It's good to be here, I should say I'm a kind of Ron Howard's up in the world of narratives and certainly a narrative quality.
And I kind of came to this come to this through a project that I've been running now for several years on contested narratives of the globe.
I know what I'll do is to try and fulfil some of my free, which is to talk about the powers and the perils of narrative.
But I also do want to say a little bit about the role of the globe, and I particularly want to pick up the point that people to make.
Last night in his recollections of the 1940s about the sense of the increasing marginalisation of Europe yesterday,
and in so many times when I listen to people talking about Europe, the internal sense,
the I think the inadequate attention that is given to the role of the other, the external,
the global in the stories that Europe does tell and perhaps even more in the stories
that Europe needs to tell and should tell if they're going to be convincing stories.
So the power of narrative,
socially imagined ways of socially constructed ways of imagining the world narratives have complex texture that made up of ideas,
discourses, performances, images,
messages that are carried by a whole range of storytellers that you can accommodate world views that fluctuate over time,
whilst at the same time still supporting essential elements of the same script that can't power.
Clearly, as we heard yesterday, comes from some combination of politics and emotions they often take on loans rather than logic and consistency.
The power is built around the idea.
Of course, we find this expressed in in lots of people just because to me, I think Charles Taylor is the most powerful exponent of this.
But human beings make sense of particularly complex, contested,
multicultural phenomenon by telling stories, stories in particular that link past, present and future.
These stories have enormous power, and this is where the strategic communication,
literature and narratives and fluidity comes in and helping us understand the power of political mobilisation.
Everybody seems to be reading. I've done across different disciplines, pulls out different things that they particularly like about narratives.
Will they find it useful for their purposes in the discussion of narratives?
For me, in the sense kind of thing can make sense.
We're trying to use the struggle for narratives as a way of making sense of different ideas of the global employability.
It is the explicit role usually explicit as it can be, but often very explicit, very important anyway.
Role of time and space in narratives and political narratives and ideas of purpose change.
The possibility of transformation.
It is those ideas that teleological character to many political narratives that gives them this great power of mobilisation.
Of course, not just on the side of those who are pressing narratives of change can equally
well be on the side of those who are contesting those narratives of change.
The revival we've seen in recent years, particularly from the right of contesting notions of liberal progress sometimes.
And I think interestingly, just now as it was in Central Europe in the 1920s,
ideas that seem to be harking back nostalgic, looking back to a previous time that are often themselves revolting,
that builds on a particular understanding and application of what is wrong with with the liberal and narrative matter normatively.
Roger Smith talks about political stories, economic stories, but he likes particular emphasis on ethically constitutive stories.
And it seems to me those stories are the ones that really matter politically, and they also matter normatively and more.
So a little bit on the table. What about the perils or at least the recurring issues?
So the four things I've got to say first is this whole question of how deep, how just,
you know, the narrative things that actors stories that actors tell for their own purposes?
Are they just things? This is one view. I mean, the older sort of philosophy, history, literature and the representations.
They have things that particularly historians, but not just historians, in a sense,
have struggled to impose some sort of coherent order on a historical reality.
But it's a school the idea of narrative misrepresentation versus a much stronger notion that narratives are really the means by which we come to know,
to come, to understand. Come to make sense of where we are in the world,
so that narratives in that apology really are far more strongly than of our social identity and that sort of debate divergence runs through it.
Me, my have to weigh a lot of the literature obviously speaks to much bigger issues in social theory.
Secondly, in related agency, the overwhelming thrust in political science literature,
certainly on topics like nationalism, was to make everything very instrumental, rationalist agent centric.
And slowly, we've seen a sort of pushback, not least by those who say, Well, of course,
yes, you know, loads of instrumentality, obviously, but there are some stories that work.
And what we need to understand is why certain stories work and why others don't.
Why they get institutionalised in particular places, why they disappear, why they reappear, and obviously why there are multiple stories.
There's never a single story that always made these stories. There are many stories of people who are absurdly unless maybe you'll come up during
the day when we saw the movements of the people who really do the narratives, the historians who tell stories.
Sort of this question of of everyone is bound up in these narratives.
Political scientists pretending that they can sort of produce universal knowledge of themselves
endlessly working off and through the big narratives that someone else has constructed for them,
whether in another part of academia or in the world.
