite. They used to have stopped.

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Quite so we find everything wrong with the rest of the world, but we are so perfect it doesn't even require placement.

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Neil McGregor, the former director of the British Museum, did a series on living with the gods, and in his introduction,

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he said We debated whether they should because we thought the difference was that if we had gods, you know, serfs can have a fight with Poseidon.

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The one wins and no one loses and you get on with it. If you only have one God when something unexpected, always you think undesirable happens.

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You can only explain it in terms of.

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And I think we go ourselves in the body politic and in Europe in particular into the session that we no longer agree or disagree.

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You either sinner all your life and politics is about contesting ideas of the moment.

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A few weeks ago and a few months ago that I was at a breakfast with Henry Kissinger who have him, that he is still a sharp observer of the world.

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And he said in his column in Cannot Remember a time in life what Europe was and neither the cause of the problem.

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No, the solution to everything. And I think that is a real challenge.

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There are big challenges out. There are global flows of people, money and trade.

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None of which, by the way, I think Jim is good for the closest, none of which we are addressing.

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Never mentioned the environment and we have great internal challenges.

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And to me, the biggest internal challenge which Europe faces is the division between countries who are members of the euro and those who are not.

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And the first is and there are things which we need to address.

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But if anybody wants to see this question of Scotland, they are very happy to deal with that.

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The second one is we talk about nationalism because as we as we denounce Trump and say

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this so much better and we say we've got to sort of take up this wave of populism.

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We also tend to forget using the German example because Germany was a country of my birth.

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This kind of difference between liberal nationalism and dramatic nationalism,

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and this is in Germany told them in the 19th century and unfortunately, the wrong kind of nationalism in Germany one.

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But if you take the United Kingdom, isn't it extraordinary?

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Absolutely extraordinary that if you're Scottish nationalists, you are going to be left wing, progressive and international.

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But if an English national, you seem to be right wing, inward looking and speaking up, I just think that requires us to pose interesting problems.

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But the real challenge I would want to put you either in 50 years time,

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it will be seen as more remarkable that the United Kingdom joined the common market as it was in 1973, then that it decided to leave in 2016.

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And I would also confess to you that until the Maastricht opt outs, it was perfect.

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That was the key point when the Brits were saying We never went,

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we never intended to go down the political situation, but it was always about trade for us.

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And all that was fine until you had the introduction of the era,

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in which case this kind of parallel and say roughly speaking was on some direction kind of crystallised.

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And as of today, the polls today for the European elections in the United Kingdom, who, by the way, once again,

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which I thought were perhaps enough things are a good thing because it allows people to let some of that.

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The Brexit Party, which was started only six weeks ago, has 30 percent.

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Labour has 21 percent of Conservatives 12, so Lib Dem tends changing canine green tonight and UKIP three.

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That must tell you something in a way which we engage with not smear.

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Not saying that the electorate is stupid, engaged in trying to tell you something.

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Even Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, recently made it quite clear that as far as he's concerned,

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the referendum in United Kingdom actually wasn't about economic well-being, and much of the European project was about Let's get rid of ideology.

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Let's get rid of the providers to promise of a better economic tomorrow.

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We can tell this kind of tone everything that this was about a sense of belonging,

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which was a sense of identity, and those things were English problems, but we can talk about that.

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It's quite extraordinary, by the way, that the Remain campaign in the United Kingdom has better in Scotland,

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better in Wales, but in England, IT budgets better in Britain.

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So that kind of leaves me with just two to five observations.

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One is because I'm not there for the dinner tonight. I want to share with you something.

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I went to the tape, an exhibition on the Commons of today.

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If anybody's in long before before the 7th Duke go into, it's Cambodia, Iraq in there, it is horrendous.

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But there was only one set of pictures which almost reduced to tears and one pictures of her.

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And there was a group of people standing looking over a wall, and there was a youngster barely tall enough to look over the board any sign.

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And the caption was 1961. People from the east looking into the west in Berlin.

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And the reason why that reduced me to tears is because that is my history.

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I grew up, I was born in 1955. And what I think in the European narrative, I will not allow anybody to take away from me,

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and I will not allow anybody to take away from the United Kingdom is my European roots and my European history.

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Just because in terms of a government structure, we've decided to go to a different structure that is a big danger.

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We should not fall into that trap. And I'm not going to say something which will surprise people.

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And that is I have no problem with federalism. I have to.

