So have been given this broad topics of Europe as seen from the outside.
And it wasn't an easy job approach to any contradictory reasons, one because of course, Europe has been the dominant historical presence.
But surprisingly, particularly India is actually makes a little self conscious reflection on Europe.
That's something I do want to talk about in a second. Oh gosh.
There's some diplomatic strategic studies writing it, the new free trade agreements and so forth.
Even if you go back very few restrictions, actually what the European experience is, in fact the only one significant one I came across.
And I wonder if you think of it, that it's a literary reference in the spirit of this is the great Hindi writer Damon Varma,
who is one of the guardians of modern Hindi literature.
And he writes about Europe in two different registers states, and I want to begin with those two ministers and then mention three others briefly.
So his first novel way of doing just those days was actually set in the Czech Republic.
It's the only northern first in all that actually set a unifying adventure.
And interestingly, it's it's Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia,
and he sees Europe through the history of Czechoslovakia, which it said was the interesting choice.
And the central theme of that novel is that the history of Europe.
Recent history of the early stages of trauma is the second of the Holocaust and a lot of the argument.
Northern Israel about how yet in accessible experience of the Holocaust is treating the protagonist.
One of this is actually this is true the occupation of Iraq, which she writes, called another another knowledge.
And it's extraordinary, thought God, as he travels across Europe.
The dominant image of modern Europe is a series of successive traumas Holocaust invasion of different countries,
particularly Czechoslovakia boardwalk bombings.
And at one a.m. and says, look, this might provide the opportunity for some kind of a shared universalism beacon on suffering.
But he what he finds extraordinary is despite the fact that trauma and suffering is a universal experience,
each nationality understands it through its own particular historic concerns and interests.
And that's the paradox he actually plays on that.
This history of suffering in cricket Central Europe, which could be a stupid idea, actually doesn't become one.
And he doesn't do like, you know, every group is kind of concerned about that particular trauma and how easy it is to
actually render other people's traumas invisible or just enjoy it and stop us from this.
This paradox of a kind of a potential history of common suffering, actually not translating into a kind of common interest.
The second major strategy to read more right about here, which is much later in his career.
So the last days of his life,
and he actually took a much more conservative tone and he writes a book called India Europe and it's in a very Hegelian frame.
It's kind of the idea of Europe and the idea of India, but.
With the bombing, you just said it's not this the potential ethical power of Trump, the dominant attitude to Europe is resentment,
and the resentment is that Europe has colonised intellectual space and in that sense, the colonisation still continues.
There's no thinking outside of Europe because Chakrabarti can say provincialism Europe what he want,
but Europe still needs a reference point in 24 to internalising it.
And that's the resentment whereby she talks about it.
And for him, the history then becomes the contrast between Europe and India, Europe and Asia branches that.
For Europe, history's about a possible future.
So the best Europe is the Europe. For Asia, it's about recovery and easiest sense, right?
So the best idea was the idea of fostering in the conceptual sense, right?
But. His critique is, in a sense or that you do towards Europe, is that the colonisation of, in a sense intellectual discourse still continues,
and that resentment is something that in a sense constitutes that engagement even when you don't acknowledge it.
So this trauma, this resentment.
The target sister, which you see a lot of I think in the last 20, 25 years is this kind of strange combination of hope and schadenfreude about her.
And it has to go back to the question president asked in the slightest, which is for most Indian intellectuals.
Europe was identified with inventing the political competition state,
and the Indian nationalist movement was very peculiar because most of its dominant figures were deeply suspicious of information.
Steve Garvey. Even happiness in his own kind of sort of strange way that there is something
about this political form that is not quite appropriate for countries like India.
And the fascination of the project of European integration was OK, has the imagination of a new political fault?
That overcomes that you should state now. You know, you heard yesterday the nation state was Chewbacca, but he's a definition student.
The schadenfreude thing was in order to do that to Europe would have to become like India.
The political future of Europe is India, which is 20 different languages.
You have the problem with what's the common language English of a cultural sensibility that actually guns,
which they get complexes is in daily life, quite natural around ambiguity in some senses.
You don't ask questions like who civilisation? This is the Hindu, Christian, Islamic, Western, you name it.
Right. And Europe will have to actually construct it, said best.
Such fascination of the EU is that it is that grand experiment in inventing a political form that actually.