And that tension between what we kind of see in the world and how we think about the narratives is really crucial.
Just one example, which I came up yesterday. You know, we're very much back in a world where this idea of, you know,
cosmopolitan nativist, you know, the cleavage between the national and the something else.
This is the major cleavage. This is the sort of dominant way we make sense of shifting identities.
And yet again, the historians can correct me.
One of the things I think that we now see much more historically were the very close connexions between nationalism,
internationalism, cosmopolitanism and regionalism. These things merged together and come together in complex ways.
And so some of the puzzling things, why do you think there's an outsider which is seen by other people as not from Europe?
Is this artificial construction? No, true. But you'd better believe it.
And yet you seem to be real nationalism in some transoceanic sense of identity gathering peoples across different parts of the world.
That's somehow natural. Well, that's pretty bizarre.
And my fourth point, and I'm just going to say very few words the globally structured tomorrow, we're going to have few smout elsewhere.
But of course, stories identities are constructed, not just these are the specific numbers, but within broader structures.
Here, of course, this is where Europe's place in the changing global really does kick in and kicks in a very difficult place for Europe to see itself.
In what many ways was the site of a particular kind of universalism maternity that was destined to go global through time.
This was the source of its great power.
So when that sense of arriving at position with that is no longer true, Tim talked yesterday about the problems in the writing and the problems.
The writing looked very different from within and from without arriving within.
We've done many things, and many of our problems are the problems of success, enlargement deepening and all that kind of stuff.
But the problems left something in the writing in 1989 was very different,
and I do think for all week, so endlessly, quite rightly think that focus on 1989 in Europe.
We do need to get away from 1989 when we think about Europe in the bigger picture.
1989 inaugurates a very bizarre blip in the picture of the bigger world and where Europe thinks
it inaugurates a period where Europe's narrative of the global regulating global capital,
liberal global capitalism, coming up with normative power fit with the way that the world seems to be going in a particular moment in time.
But of course, it is a particular moment of time, which is very old.
If you think about Europe's position in the bigger world and the longer periods of the 20th
century where that notion of what happens when what have been the core region becomes the second
free region in the global system actually is the factor that works that underpin many of the
great tensions and contestations in the stories that we're trying to tell about Europe now.
So that means that that particular narrative of the global liberal global capitalism,
globalisation technology, managing what regulation administration,
all the stuff that dominated so much of the 1990s and for which Europe is global, of course, looks very different.
If you tell a story of globalisation of the global, which lays much more emphasis on the geopolitical so that the piece story the killing of hope.
Internally has to be shifted to a story of how can we recreate hopes externally,
how this story can be a different kind of story in a much harsher and nastier world.
And of course, the story of global capitalism as structure?
And how is this match? And here I think the point I was speaking briefly yesterday.
My question to Gisela Stuart is the part of the real problem is that it's not the narratives of Europe themselves,
but are because they're important and they need to be discussed. But narratives of the alternatives.
And at the moment, many of those alternatives flip very freely.
They sound great.
The family of self-respect, it's restored nations non universalist globalist connectivity without deep institutionalisation all sounds long,
except that it really is very difficult to work out what those things mean and couldn't be.
And if you think like that, when you think of the offs,
the structural trade-offs Rodrick gave us the trade off between globalisation, democracy and sovereignty.
He was down to the liberal economists identity of military security.
You put those five back and you end up in a range where the range of alternatives is not so great and where the
liberal narrative of Europe as a model for managing those trade-offs is the most successful narrative that we get.
Thanks very much. Last night, as I was listening to inspiring stories, starting with Peter, I was looking at the room,
seeing how all of us were itching to tell our own stories, or at least that we had imagined our minds scape in a bubble of Davos.
And I was trying to imagine what was happening and the interaction a hole the size of the bubbles where they bumping against each other,
where they are becoming intertwined, where they connected with the threads of colours.
So in a way, that's the conversation we're having with our silences, as well as what we say in this room as in all over Europe,
the question yes, of course we have as many European stories as individuals in Europe, but how are they connected?
How do they create clusters?
How do they echo between each other in sharing some shadows, the long shadow of history and the kind of show that he just developed so grandly?