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For the euro countries, federalism is the only way they have to go.

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They will have to come up with the European demos and that will require European pan-European countries.

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But the big dividing line will be trigger between those countries who have a single currency and those who don't.

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And by the way, what would it have taken for me to campaign for remain in the referendum would have been very simple.

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David Cameron has come back from negotiations that say the European Union, with an expanding number of members,

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accept that forever and ever there will be euro countries and non-euro countries, and you've got two structures to bring those two things together.

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But because we didn't. I'm afraid that's heartfelt, but federalism is something that we'll probably have to put in a lot of states in Europe.

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Thank you very much indeed for a whole variety of very thoughtful advocacy points that come back.

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Thank you for that discussion, but not with the Liberals.

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I think in a sense, let's assume very similar to our next speaker in the shape of another.

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I wonder if we could do this to you in reminding ourselves that we're talking about the contested Americans of today's Europe,

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but we're also looking forward as well as that and thinking about how things matter, not just in five months or five years, but 50 years.

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There's also. Thank you. If go to desert.

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I just wanted to mention very quickly that we are also running in the UK for the European Parliament elections out of London.

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So we haven't given up on the UK. Even so, I think when we think about narratives and fantastic visions, as you said,

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the big thing inside that it also took from the discussions earlier is that the narrative is powerful.

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If it draws from the fact that people experience and then have a sentiment towards and then it's taken up by someone,

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the politicians on who takes it and talks about it and the feeling that it somehow connects to them.

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And I think sometimes when we have these theoretical debates about narratives,

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we forget that we can't just have them up here in the room without connecting them to the last reality.

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And so I think the big insight for me that and that is also the story of why we

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found the vote was that people are currently experiencing and big questions big.

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I would say problems, but also the phenomenon that are affecting their personal lives.

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And they don't see the narrative from the EU that will help them answer these questions.

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And so just I think the one thing that I can do here as a representative of this European movement,

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every village is to give you some insights about what kind of stories I heard from the people that I met

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across Europe over the last two years and also maybe tell you a bit about what we did because it is,

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I think, a phenomenon. I don't know how long it will be on if you will actually be able to fulfil our vision of building a long term European party.

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But I think it's a phenomenon that speaks for itself, that exists and that our people are standing behind it and for the big discussions to come,

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also to bring back to the new cleavages and whether they have political representation or not.

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So. We decided to follow this political party of pan-European political parties because we saw that on the one side,

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we have huge question marks, big challenges that we that we face.

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For example, I mean, a Romanian that I know you wanted to as part of a movement said, I can see how the government is legalising corruption.

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I can't see the answer. We need to somehow, from the European perspective, to find an answer to this.

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To stop this opportunity go from the south of Italy was like I had to leave my single mom alone and

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leave the south of Italy because I couldn't stay here and find a career path that works for me.

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And why isn't there any form of like bigger investments from the European level that can somehow

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make our country work so weak that it's a bit back to the austerity people that we talked about?

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And then there's Stavros, who actually met a week after I met with him,

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Garton Ash year and a few years ago and asked him about his vision for Europe and said,

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Look, I don't understand why Morocco is having my own my my wage.

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So why is this person having an effect of my life reality, my my life's reality?

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And they kind of voted out of power if I don't agree with what's happening.

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So I think there's this big question of the rule of law, of social equality, of all financial crises and financial flows.

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And we don't have a European solution yet to answer to these questions.

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Are there? They have one common denominator that is that they're all beyond the national borders.

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These are all phenomena that we cannot solve and will never be able to solve with just a matter of perspective.

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And we know that is this one. And so saying, let's go back to the nation state.

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Easy, everybody, the Keynes in front of their own door, as we say in Germany.

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And somehow we would come together and the like, you know, with the heads of state and somehow figure this out.

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And that is actually, to be honest, it's somehow logical and sensible solution because you just say,

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OK, if we go back to the nation, you figure it out. That's understandable. And that is a narrative that I can buy because I can connect to it.

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It talks to the problems.

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It takes the problems up and then it says he is the solution, and we haven't managed to find a solution that is really European answer yet.

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We're not able to tell this narrative, and that is because we don't really have European politics.

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There are multiple examples for this economy, and you know this all but in the parliament there a lot of the power of the European Parliament,

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a lot of power is due to the national parties. I talked to an MP person, vice general secretary a few weeks ago who said, Yeah, we never did.