In the ICU in 1947. Right? So that's that that's the point.
On the other hand, I think for India, in a sense, Europe is the future of India.
Because the team hadn't invented in 1947, there was any kind of a common market, right?
So in that sense, there's a kind of crossing of these two different political imaginations where in the political cultural sense,
Europe begins to look more like an electronic sense. India begins to look more like, you know.
So this is the moment to hold. Then there's the moment of seise, the moment of cynicism comes from this fact, which is in European debates,
there's often a great deal of investment in saying that Europe is not just the invention of political form,
it's also the invention of a new conception of justice.
And it's interesting both protected the right latch on to the European form for their own reasons.
How hijackings think this is going to be a new and propia Harvard law?
Students think it's going to be a social democratic thing,
and it's interesting to see this kind of identification of a political force with a substantive project of justice.
In its outward projection, Europe is what is projected itself as this social Democratic copper machine project, right?
This is the environmental project. This is the anti-American capitalist monster project.
This is the alternative to American Empire project, and that has been the European set presentation abroad.
And the moment of cynicism comes from the fact that this story is completely unbelievable to anybody outside of Europe on issues like capital,
mobility and globalisation.
Turns out, Europe was actually more American than America on the virtues of excessive capitalism and finance and credit guns out.
Europe was more American in America, even under a shorten intervention as recently as Libya turns out.
Europe is more American in America. So this construction that what holds Europe together is some distinctive economic and
political ethos that comes with this pretty song invites a great deal of scepticism,
and I spoke to a large number of diplomats ready for this conference.
It's the one thing that they actually find deeply sanctimonious about.
You know that the gap between the representation and what the actual reality of Europe is.
So that's the cynicism that there's a story being told that is actually a kind of implausible.
And finally, just to register, you might say, which is, I think the current register, the register of indifference.
And this just has a particular form, which is to say that is Europe actually going to be an actor on the world stage.
It is a significant presence. It's India's largest trading partner, ActionScript its EU as a whole.
So in that sense, it's a very visible presence. But.
Because he does not have a unified foreign policy and most diplomats to think of France and Germany.
I think that Orthodoxy said he wanted to speak to Europe.
I think still still holds true,
but very frankly deep scepticism that Europe in this new political agency can actually act as a blind historical agent in
relation to the United States or arguably even Russia and particularly China of sucking doesn't have the military unit to study.
He doesn't have a strategic we should study certainly doesn't have a bandwidth to be able to engage
in wake up to the fact that the distribution of the powers in the world has been substantially.
And in that sense, I think, you know, particularly in India,
I think most people think America is miles ahead of Europe in actually thinking deeply about how the world has actually changed.
But more importantly, besides,
how do you assess the lack of an energy bar that makes it a difficult thing for me to act in a certain sense of unreality?
And I just end with this point is that yesterday we talked a lot about sort of Europe as a kind of antidote to American capitalism,
things like privacy and the power of Facebook and big companies like, you know what, the rest of the world thinks of that.
These are very good arguments.
But if you ask the question, is it going to be more exciting for people, young people to engage with a country that thinks of regulation?
Or is it going to be more exciting for young people to engage with a country that says which are the
countries that are going to innovate to invent the internet of the future experiment with A.I.?
Or in fact, I think the answer is unfortunately, it's actually going to be much more relaxed that in a sense, this is something that, you know,
it's it's it's it's it's a form of virtue signalling,
but it actually doesn't quite confront the hard realities of technological power ships that are actually doing this.
So in that sense, the fear that Europe is actually becoming a little bit more inventive or to
turn the full circle back when he said at the beginning of the 19th century,
it doesn't matter what China thinks. I mean, the danger. It doesn't matter what you do things.
So that's very much it's it's a real pleasure to be here.
I mean, lots of people have said that it's really true.
And to them, it's also challenging the massive because of the presentations that have to see this light.
And it was hard talking to it's even less sexy that that has been said before because I'm dealing with the image of the European Union,
all this technical thing. This is some research I have done for some years and covering a series of countries.
And in the end, I mean, I completely with with the publications.
The latest of which is was in 2014, which means that I have to update to a certain extent on what has been done.
Meanwhile, my others in the field.