And indeed, I'm here to tell you a bit about this chap.
Tim asked me to tell you about this book that he very kindly mentioned yesterday, and I'll put it here for anyone who wants to look at it later,
which was actually published almost 10 years ago, just after the 50th anniversary of getting you to remember the great celebration.
Finally, Lisbon Treaty was passed, and the European Europe crisis was not seen yet, just around the corner.
And we had for the first time a European flag and this very definitive and and that that was quite a big thing.
And indeed, everyone was going around in Europe like Diogenes. Remember that this is living a full day like those around and with the light.
What do you do now? I'm looking for a man who can provide.
I find him and everyone was looking for those European stories how we have changed since then.
So part of the question is how and what's happened in the last decade since this book.
But I also would like to raise with you. But let me just say some things about the book.
Let me add was there was the product of a five year long euro project called Icon,
bringing together all sorts of disciplines, but very much a political philosophy book.
So this is unapologetically. And you put asking about what are your what are European stories as seen by intellectuals in Europe?
Of course, we mused about the relationship between us and the oil pipeline.
Is there a connexion? But above all, it's about intellectuals.
And indeed, the first question that we asked was Why is it that for so long,
European intellectuals who care about the European Union after the reforms of the 50s?
Nothing was written really. And so very quickly in the intro, we developed three reasons.
The first was simply that Europe and European story had been perverted, obviously.
The second was diversion.
The big problem of our age, which we've come back to, was the Cold War was the structural division of the world that we could just die tomorrow.
Who cares about what's happening in Brussels? All the more than the third reason was disillusion.
This is a technocratic thing. Call it still trade. Who cares?
That's not the kind of thing intellectuals think about that kind of us, European studies, people or nerds, and we care about little regulation.
But then something happened, and we all know that Maastricht is not just a benign, but possibly not.
And.
And the sudden realisation that this thing, this animal was not just the kind of trade thing, there's more than that staked in the making, whatever.
And so in the next two decades, loads of debates around Europe and what it is and then came more crisis.
And that's the after the post book. But let me say something about the content of the books, not the content of the book.
First of all, you may ask Tim raised yesterday this about national debates around Europe amongst intellectuals, and the term debate is very important.
This is not about national stories, about national contestation and disagreements, as we're talking about in this file,
and we have these four groups of countries, the founders to join us at every turn as the outliers.
And each of them in a way have some consistency in their discourse and narrative of Europe invented, possessed really far in the core.
But then the joiners, it's it's been other than that appropriated and unlisted in these.
So this was join us. And then the returners revealed divide.
And finally, of course, the archives are they in? Are they? I sure will come back on this.
So we have these clusters and they have different ways of appropriating the EU.
And indeed, part of the question of the book is is what's happening between people clusters group lost in translation now.
Of course, David talked about him yesterday. The book is a company of ideas and provocation.
Europe is all these things at the same time object of desire, but in Romania, ethical hazard, normative power, but also just this giant supermarket.
The city does very much in the East and it was starting to take.
But what do we make of this multiplicity, if not tackled?
Are these stories these national debates in their own national linguistic ghetto
that are important or are there echoes that do live in the air to air pollution?
So the way the book proliferates, the debates poetry,
but we ended up and this is a complete chapter finding that there were across all these countries.
We have 49 countries in the book four kinds of debates, and then we can ask whether the public crisis.
That's true, this debate. So we have four types of debate. I'm just going to very quickly give you the bullet points of each debate.
So the first debate is about identity in Europe identity and above all, seeing that every country sees Europe through its prism.
What has Europe done to my country that has Europe down to my future?
So but then there are other prism, the kind of regional Nordic social and cultural prisms.
And of course, there is also the stories of the periphery. We were very fascinated by the first, the different versions of peripheral angst,
and this very ways of self assertion that peripheral countries had cultures of the underdog.
The night our nation is at the core, very much whether you go in Poland, Greece, Romania.
We each have our different ways of saying at the core and contesting it all.
So that was the the relational debate.
There's a question about how neighbours pairs of dual pairs in Europe interact, how they are present and what happens between them.
Now, the second debate I'm going to go very quickly is is not as a civilizational civilizational debate and we heard yesterday,
especially with our own Gary and colleague. What that means, but not only.