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Like, we watered down our programme so that it accommodates all the national parties that are part of the NDP.

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You look at Manfred Weber and you see that he's fallen on stream against Nord Stream and the transit markets for Nord Stream.

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And you have many examples of national politics being more powerful than that than the European groups and that actually doing it.

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I mean, there are a lot of lobby organisations currently moving back to Germany because they

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believe that they can make more of an impact that they can make than European Parliament.

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You look at the continent, it's obvious. I mean, that's national interests that the commission tries a bit to build the European perspective,

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but it's not strong enough and it's not incredibly powerful enough to do that.

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So where is the European with our European politics that can actually solve these problems?

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So what we try to do is say we need to make European politics a reality, and that's why we built the European party and be face a lot of impediments.

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I mean, you have to understand that at a different electoral laws or no electoral laws, they can intervene in different countries.

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And just to give you some examples of how random that is in Italy, you need 150000 signatures to be able to run for the European Parliament elections.

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In Germany, it's four thousand in Italy. You need to have a notary sitting next to you on the Piazza, who is actually saying,

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OK, this is a signature nobody's ever made that has ever managed to do that.

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In France, you need to have around 800000 euros to print your own ballots and take these ballots and send

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them to the electorate office and all across France to be able to be elected re-elected.

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Even though you already large participating in the elections.

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This is these are thresholds that come before the percentage threshold that we talk about, which is also different across European countries.

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So there's no common rules about European elections in which the European elections.

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That's why I recognise that. And these are all little impediments that show the we we currently don't fulfil,

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even what we already say in the treaties of having European parties because we didn't down to

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actually establish an entity European party that could be and run in different countries.

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And why is it that it's again, because of national politics, there is no interest of a national politician to some or further the idea of a

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real European party of having the power transferred to a more European level.

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And so I think the big question is why haven't we made this step of integration which would actually take up this problem that we need,

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that we don't have a democratic representation really and build that as a Europe that works?

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And I think then you can come back to the narrative and say,

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this is a narrative that would work because we could say if we had the European Parliament,

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that is actually the most powerful body in Europe,

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that people could come with their lives reality and say, I'm going to elect the European parliamentarian.

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This European planetarium can take and take the bureaucracy,

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all of stocks and bureaucracy or any other topic of climate change or all of these big topics.

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And somehow you benefit for me and then also implement the solution, the European level and make that a reality.

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So I think for us, the big demand that we have and to actually tell a nice little story about Europe is that Europe works in a European way,

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that we have the possibility of federalism, that we discuss which competences should be on the European level and that the people

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can then elect the parliamentarians directly and in comparable ways across Europe,

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so that you can then know that your vote is worth something if you like.

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If I currently have to explain to people why they should vote in European Parliament,

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most often that hear it doesn't make a difference, it doesn't have an effect on me.

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It's more important what a vote on the national level, but we have to somehow like, do this.

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This step forward to give this trust to the people that they will make some decisions, which might be annoying for us,

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which might have some tendencies which are scary to us,

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but which give the people the feeling that they actually democratic representative on the European level.

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Yes. So I think what the last sentence there is that we somehow need to hold our petitions accountable,

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and I really hope that we can build pressure on people like the Chancellor Merkel, who has the last years, have been really courageous.

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We need to hold national positions accountable, to be courageous, to do steps towards a new European Union.

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And I will be very happy to learn more from you at this conference to take care of me and my quest of building a European party faithful.

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Thank you very much for these insights from the political front lines.

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Next thing I need to focus on you. Give us your thoughts about the North American protests, whether that and what.

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I would like to thank you for the invitation. I am obviously probably having ideas almost completely different from what I

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have already heard and probably I am going to hear during the end of the day.

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It's not arrogance, but I am. I am supposed to represent here a couple of people from didn't ask me to represent them,

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but there is a public statement to bring some two years ago in Paris.

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It was a short weekend and the end product was a piece entitled A Europe We Can Believe In.

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And it was signed by, for instance, amongst others in Prague, Toronto, the sole recycler who call Roger Scruton just for yes.

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So a Europe, we can believe in the background or the story behind this document is something like this almost 10 12 years ago, 13 years ago.

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I can't remember, well, Dutch conservatives that are Dutch conservatives, not only the rules and how they, together with some European thinkers,

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we launch a foundation and the school, the founding Birch Society, and we have a name centre for European renewal.

