Well, I come to the history of Europe as an outsider, which I sometimes think is a bad thing to be because I don't have any axes to grind.
I don't have to defend my country and my people. I don't have to attack my country and my people.
I see Europe from across the Atlantic Ocean.
And when you see it from further away, I think you're more aware of the commonalities and the differences.
If you ask Canadians, and this has been true for long, as I can remember, if you ask Canadians,
what are the some of the plans and they sometimes is now going to Europe?
I'll start in Dublin, then I'll go to London, but I might stop in Paris and I'm hoping to get as Far East as possible.
But it has sometimes more ambitious than it might go to St. Petersburg.
But for people, so the way you are, I think the more you tend to see Europe as something that has a sort of cohesion.
The problems, of course, start when you try to rewrite its history. And one of the great problems,
which is I don't want to raise some of these problems and suggest areas where we may want to continue to explore Europe's history.
One of the problems, of course, is just simple geography. Where does Europe southern end?
It is not a continent. It is part of the great Eurasian landmass.
And it, of course, is bounded by seas on three sides. But where does your stop in the East?
And this has always been a difficult question, I think remains a very difficult question.
I was in Tallinn a few years ago doing something for the BBC, which was exploring some of these questions,
and we asked a local historian whether as Europe and he said, at the Russian border.
And he was very clear that not nothing on the other side of the Russian border currently, in his view, is Europe.
But others would say the events of the Urals, or maybe Europe doesn't end anywhere in the east,
it just simply attenuates and other countries begin to come in.
It is, I think, a very important question.
And when you're looking at geography, I think we also have to remember that over time, our views of what Europeans have shifted.
I mean, for the Greeks and the Romans, Europe was very much of the eastern part of the Mediterranean.
And the term was used to distinguish what they saw as Europe, which is actually a very small part of what Europe is today from Asia and from Africa,
which they saw as being somewhat different and inhabited by different sorts of people. And over time, of course, the Centre of Europe has has moved.
It's shifted westwards and northwards. But again, these are questions where where does your start?
When does the idea of Europe start and what does it encompass?
And I think tied to that again, that the question of geography is, is water a barrier or a highway?
We tend to see natural features like great rivers and of course, the English Channel as being things that divide Europe up.
But of course, with so much of history waterways, we're much safer, much more convenient, much more economical as a travelling.
And so although people who have advocated leave have tended to see the channel as something
that marks out the distinctiveness of the British Isles from the continent of Europe.
I would argue that for much of Europe's history in the history of the British Isles,
the English Channel has been a highway which has been easily pronounced transverse
and has carried ideas as carry goods and has carried peoples back and forth.
If it's not geography and geography, I think is problematic, then is it in some sense,
cultural is what we think of Europe today in some way and heritage in the classical world.
Inheritors of the Greek civilisation.
And then the Roman civilisation which succeeded it and against the thought, because I suppose I said that was very much a Mediterranean visualisation,
very much at the eastern end or southern and northern side of the Mediterranean is Europe civilizational idea.
And if so, which civilisation? There are those who will say that Europe is a Christian civilisation,
and today these terms are very problematic because usually they mean something very specific by it.
But I think it's probably fair to say that you can see the enormous cultural influence,
if not the religious influence of Christianity in Europe, which affected culture.
It's affected architecture. It's effective ways in which we think. But it is also, of course,
divided into a dividing line right down to Europe between Catholicism and
Orthodoxy and then later on between varieties of Protestantism and Catholicism.
And we cannot look just at the Christian heritage of Europe. How do we define it?
And we see it because we also have to take into account the enormous contributions made by pagans, financiers and by Jews over many centuries.
So it's not a civilizational thing, is it? Is it a set of shared values? And then of course, we get into question which share values?
And if you look through European history, you can find any values in many different sorts.
Some of them we might have are some of them we would certainly deplore. Is it an economic entity?
And I think certainly the economic ties have been there for a very long time, and we can always, I think,
to assume that what we're doing, the present is more efficient and more far reaching and more effective than anyone in the past.
If you look at the links of trade and the movement of goods that, for example, founded or brought together Europe in the Roman Empire,
if you look in the Middle Ages, which can, I think, too often think of as the Dark Ages and still an enormous amount.
Trade going on, and there were also ideas being moved around, ideas being moved around,
even for a time when we think they should have easily moved around.
If you go as I went fairly recent Instagram on the Danube in the just in the north of Hungary, it's the most extraordinary place there.
You can see Romanesque buildings, restaurants, buildings, baroque buildings.
Mean these were styles and ideas that moved across Europe, often through very, very great distance.