And, of course,
this civilizational debate and he just mentioned it's about progress and how different countries debate the contested process of modernity,
is Europe its nemesis or is Europe about the pathologies of modernity?
How would this Christianity stand in this? What is the source of our European self from enlightenment to secularism and hegemony?
And indeed, how is the moses of modernity debated across countries, including around globalisation,
but also the very question of community and the loss of organic solidarity?
Very big at the time. Third, debate is the political debate.
What is integration? What is this part of the contest, the promise of liberal democracy?
Not in this group to say much about this, but of course, already done or has done more than 10 years ago.
It was all about liberalism and its discontent and about what is liberal impartiality.
And finally, liberalism. What how do we define in our countries the contours of liberalism?
And finally, the fourth debate, of course, is that is the definition.
What is the definition of Europe? The definition as finale to the end point?
What is the nature of the European polity? And there, of course, was five different definition of contestation in every country.
If we use the word fragile, what we contrast it to is it contrasted to continental or to empire.
Our past, our future. Is it about federal union versus federal states, all the isms that ends, you mentioned?
And indeed, we had a bias as editors of the book with Justin Ikhwan, Jenny Panopto because we were interested in the third way.
We were interested in the extent to which these national debates would raise the question of whether between nationalism and supra nationalism.
Origins of the nation trope, an image that was emerging amongst our conscious debates in trying to shape a third way for Europe.
And I can say more later. So once we had all of these debates mapped out, the question for us is what do we do with these debates?
What do they create? What is the glue that binds us together?
And we end up in the book and in the conclusion that's the title of the concluding chapter,
crazy narrative diversity and all of these asking what echoes can be productive for European integration?
What is the tone of this coalition? And yes, the European Union is a bubble, but it has kind of simultaneous translation.
It's not all lost in translation, but under this big superstructure of integration,
of cooperation of institution, what is happening to the people of Europe?
Because of course, that's my own bias.
If I was going to tell my story yesterday, I would have talked about being raised in hybridity to Greece and France and Germany and France,
and how that makes you obsessed with mutual recognition between people, how deep,
how empathetic, how engage, how limited to come talked about an enlarged vision.
Can we do that? Not really, but we can just play with our realities.
So this was the question we were asking by the end of the book.
And I'd like to say in conclusion that of course, since the book we've seen the crisis,
we have seen the denial of recognition we have seen in Europe through prejudice and insult as well as material suffering.
But what do we do with it? Well, what we did with it, with some colleagues,
was to write a little book of the Greco German affair and asking about whether mutual recognition was lost.
And indeed, the finding that in every story, you know, I'm not one to say that in every story,
we have a silver lining and the silver lining of this euro crisis that we've gone through.
Is that an end of the day, even if this engagement has been about denying the other an insult,
it's also in that very way a way of knowing each other better.
That's what we find between Greece and Germany. And I think that's what we found amongst Europeans of the crisis.
So I would like to appeal to us when we think about Europe,
who are European stories and how they mingle and contest each other to remember that there's always a silver lining.
Thank you. I'm coming at this from the angle of literature,
which might be quite a bit different feel for a lot of people in the social sciences and in politics, but anyway, here it goes.
So a few words then about the narrative from a literary point of view.
So we've got this term narrative ology, which means basically the study of narrative, and it is a huge field.
I'm not going to touch on anywhere near the different concepts that are being discussed in our ontology.
I'll just touch on a very few aspects here,
and I'm going to use three of three examples of German language authors from three different centuries to just touch on a few questions here.
My focus with this is the question of how literary narratives establish identities, both personal and collective ones,
and how they discuss the issue of borders and boundaries in a personal collective and a geographical sense.
So throughout history, literature has always been connected, concerned with the relationship between space and identity.
On the one hand narrative as a way for a culture society to assert its own identity is full of their place in history.
And on the other hand, and perhaps more interestingly, you've got literature which challenges these boundaries and identities,
tries to shift blur or collapse boundaries and distinctions.
Now, fashionable term in literary studies today is transnational literature.
So this is literature which transcends the national and linguistic boundaries, whereby authors have long national literature.
Write about other cultures, languages and experiences, but also literature written by authors who don't neatly fit into any one national category.