Fortunately though, there is a wide and very large research group, but in the U.S. led by Intelligibly Mike in Holland,
and they have been very productive and a few other studies that have been going on for some years.
But what was the context within which this field of research started, which is a rather recent one, is about 15 years.
The current US, with precisely that of the idea of the distinctiveness of the European Union,
was those years in which we were talking ourselves within Europe that the EU
is so distinctive its normative collar is a soft follow US civilian power,
many types of adjective ized power so that we have so not.
And also the EU documents were full of this reference to this type of set for a presentation,
always mentioning the rules, the historical roots of this distinctiveness.
Now, of course, this also meant to better power. And so the debate went on inside.
At a certain point, someone started to think, Well, let's see whether the other's body argument and what they think about the European Union,
because this is also relevant in order to understand whether the EU is is perceived to be legitimate, is perceived,
set to be credible and hence has more chances to have an impact outside in this transformative power.
Europe, the oxygen to us, the outside.
So the literature started very rather fabricated to the bulk of this is very systematic in the way in which data are collected.
Other research is more focussed on a specific country,
so it goes deeper into the history of the country's territory, the storytelling of the in the country, et cetera.
But only now, regardless of that of the methods that were used and even the actors.
So whether it was a state actor or was not allowed to enter Confucian negotiations at the WTO, at the World Bank or at the UN General Assembly,
more or less we can identify a set of results that can be very, very synthetically summarised.
And then what we do in a very short one lie. So as summarise that in 2014, and then I thought, Well, something must have changed.
A lot must have changed because of the three crisis that the European Union has gone through in the recent years of the economic crisis.
That led to a view to the euro crisis, the so-called refugee crisis and then Brexit.
Brexit is the fragmentation prise, the prise itself the ideal of Europe as being a will that go always in one direction without going backwards.
So my expectation was the damage being done to the perception, the perception of the European Union now having to leave some of this later to,
I guess, I hope most of the literature that has been produced.
Meanwhile, I came to the conclusion and that is what I will argue that this is only partially true.
And the reason why this is only partially true is because the damage the assumes that the image before was a positive one.
Why? To the contrary, there were many elements of weakness that were detected and mentioned,
also in previous research that has been seen in a simple way, overcome by the more recent causes.
And the second thing I want to claim is that contrary to what I expected,
the crises of those that have made sense to me, the biggest damage is not the economic crisis.
It's not the euro crisis. And sorry to say here it is not to blow the Brexit crisis,
but is the refugee crisis and for what it represents in terms of the values of the European Union that has all.
This projected itself as a value driven actor, and second, in terms of internal solidarity,
because the internal lack of solidarity in the case of the refugee crisis was probably even more striking,
the that that was manifesting itself in the case of the economic crisis and the management of the Greek crisis.
So this is where I will go. What were the funding that have really just squeezed because I have so many help in my time?
First of all, the first important thing to notice is that the EU is largely unknown.
So we think that we go abroad and everybody knows about the European Union.
But this is, of course, naive to think people don't know about the European Union inside Europe.
So why should you expect the people in Brazil or South Africa really know and tell the Europeans?
So they tend to mix up Europe and the European Union is very also interesting.
In many incidents in Russia, the high percentage of respondents need to know whether Russia was part or not of the European Union.
I don't know whether it changed after the Ukraine crisis, but those were the results of the.
So that's the first thing. So do not expect that people rely on the European Union really knowing what you are talking about.
Secondly, I mean, I'm talking about the large public.
Of course, we have the elites on us, but of course, the elites are more knowledgeable and in general, it tends to be appreciated.
It's not as guy who, with exception to a certain extent of the Arab countries where the the traditionally the perception that has being more
called very limited media coverage limited to very specific issues that are relevant to the country in which we are,
of which we are talking about.
And the reason for this was very, very young and was told by a journalist told Al Jazeera, interviewing one of the reports this one on Al Jazeera.
And they tried to have a for some months.
They're trying to have a report on Europe. Prime time and they had to shot it.
It was, they said, the European Union is difficult to tell.
It tends to be boring. There is. There are no sexy stories to tell about the European Union.
So that was prior to the crisis that have made it more attractive.
But so it's difficult to sell and it's difficult and still particularly attractive for the old story.
So there are limits to media coverage.
Also, most of the reports are not through direct journalistic that are present in Brussels, but it's more through press agencies.