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It was there before the crisis, what we have, the last crisis,

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what we usually referred to and the central idea behind this meeting, where different people from all over Europe, Polish,

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the Italian, Spanish, Swedish, some Germans, Hungarians, Czechs,

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excessive force together in order to name the problem that we jointly or prior to that we had independently of each other.

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Individually, we felt or thought or we had some ideas about that.

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But there was now a focus point. And this focus point was I have to because I have to be green.

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I'm not going to tell the whole story. It was more, more complicated and more interesting than I can tell you right now on the air.

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But the common idea was that the problem with Europe is the problem of vegetation.

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It is education that methodologically speaking or or finding a basic idea where we can focus all our ideas.

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Justin, to tell the name what the problem is with Europe and it is education,

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education and what was interesting that this was a common ground for both the best and European participants.

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And then you see European participants as well. The common thread was the connecting line was between us that whereas the Western let's

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call them conservatives or sceptical thinkers thought that the Western culture has,

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as and as has become sort of aimless, uh, losing energy and not simply knowing what is what and losing reality on the one hand, on the eastern side.

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We we have an education system of post-communist education system where we were supposed to be happy we

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were supposed to just switching over to the Soviet type of education over to which was based openly,

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exclusively on ideology as such, but now absorbing the end of history,

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story and similar things, and democracy is the best, the improbable other things and so forth.

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Education is such an approach this country even today. I am a rector of a posh Hungarian university.

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I know what I have been talking about. The problem is still with us.

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Who? Beaches, the beaches problem varies by police, but more practically, the Hungarian kids still don't speak the language under communism.

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Even if you were a German major or English major, it barely happened that you could spend some time in Great Britain,

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for instance, from an English major and so on and so forth.

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So to put it, I know that I have you have the postcards that are very simple yet.

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OK, so the common thread was there is something wrong with education,

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and probably these good to give a patient was penetrated so profoundly with ideological way of thought.

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That was partly due to the loss of intellectual traditions that the seven or pillars of our culture.

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Certainly. Well, let me give it a I don't think too many people read ancient Greek and Latin in this room.

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It is because of the education system, but this culture, but this is just a symptom.

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I don't want to say that all of us should learn ancient Greek or Latin prohibition.

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Yes, thank you. It was a validation of what I already said.

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So this is this was a common ground of this statement and document.

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And I myself found for common ideas that connect the whole idea.

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It's about a 15 page pages. I read the statement and these four ideas around which the ideas are phrased in the statement.

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I call them the excesses of the better. Number one, the excesses of the individual.

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Second, excesses, excesses of the rational third excesses of the legal.

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And the fourth one is the excesses of progress. And I don't have time, so to speak, about each of these.

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But I want to just give you one example. What kind of what is the level of let's see.

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What is this? It is. The individual European culture is unique in the sense how the individual back to the ancient times was so sort of invented.

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This is the source of our science in the modern sense,

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Asian sense also and therefore the individuality of the individual, the role of the individual and so on and so on.

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It is is one of the most important developments of our culture.

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But compared to the basic fact that that man is, you know, even so,

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there's been this tension which has always been with us between the individual and the community, according to the statement,

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or at least even implicitly said that the individual is contrasted to the community where the individual

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has turned such a prestigious position in our society that the community is no longer including religious,

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civil, national and some force communities.

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Thank you. I am out. Letters since provisional could be made to authorities.

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I think you could finish off our introductory section. OK.

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Actually, let me start the discussion after what I heard.

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I wanted to discuss certain problems, especially between narrative and structural problems or the conditions of possibility of any common narrative.

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But but let me refer to the, he said.

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And also to you begin with those two words.

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Or rather, it will be a discussion with Henry Kissinger, who is not with last one group.

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Think about the European Union is that you can discuss even with Henry Kissinger or even he can be wrong and he is wrong.

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When he stated that, when he said that if he really said that the European Union,

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the results and inform them up to me, European Union solved, or at least partly three big problems.

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One is Eastern European problems. We just had yesterday the first 15th anniversary of the Polish and the only Polish Eastern European accession.

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To European Union, and I think, you know, this part of Europe, Asia, East Coast, many problems.

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Timothy Snyder knows well, it's not by coincidence that he called.

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He named his book The Succession of All These Regional Bloc Lands.

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I think that this was a huge problem in the modern history, at least partly at the sort, of course.

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And then let me refer to the title. There was a problem with the Nordic narrative.