I hope you're going to touch at least on two of those office.
So something which has always been the purpose of literature, but since the start of writing is the trope of the quest and the journey.
So this is something that goes back all the way to the ancient epics.
So it's the idea of narrative transporting us into different valleys and space is taking us on a journey,
which is often, of course, then a journey of self-discovery. So writing about the foreign, the exotic, the unknown shows us something about ourselves.
So there's always a kind of dialectical relationship between the other and the self.
So on the one hand, you've got narratives which familiarise the exotic and the unknown,
but you also have conversely narratives which show us that the familiar is really strange, perhaps uncannily perhaps exotic.
So it's that sort of dual relationship which which is at stake in much of good literature, as I would see it.
And that sort of exploration doesn't necessarily require people to be very well travelled.
And my first example is the Austrian 19th-century writer about that shift or not.
Perhaps one facet have a list of the literary canon.
I imagine many more journalists won't have heard of him. So not a very, very eventful life of a very unhappy life in many ways.
That's very strange and wide-ranging stories. And I'll just mention his breakthrough story, a novella called upThere,
which he published in 1842 and was a huge hit with his Austrian and German readership.
So Obvious tells the story of a North African Jew living in the desert,
who has a number of devastating blows felt to him and then makes the journey through the North African desert to the Mediterranean,
travels by boat, by ship across and circles of all places in a remote Austrian Mountain Valley.
So it's a story about seeing the sort of the exotic, the foreign in so many ways,
religious ethnic ethnographic coming into what some shiftless racist would have been the familiar.
So it's about looking at the familial through foreign eyes.
My second example is another writer who accused for part of his life would have counted as Austria and then later,
of course, as Czechoslovakia, and that is Kafka.
So Kafka, as you know, grew up in the Habsburg empire, an interesting example of a multi linguistic,
multi ethnic kind of conglomerate of nations within one nation state.
And interestingly, when Kafka writes about Europe, he doesn't really mention specific spaces or places, for the most part.
There are a few examples where Kafka mentions national spaces.
He mentions non-European spaces, mentions Russia.
He mentions the Arab descent, and he mentions China and talks in Chinese once.
Kafka once wrote to his fiancee in the letter I included in here.
He needs it. And this fascination with China, from the eyes of someone who lived in Prague,
a small but multicultural city within the hotspot empire, is then transposed into several stories.
We have got the most famous the longest one building the Great Wall of China,
which describes how this wall is in fact an impossible project that can never be built.
But what they do instead is that they build early parts of the wall, not even joining them up.
The reason they build parts is simply so that the people involved in the project can get a sense of closure.
So walls in this story are not functioning borders or barriers.
They are psychological constructs and that the story within that long go on building the
Wall of China story tells the story of an invasion from the north of savage nomads,
invade the capital and destroy the culture of that country of China.
So you can see how, taken together, these two stories really show both how boundaries are futile.
Ultimately, in a measure that perhaps a psychological crutch sort of cross thesis.
And yet they also absolutely vital, because if we don't have boundaries, then terrible things will happen.
In this diary, Kafka reflects very interestingly on what people's mind of literature,
and by this, he means literature written by a minority group within a dominant culture.
So for him, Kafka as a German speaking to within in Prague, this was a kind of form being an outsider within the language and the culture.
And this Kafka says minor literature is characterised by many things, but above all the things, it's characterised by being more political,
more politically critical than the literature produced by authors who feel more at home within that language.
Now, coming back to the question of narrative that entertained voters and so on, I think we should add another question here,
which is the question that the voice of the writer, whether this is a personal first-person or an impersonal what we call omniscient narrator.
So the writers are, of course, vital to the stories that we read.
And as readers, we have to to some extent put our trust in these narrators because they are the ones telling the story.
But then, of course, as you know, the single is the only reliable narrator has been a very effective literary device for many centuries.
I'll just mention one famous, slightly pop literature example, which is Agatha Christie's al-Kurd for her novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
I wanted to give away the twist if you haven't read it, but one of the most spectacular examples of unreliable limericks.
And so you're talking about the writers. I'm coming to my final example, which is the German Bosnian writer Sasha Stanisic.