So they tend to be very standardised in terms of the message that that is delivered in general is not that visible.
I mean, I expected that development cooperation being such an amount of money that the European
Union and the member states spent in countries which make the European Union more visible.
This one is very interesting to note.
The 70s there discovered also through recent interviews in South Africa, that what is more visible locally is the agent that is using this morning.
There would have to implement the project as frequently is a national agent.
So this is in South Africa. The agenda came more to the discourse was Gee, I'd say that the German gets it and they're using EU money.
But what becomes visible is the national face.
The perception tends to be in general, very much influenced by historical memories that we were seeing for.
And colonialism is new. One is the future that plays the most relevant role.
Also in the sense of the shaping the sort of colonialist image of the European Union in the sense of being the overlapping with the colonial
country that we are more knowledgeable of so socially shaped perceptions of the perceptions of the global order and more contingent variables.
The personal physician, the type of relations with the European Union, the type of interaction in general.
There are a series of rather positive images, but they are all objective ized or they are old,
but with the vast following the first and is shared by all it was that of an economic giant.
But this economic giant recognised by all people interviewed is lacking leadership.
So there is a lot quieter potential of leadership which the European Union is unable to use because of an inconsistency in policies,
because of control, because a area of the. Divides adapted to the inside,
which makes it also not flexible because once an agreement is making so it is very difficult that they can change this agreement is a negotiation,
some compromise that is and also subordinated by the two other actors in general,
even when it is considered that if this is the second point as a beacon of multilateralism,
the most frequent criticism here is that it tends to have a patronising attitude towards the obvious and hear
the interviews at the levels of the negotiations for the economic partnership agreements that Edstrom doing,
for instance, are very telling in this respect. This criticism of being patronising, dominating, not listening and teaching is very frequent.
You always find that in interviews with the leaders in the other parts of the world,
particularly not in the US, but in the south, in that part of the world as a model of regional integration.
Again, introducing the African Union demands the fact that the EU is trying to export to set an idea of regional integration,
which does not take into consideration the local context.
So it gets patronising when it comes to democracy promotion and relegation.
It's also recognised to have a role, but always with about double standards.
So it's never something that is fully bright.
How did the three clauses make a difference where they had enhanced some of the criticisms that were already there,
so internal fragmentation became more clear.
Interviews in China China is a very, very keen observer of the European Union that they need to level intellectual levels.
Lack of coherence and patronising attitude became particularly clear in the case of the management of migration and its like,
and I will spend a few words here. They reconstitute as a mediator, also with notice in the case of mediation,
in the case of Ukraine and the recent analysis of the Eastern Partnership countries and perceptions in the Eastern Partnership country.
Tell the story of a potential leading actor that is not leading and is capable of performing
a mediating role in the job of the EU as an economic power has been weakened at the beach,
but not to the extent that I expected. According to the research that is available, of course, crisis is very interesting literature.
Obama's recent change of use in Australia tell the story of the military that has not been compromised that much amongst the need.
It's also, to a certain extent, the case of China publication of think tanks in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine tell the same story.
What are the images? The most damage that is in the area of the EU was normative power when it comes to respect of human rights.
And here, the perception that has been protected into the mega region is particularly telling
and the both at the level of NGOs Agios and and at the level of governments.
In the case of AIDS prevention organisations and NGO global NGOs indeed interested and says local NGOs.
The criticism is the greatest criticism has to deal with the lack of respect of human rights for
the migrants and attention to the local context when externalising migration and borders control.
And in the case of governments, the greatest criticism is one of patronising attitude into requesting policies that was made.
Aim is to control the borders outside of the European borders, so this external analyzation of migration,
management and border control linked to securitisation is very much damaging the image of the
European Union and its absolutely making not credible the EU as a normative power and anything that.
And I want to reiterate what has been said before, it's a pleasure and an honour to be here.
Thank you very much for inviting me. I want to say something personal first that I'm proud of and going to address obvious reasons.
I'm an academic. I'm a historian of the 19th century Middle East, and this is what I would possibly be talking about.
But I'm also for lack of a better word than activist.
I was lucky enough to end up in my home country, Egypt, when the uprising happened in 2011, and I found myself in the thick of it.
So I have something to say about you in these two capacities, so maybe I'll stop by my academic one.