I think finally, as we consider one of Europe, I think it's an interesting question and I'd like to go around and that's about it is
why have the periods of unity in Europe and so much less in the periods in China?
And I think it is something we think about.
So what our challenges are to try to find consistent threads through this complicated story without being ahistorical,
without reading the president back into the past, as has happened, has happened, is happening.
It happened very much in the 19th century. We have to look at what Europe will want to think about.
Do we look at Europe with our continental Europe, which is in some ways being a model for the world?
How do we deal with the difference between nationalism, regionalism, localism and pan-European ism?
And as Andy Haralson, I think rightly these are not mutually exclusive.
So it seems to me another question we might want to consider is how much do we look
at Europe and how much do we go down into society and consider those stories?
And how do we consider how they interact? The same is true of history, and I'm just throwing these out.
I have my heard areas where the meaning of Europe and its history can be explored.
One is in the growth of the centralised state and interstate relations,
and this is something that Europe has contributed a lot to and the growth in international law and international norms, practises and expectations.
A second thing that very closely allied to the growth of the powerful, centralised state is war.
How much of a role will play in European history? This is something I think we need to consider.
I don't agree with that to a Hanson says. As a western way of war, I think this is I find his arguments unconvincing, but war has.
I think that played an enormous part in the development of Europe in its adaptation of better technologies and its organisational structure,
which leads me to the third point I think we should look at. And that is Europe in the world.
I think consider Europe without looking at the ways in which Europe has gone up to the world.
The place in which the world has come in to Europe, I think, is to miss a very important part.
And this again goes back acrimony because back into the invasions of the peoples coming from
the east and the outer edges and the peoples coming from the Middle East and North Africa.
And so I think that relationship between Europe and the rest of the world,
it has always been there perhaps became more important in the early modern period.
And so I think what we need to do is we look at the history of Europe is not trying to create narratives.
I think we've seen what happens when historians create narratives. We do not have a glorious record in this.
We created in the past some very dangerous narratives which tell of victimisation or triumph.
I think we need to be aware of that. I think what our role should be is to see Europe as it always has to work in progress.
That's something that's difficult to define and we should contribute to that discussion.
We need to integrate the different sorts of histories that can be written about Europe.
But I think what we need to do above all is keep open the idea that there are
many different narratives in history and one does not supersede all of others.
We can agree with the idea that historians do not necessarily create narratives.
One of our main task, which is to construct existing narratives, which we which have been constructed by different intellectual communities.
So what I would like to do is not to present a narrative of the to present three key elements,
which seem to be very important when we discuss our subject Europe the of twenty first century.
First of all, I'm going to speak on the problem of European nations turning to the question
of a petrol coming from with all three of the theory of Perth dependency.
First, there is no writing of any history of Europe, which connected with the nations of the nation states left out.
To some degree, the nation is always the elephant in the room.
If we talk about Europe and on the other hand,
I would very strongly endorse the thesis that historically the nation state and European integration are not opposites.
The development of the European community and the European Union does not imply the abolition of the nation state.
On the contrary, European integration is a manifestation of the self-assertion and regeneration of the nation state.
Even the so-called quantum leap of the left, though, it's not resolvable.
It isn't, nor from identical nationally.
Interests there, she went on, was far more the result of American pressure and complimentary or German or Western interests.
So if we have a look at the early history of European integration, we could absolutely endorse a new was well known for Europe, right?
The European rescue of the nation state.
In other words, whenever European states and nations felt that their very own interests were best served by the mood of European cooperation,
there was sufficient progress in European integration. This wasn't the case in the 1950s when you see what's at stake.
And in the late 1980s, when the single market and the single currency were under discussion.
But this was also the case. After 2000, the new enlargement of 2004 and 2007 created a new common political and communicative space.
It helped to ease national and international tensions in the post-Cold War.
Having said this, we must consider, of course, the other side of the coin,
but broadening the perspective for the know writing of any history of Europe that does not
take into account the European forces of self-destruction that shaped the 20th century.
And this brings me to a second key element, which is the question of the Petro coming from without.
Historically,
we can ask whether Europeans did not need from the beginning of the 20th century with power from outside that was politically and materially superior.
But opponents of petrol, so to speak, would have kept in check the European petty and contradictory national interests already after 1989.
It was only the Americans who what role could have played such a role.
But the US refused this role, even though it actually fitted strongly in its position as the main victim of World War One.
Washington did not ratify the Paris treaties that proved that politically over the Atlantic,
plus the European victorious powers Great Britain and France were left alone with the acuta task to pacify the continent.