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I tried to follow closely on verse three, and there was almost nothing about ending or what if everything was about percentages, money, populism.

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But there was there was really nothing that we can do in this sense, actually.

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Who said that my grandfather died or none of us want to play that often?

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There was a lot of noise about Eastern Europe in the 70s and nineties, but there was no one single idea that came out of this region.

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But but anyway, if you look at the numbers, Eastern European economics is very successful.

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I would say that the best,

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the most important achievements or the most important consequence of Europe of Polish or European Eastern European accession is independence.

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This is what one populists are so dangerous in this country.

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You can afford Brexit. You can afford to Trump if you are in Ireland.

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The old world speaks English, if you will have nuclear weapon, etc. But if you but.

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But if you can afford it, you can survive. Kaczynski or Viktor Orban, it's still a question mark.

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We are not neighbouring Atlantic Ocean. We're never neighbouring Russia. It's a difference.

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But, but but the second problem that I think the European Union solved is as a German problem.

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I just read that the PS3 probably as well as some of you in the book and last foreign policy, the comeback of German problem in Europe.

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But actually, this is a kind of a dialectic title that we have again, German problem because we felt so strongly.

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The former German problem, which was as another characteristic, said once in Berlin that he's more afraid of too passive Germany not too active,

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which for a poor Polish foreign minister to say that in Berlin,

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it's quite it shows you what achievements the European Union accomplished when it comes to Germany.

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Of course, you can say that it was not European Union with nature or it was American umbrella, etc. But let me ask you a question for this discussion.

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Maybe for other panels as well would really need to survive without European Union.

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With NATO's we will be NATO and NATO has, as we know today without European Union.

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I'm here. I'm hesitant or like.

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I have a lot of doubts. I'd prefer later with European Union than we thought.

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And this is how I understand why. Before Trump, Obama happened in the sense that he was not elected from him,

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begun this descent into her small or for Europe, maybe not that strong did verbally express this, as with Trump.

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But that's a political philosophy. It's a certain change you pick on with Obama, unfortunately.

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Then the third thing is Russia. I would say that he used.

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Still, if you look at the sanctions, American sanctions for Russia are irrelevant.

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The trade exchange between Russia and America doesn't exist.

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It's less than one percent of of Russian GDP.

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But the sanctions are a view that we are, you know, in Western Europe,

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you can be surprised that they are still entangled and there are quite, well, efficient and maybe even strong unions.

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This could be a perception in Eastern Europe who are disappointed,

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but we in party disappointed that we understand and we appreciate, especially today, it still exists.

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But but I can't imagine that without European Union umbrella in this region, Russia would be much more dangerous.

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Russia would be much more active and wash up. Russia would have much bigger ambition from this point of view.

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European Union at least 40 at least solve this huge problem in modern history sometimes.

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And again, it's like with Germany European Union. His eventual successful in the sense that like,

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I don't know if you are aware of the fact that it's not friends that traditionally used to be the biggest trade partner from Germany.

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It's not even China. The biggest trade partner for Germany is for the Arab countries,

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v4 and the trade exchange with these four countries Czech check with makes in Great Britain.

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It's not really well known who are the Portugal countries, but it's Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary.

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Poland is almost twice as large as was with France, and the progress is nine percent year to year, whereas with France is zero point six eight eight.

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Explain explains of this part of the problem with the contested narratives,

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because if you if you ask yourself why Germany is so passive or why it's run certain appeasement policy towards Kaczynski Orban,

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so why they tolerate so much, why Fidesz is only now suspended, why Manfred Weber could say that in Hungary we have civic conservatism.

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If you can understand like why they also tolerate so much in Poland.

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And on the other hand, why there was no common narrative even for France and Germany.

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And it's actually the German Franco alliance I think doesn't exist anymore is

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next to this compared to manifestos McComb and Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer.

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There's nothing in common, I think, and kramp-karrenbauer, when she answering to Macron,

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proposes to resign from Strasbourg to replace France in the Security Council for a European Union.

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It's like a slap in the face or a total ignorance in foreign policy.

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So but it's it shows you why there is no common comment, not only our common narrative or for Western and Eastern Europe.

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It answers also the question of both structural reasons to add to the business.

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With this with Western stable politically,

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even if kind of a house of ethnic dictatorships is a certain achievement from comical points of view, it's a better business than in France.

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This is how hard is to expect common European narrative the rest times with free discussion.

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Thank you very much.