I prepared to with nothing very significant, just some pictures and I'd love to be talking about.
I actually studied here, my Ph.D., my nephew was here.
Technically, it's Peters. But objectively at that time and in the middle centre here, we had a project and the project was in a sense,
how to listen to you because that was the paradigm of the dominant paradigm.
When I came 25 years ago, there was this famous 1798 deadline.
But upon cutting spending like the printing press and the first lady just coming to the region via the French,
and that became a very dominant paradigm.
And the question was how to listen to it.
And uh, a lot of the scholarship was taking place about how to challenge the notion that enlightenment, but you meant enlightenment.
And it was the spread of enlightenment.
Ideas of liberalism and the rule of law has been there was reported first as a trickle, then esteem that a flood.
If you were working on the 20th century other than the 19th century,
the paradigm shifted a bit and it's the paradigm of both realism and and conspiracy.
The question was, in a sense, how to make sense of this amazing dramatic transformation of the map and into the Middle East, the Middle East itself.
Being a European coinage, the term and the countries that these borders were drawn by European military and police and officials and in in the West,
resulting in up to the First World War after the press conference and the establishment of the bandits,
resulting either in the French state of violence or in a place like Syria,
or the more subtle but equally disturbing one of indirect form of finding someone who can serve the interests and to own,
as it's been called empire by a treaty.
This is a particularly interesting picture because this is Spicer who was supposed to be king of Syria, who ended up across the street.
Syria ended up being king of Iraq. And here he is, put on the throne with the British national anthem playing in the background.
So this is a very familiar story in the Middle East.
This is the story of Sykes-Picot is a story of conspiracy, and it is literally the household sites.
People is not an academic jargon that the mess we're in now is because of what Britain and France did to us back then.
And it's this the form of conspiracy.
Now, if you're doing intellectual history, we had this very powerful paradigm to cope with,
and that one is to be performed in the different age, which is the intellectual history of the so-called Panopto.
We haven't been in the songs basically measured against the European yardstick or what European
yardstick and economically it was the paradigm of the integration in the world economy.
This is a perfectly famous study.
Now, of course, since then, the field has been completely radicalised and because mostly of postcolonial studies, has been completely put forth.
And Europe has been centred. But I think a lot of the scholarship, because of its interest in this entering Europe has lost sight of the colony.
Yet somehow they want to share with you maybe a couple of interesting angles
through which people have been approaching and revisiting these questions.
One is this business about what I've seen in Egypt and the French, and to actually study what this printing press was thinking.
And of course, it was not. Printing will tell you it was printing military communities.
This was the technology used for imperial plus purpose.
And then there's now a huge amount of literature on this moment, as I'm sure many of you know, because this is something, for example,
books is as working on Skip this and I might want to work on you but know intellectual ideas, but the scientific ones is interesting.
This is the founder of the medical school in Egypt is the beginning of modern medical science.
This is a prolific guy himself and his literature about what he does.
This is your typical white, enlightened European men coming to spread science to a bigot, to the superstitious religious society.
Islam is the only obstacle to modern science, and his goal is to halve how to harness Islam.
Response for the lack of time will just skip this.
I actually was interested in his students and how they think about science, but also how they think of him.
And so I worked on some of his students and then how they understand modern science.
And for them, you know, this whole dichotomy between modern science, especially the pro-peace argument that Islam stood in the way of dissection.
And that is why we've not really found the proper modern medical establishment was completely bogus as far as they're concerned.
It's a dichotomy that exists only in his mind.
There are Muslims who and who they saw no compunction whatsoever in opening up bodies and practising B.S.,
and they ended up actually dissecting his own language rather than have it.
And that was the problem rather than I understand this part with an interesting field of work.
Now again to visit is literally thought argument, which is the dissertation that I just read a couple of days ago in Harvard.
These are two famous travellers to Europe in the 19th century.
The one on the left is very, very famous for us. He's the main translator.
He went to Europe in the ninth in the 1830s. He ended up coming back to Egypt,
founding the School of Translation and spreading specifically French legal ideas and the principle of separation of powers into Egypt,
a major intellectual force politically and and intellectually.
But the scholarship now about him is is,
is that of someone with a deep sense of unity of context as opposed to the guy on the right who's now being pre-selected.