So scholarships shot to fame with his first novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone,
which is set in his native Bosnia during the Bosnian War and then tells the story of a boy's wartime experience and flight to exile to Germany,
which is where Stanley six lives now. His second novel for First All, translated by Anthea Bell Before the Feast, is very different.
It's set in an East German village.
A sexual East German village called Foulston settled in the East German Brandenburg province of We'll come up and people think of writing like this.
Why doesn't he write about Bosnia again? So the German Jewish can't take maxim?
Villa wrote a very scathing article. I think so, saying that's of the Scottish, which is basically selling out.
They're trying to integrate into the German mainstream and try to logical East German folklore, he says.
And as a migrant German writer, you should capitalise on your album as you should write stories about where you come from.
Not about German topics. I would say that very simply, the novel isn't as straightforward about German identity as you might think,
and this is why I think Scottish, which is such an amazing writer and such an interesting example.
What's interesting about the novel, amongst many other things, is that it's told by a first person plural narrator so that we know, right?
So which is quite unusual, I think, for novels by and large. So on the one hand, you of course, have to ask, who is this we?
The first line seems to be simply a kind of selective village voice, but then fissures and cracks seem to appear within this collective identity.
So the way seems to be sometimes explicitly male, so therefore very gendered.
It also seems to be very hostile towards both towards outsiders to the village community,
people from foreigners, strangers and also hostile towards certain people within the village community.
So I think what Scottish hipsters novel shows us, then, is that narratives really are both to assert identity,
perhaps to draw us into a sense of community as belonging that is obviously one of their functions throughout history.
But they also very softly to show off the mechanisms by which we actually get drawn in by means of narrative.
And then thirdly, to house, perhaps for us to take a critical distance from these strategies to be able to see through the strategies,
or perhaps to at least have a critical sense of distance. So in the case of some exceptions, for instance,
the way narrative gradually and draw the area reveals a the violence tendency so that the novel is set
during the night before the face that is mentioned in the title and repeatedly the narrative we voice.
And that hints at some terrible violence that might be part of this age old feast that the village community are celebrating,
as the narrator tells us early on. We are glad Anna is going to be, but the sentence will be carried out at the feast tomorrow.
Yeah, one more sentence. Anna is in fact, a character within the novel.
She's a young woman who goes through a run in the night, and we find out that she's going to move to also began studying medicine tomorrow.
But throughout this nocturnal narrative,
we're never quite sure whether Anna is really going to be a victim of some sort of savage ritual that goes back centuries,
or why long sentences such as tomorrow is going to be her final days have a much more harmless dimension
that I think is precisely that power of narrative to on sexual confusion question our own attitudes.
That's why I think the purpose of literature lies and why students still study facts that are old but also have.
He texts that are what I. Thank you. Timothy asked me to say a few things about how someone who comes out of the field
really communication research might think about the power and perils of narrative.
Now forget a moment of sort of programmatic advertising, if you will.
For those of you who are not familiar with the field of media, communication research doesn't exist in Oxford, for example.
It's an interdisciplinary stela research that's concerned essentially with the question of how people share symbols across time and space.
In my case, my chairs and global communication.
The central question, I suppose,
to the role of communication in the fundamental political question is whether these are a box of recognised institutional,
established political actors or more broadly, the existential fundamental political questions.
Who are we? How do we live together? Who gets what, when and how?
So this is sort of the field, if you will,
and the origins of the field is in social science and psychology and the grassroots with rhetoric in particular in America,
speech, communication programmes and some of the greatest scholars in our field. Originally, a captain, James Fallows, came out of that area.
Now, as I thought about the question to me, he put to me of how we think now as a field without narrative.
I realise we don't really very much because I think like many other fields, thousands of our feet become primarily social scientific endeavours.
I suppose we have become rather impressed with numbers and with quantification of various forms.
And I wholeheartedly embrace that,
though I suppose it saddens me sometimes that we don't think so much about narrative as we perhaps should in the sense that of course,
there is a world disclosing insights here that are not as productive Carolyn or anyone else on the panel,
but I think are sometimes forgotten from from the terrorism scientists about think about communication not as the transmission of information,
but it's about the creation of meaningful relations.
So as a relational thing, as a pragmatic thing and not simply a question of the content of something and the effect.