But London and Paris pursued very different interests than peace conceptions that
finally turned out to be incompatible with the untold cold years that had won.
The war was replaced by a result of the cold air that lost the peace.
And though these conditions,
European Democrats were not able to establish a strong unity of action against Mussolini or Franco, let alone against Israel.
And even after 1945, the Franco-British antagonism continued under different circumstances after the Second World War.
Peace in Europe was only to be heard under the conditions of the Cold War and with superpowers in Eastern Europe that,
of course, the Soviet Union that dictated the development if necessary, with tanks Western Europe on the other side,
that sort of level prerogative or even the informal Germany of the United States,
with the US pointing the way to Western European countries could recover from from the devastation of war,
the pool stable, fairly stable democracy is established.
Political freedom, economic growth and the welfare state became intertwined in an unprecedented way.
So the Cold War corroborates the experience of the 20th century,
namely that modern Europe needs a sort of superior part of the continent from its own self destructive forces.
The crucial the crucial question, therefore, is what about Europe's peace and security after the end of the Cold War?
Other Europeans today capable to get along with themselves without perpetual?
Are they capable of controlling the tendencies of self-destruction destruction?
Today's Europe convinced to resemble a Europe of 1914 in the possibly fatal way?
That brings me to our last key element that is the theory of path dependency.
After 1945, Western Europeans choose a path to protect them from, so to speak, the ghosts of the past.
And I will recall that this was a Western tradition.
I mean, the whole history of European integration was the best western project championed and popularised by the United States at the beginning,
at least. And when? Divides Ukraine.
The road to us first was already paved and tricky of US political science and came into being in 1980 in 1993,
exactly when this old Western narrative was obsolete.
And that is one of the great ironies of European history that in exactly that moment when the European Union,
the European Union, was came into being because to some extent, at least so obsolete.
So nevertheless, after the 18th 1989,
the community that was formed made it possible to give the new post-communist Europe a structure that went beyond national equal terms.
So we have to ask, has the European Union itself?
And what role is indeed into the role of the petrol the Europeans left before 1914 and
after the 1980s has this something the crucial transformation of the Europeans to impose
or in the transition to a sort of collective self control in the most successful attempt
of the Europeans to impose a binding set of rules which protects against themselves.
And this should not be underestimated. The EU, with its strict principles of democracy, human rights and protection of minorities,
has achieved strong integrity of the supply of peacekeeping results.
So for a quarter century,
who in his attitude towards traditional powers were not capable of that is to overcome the security forces and to pacify every continent.
The present, of course, and that was something we were talking about yesterday and today the situation is much more complicated and ambivalent,
and we have a clear trend towards the rationalisation of politics.
But on the other hand, there is a mechanism in place which I would like to call the path dependency of European integration.
Of course, the General Council must be very brief on this narrative.
If you like this element of path dependency contains a decisive element, which is the European states and peoples no well recognised.
Time and again, that it would be much more expensive and costly to leave the path that would move on it, albeit laboriously.
And in this respect, to some degree,
this continuous muddling through that by no means corresponds to the great goals of the European citizens that is involved in some of these pictures,
of course, and there is indeed a narrative of trade offs and the reverse is welcome this morning.
So the question now is we are facing crucial choices.
Europe's crisis is undeniable, but it could prove that at the end of the day, the Europe European path,
as laborious as it is, is the least costly for European states and people of the world.
That's OK. But I mean, even in Britain, it cannot be ruled out that the new Democratic majority will come to the conclusion in the months to come.
And in my opinion,
this is really a historic test on the question of how strong this path dependency has been established in Europe in the case of Britain since 1973.
So Britain might discover that it is much less burdensome to accept membership in
the EU as laboriously as it is than to escape to the open seat since there are much.
I run into big focus on Europe in the 20th century.
The first one to tell about going from 1914 to 2049 to the second long, cold rollercoaster from 1952, when I finished this at the end of 2017,
when I was in Germany recently, someone asked me why I'd undertaken this laborious task of writing these two big volumes.
And I think the expectation was that, I guess the philosophical reason for doing this thing or €10,
it would be a personal narrative for why I've chosen to write these books.
So I think it was, and despite what I just said, I wrote them because the publisher ask me to.
Yeah, I've done what was meant to be one volume that turned into two.
So it was indeed a long process of trying to explain the history of Europe in the 20th century in the first instance to myself.
The title of the second volume is interesting because with the so rollercoaster, with the metaphor, a roller coaster,
what I wanted to do was to turn away from the West European perspective, which is effectively of post-war European history as a success story.