He also travelled to, but not to Paris. He wasn't just a pitas, but not to learn French, but to teach Arabic as a professor of Arab interlocutors on.
Less than four point for this one eastern one from Hungary and Russia.
And lo and behold, we now discover that there is many jobs, including a Europe that is trying to catch up with another Europe.
And this guy on the right understood all of this and his resolve to the outcome of his
scholarship and his writing now is something much more complex about these different rules.
It's not simply an imperial Europe, but a divided Europe and Europe,
meaning different things and read in different ways by different actors in the region.
I think I have four more minutes to be generous.
Let's get. I.
And with the comment for me, as I said, I ended up in Egypt personally.
There's a picture I took on the 25th of January, the day that finally happened.
And I remember the weeks and months later we were approached by a very well-intentioned European and American experts in transition to democracy,
the ecologists advising on how to transition to democracy.
And they kept on saying, You have to do the station. You have to get rid of the old Pluto and you have to.
And yet we know all of this, but it's more different here.
It's difficult. Yeah, we know. We understand we've been there before.
We understand that Hungary was different from eastern Germany and East Germany,
and so we understand the argument that we admit that we've heard that before.
We said, no, it's we are not another colour revolution. It's this sense here.
It's long 1989. So they would say, OK, maybe 1848.
There's no law enforcement effort, so it's a different paradigm.
Please listen to us. And one of the main differences is that we do not have the European Union to which we want to join.
We have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that is the main power of the action of the despotism in the region with its enormous financial power.
We have Israel, we have the United States and we have you to deal with.
You are opposing a huge amount of damage and and distortion, and that was a very difficult message to say.
But the main thing to they want to end up with is that we ended up obviously discovering that we are talking
to the wrong Europeans and the other Europeans who he ended up dictating the terms of the politicians,
not the human rights activists and the journalists and the academics who were concerned, as we discovered,
like what we've been talking about over the past two days with migration and and the migration crisis just to.
Yeah, I've been following, according to the Independent.
There is now a budget to a negotiated budget, becoming one for the European Commission 2021 to 2027.
That is a proposal to increase the amount of money devoted to border control from 15 billion euros to 35 billion euros.
That shows the scale, and the issue is that we activists, human rights activists, academics and of course,
we have no say in this, but that this course is now manipulated and very cleverly by our leaders,
especially by someone like Sisi who is basically telling Merkel and me and my goal don't push for openness or democracy in my country.
Because if you're free, if you're afraid of what happened with Syria, just imagine the scale and the flood of refugees out of my country.
So effectively, he's holding us ransom, plus Egyptians to undertake his own reforms and of course, reforms, quote unquote.
And of course, the Europeans are getting along with with the last bit.
Uh, to in a sense, uh, the dispute broke up with regards the military might of you.
Uh, yes, maybe you does not have a unified military policy, but you're not always appealing to the huge supply of arms to this region.
Um, the call to arms imports off by Middle Eastern countries increased 87 percent over the past four years.
Uh, in this period. Four of the largest importers of weapons in the world are from the region Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Iraq.
And while the United States, this is a big supply of arms all over the world, Europe, not the EU, but European powers became independent fact France,
Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the Netherlands are inching in collectively to replace the United States as the main supplier worldwide.
But with regard to the region, it's actually, for example, in Egypt now.
France is the main supply of arms for Egypt, not the United States, despite the 25 to 40 years of of of.
So French arms exports to the region over the past four years has increased by 260 percent.
German exports 125 percent. Italian 75 percent.
British 30 percent. When they do this, they turn not only apply to violations of human rights violations by all of these Middle Eastern despots,
but they also violate their own priority of border control.
Because what do these weapons do?
They end up being used in wars that cause more and more displacements of population, creating the problem that Europe wants to maintain.
So it is. I mean, we've given up on human rights.
We've given up talking to Europeans about human rights and democracy. We we thought the we too are concerned with stability.
If you are concerned with your own stability. Stop sending these arms to these disputes.
There's nothing called enlightened despotism. That's a contradiction in terms.
These cases and the essays, and that they are a huge cause of instability on the long run to the region.
So the problem that I would end with this is that it's not the conspiracy.
Oh, so it's pretty cool what we are now being ruled by.
It's a collusion. We are. It's a conspiracy, but also the collusion between European, uh, players and local despots.
Thank you very much.