And by looking intensively and intensively at Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe,
Balkans and so many Europe Mediterranean area, and not just to the EU,
I wanted to show that Europe was in fact a Europe with a lot of movements and some crises of ups and downs of here and there some movement of a whole.
So that was the way I decided to use this as imperfect metaphor, a rollercoaster.
Incidentally, the suggestion came from a German friend of mine who were talking about possible titles for this second,
Williams said, What sort of possible? What's that in English?
I said Rollercoaster, and she said, Well, but it is what it was like after 1950 and not a straight line, as I think.
So sometimes I see no reason for a last decade to be the case in West Germany, but rather the ups and downs and loss of movement of the Americas,
however, of what are the different types of they've called it the global age.
It's a weak society in many ways, but it also encapsulates nonetheless one of the main themes of this century.
Because whereas the first one was about war, so Panopto,
the second volume in Europe in the seven decades since 1950 has a lot of things right through it.
And it's quite one of the difficulties of coming to a Typekit is actually the fact that it is so different in its development of the global age,
at least suggests that in this period, globalisation was a significant factor, which in fact does run through the book Increasing Globalisation.
But secondly about Europe in this period, it comes dependence upon liberal forces in a way that they haven't been before.
So in this way, older or less trendy in the global age also is quite a valuable thing to write in the history of my own era.
In the same lawyer, I was born in 1943, so by writing most of my own lifetime, as I say, poses its own novelties and its own challenges.
And so we try to make the history of the EEC EU interests.
One of the greatest challenges that I wasn't sure, but in watching this and writing the book of this sort,
the historian has to impose structures on the book on.
These structures are largely not shaped shaped by narratives,
but shaped by developments which are often in personal development, such as economic development,
social changes, demographic changes and also for political and cultural changes in which narrative obviously does play a role and personality.
When you think of the role played by this country, by Margaret Thatcher, for instance,
but much more importance for warm personalities strikes structured as more severe than any other single individual that has got shot.
And here you have with the the difficulties, the first ones are fitting in the role of personality into all sorts of structural,
indeterminate structural determinants which actually shape the history of Europe.
When we come to the question of narrative it poses, the question to me is whether a narrative is is causal or whether it's his a.
Reaction to developments, so many of these changes, of course, in my view and notice that caused by things, Bill Norris says.
But then narratives reshape themselves to accord with the changes that are taking place.
One example the obviously the Brexit narrative here take back control.
Brexit of the take back control fits into all sorts of narratives of British or actually English exceptionalism,
which have a lengthy history but didn't play any significant role until the crisis decade of 2008 to thousand 18.
So some time where you have led the double crisis of the Africa finance and Economics Typekit polarised stance of politics.
And then on top of that, you have the migration crisis, which I don't remember hearing mentioned so far,
but it's such a fundamental significance for present European narratives.
The migration crisis top of the US, which then shaped the way in which the Brexit debate could follow in this country
to take back control of what's harking back to notions of British exceptionalism,
including the role of the Second World War on the British view about the Civil War so different from us,
the joke of self-evident but also practically every other continental European country.
So to this extent, the the narrative was able to slot into things which themselves haven't been determined by narrative,
but by things external to narrative and.
So in the book, What I deal with as really come to the I also deal with my time to transition from to between two periods of insecurity,
say I start with it along with the existential insecurity of the Cold War, the early Cold War period.
I'm old enough to remember that insecure until the 1950s and early 60s when we did
think that the nuclear war breakouts anymore us particularly the Cuba crisis,
but then moved to a new era of insecurity, which we're going through now.
I think this this is a new insecurity composed of economic deregulation, globalisation with all its pluses and minuses,
communications revolution, which is obviously a vital part of this new form of insecurity.
And instead of unipolar international relations,
which you thought would take place up to 1990 if we had multipolar international
relations with all the great complexities under increased dangers from,
I see this as the the results of a three four process.
Just to mention, this is an economic major economic transformation in the period between the 1970s and early 1980s.
Political transformation at the upon the events of 1989, two months ago and then the communications revolution of the 1990s and 2000s.
Of these three transitions, I think it brought about the levels of insecurity that we see in so many walks of life today on the pivotal position.
This, I think, is of the 1970s and early 1980s.
We're now first, of course, with where this crisis leads us in the crisis that we've been facing in Europe since 2008,
since the beginning of the financial crisis. And this poses the major issues, of course, as we all know for the future of the EU.
My own what is a very committed pro-European?
This is that I think the EU needs significant change to continue in the long term.
But I can't see how well significant change from the original. That's the question of the future.
I got.