Thank you all for coming back.
The last 15 minutes of this marathon, I feel like a picture of the people at the end of the London Marathon crawling across the line,
but it's also been an intellectual, very important and amazing exercise in battery gear.
We had lots of art and music and theatre, and I'm afraid the image that came to mind of the two day progressed was some of you will know that Banksy,
the graffiti off his murder, the into which as soon as it had been sold for a vast sum of money, started shredding itself.
And the theatrical image I have indicated was that Junko Jones had trained for 48 hours without any wine watching,
while all of self-congratulatory ideas about the EU are shredded in front of his eyes.
So Europe within those weeks divided boring. I'm attracted to different importance of deceiving, mendacious, patronising and practical.
And that was only yesterday evening and this morning it got even worse.
A continent which doesn't have equality before the law, which encourages refugees to cheat in the name of law and lie in the name of truth.
An example to India, but an example of how keeping refugees out.
And then in my book, worst of all, the story that how to make progress very hard about war and arms exports to Middle Eastern dictators.
Arms to be used to kill their own people, all their neighbours, and send more refugees across the Mediterranean.
So this was a rather sobering, elaborate sequence.
However, now in our long sessions out of this gloomy cacophony,
a wonderful politician is about to emerge and to give us this problem, and we have two wonderful speakers nothing to do about it.
And that little girl, they will speak for 10 15 minutes and then we'll have a discussion,
which is as much about computers and reflections as about to direct procurement method.
Thank you. Thank you. One point Smith told me that I would be tasked with trying to create a polyphony out of the cacophony of public lights.
And so I will not attempt that.
But I do want to start by just taking stock with with all of you for the moment and the place that we've had this conversation.
The moment is, you know, in the middle of the Brexit debate, the also two weeks,
just two weeks ahead of the EU elections, which will be a big test for the European project.
And and it's also, you know, just in the course of these two days news that some users have broken.
Of course, there were local elections in England and and we found out that some junior Matteo Salvini of the who stands out as the single
most powerful far-Right politician in Europe today because he essentially runs the governments of a founding member states.
He travels to Hungary and match with Viktor Orban, the self-proclaimed champion of liberalism, just just two days ago.
And something else is happening.
We learnt that Viktor Orban himself is going to travel to Washington to meet with Donald Trump and precisely on the 13th of May,
so that's roughly 12 days before the elections.
What signals that sends also from America? And on the 13th of May, I got an email inviting me to this and I won't be able to go.
But in London, attempting to close the door on his own name don't know if this means familiar to the theories.
He's the thinker on nationalism, which I heard a lot about when I was in Washington in February,
and it's been described by several people who know the Washington football much better than I do to us as a thinker that the people inside the Bush,
the Trump administration read rather intensively these days,
and he's going to be the first time in London and getting a conference on the 13th of May with,
I'd say, hardline Brexiteers attending and some Polish peace and justice support, apparently and another.
Such networks and I wanted just to, you know, just set the stage for the moment where in the title of that conference is Europe at a crossroads,
the future of Europe, national identity and the virtues of nationalism.
So that's that's the moment in which we're having we're having this, this this conversation.
So I don't know if you've anticipated all of this, the thing when you get organised,
everything, but it's certainly a very timely debate and it's a very rich debate.
I thought I'd give you a little I thought I'd send you a little postcards from these moments of the last two days,
just snippets of things that struck me that were said and perhaps to, you know, keep the conversation later on.
So I jotted down some of the, you know, some quotes from various people.
This is not an attempt to summarise everything that somebody said, nor is it an attempt to summarise the whole, the whole conference, the whole forum.
But I hope, I hope I'll be faithfully, you know, restitute in some of what was said.
So we started with a cacophony and you told us at the start of the conference that this
would start with the cacophony and we would try to move towards a listening symphony.
And so the things that struck me, I'm just going to quotes a few people and again, I'm not quoting everybody.
Catherine Bernard from from the New York Times described a car mechanic in
Strasbourg who crosses the border 100 times a year over a hundred times a year.
And he was saying Europe here is for now and it is miraculous.
She also mentioned in Saxony farmers who say that Europe of the EU is much more about wolves than it does about the local people.
And he said, Yes, we are the endangered species.
So right there we have immediately two very, very different polarised versions of the visible, Hoffman told us.
Very interesting from her studies that Europeans do care very much about the project,
and they know more than we think about Europe, and they pay attention to European politics.
They have high expectations that eu, you, the EU and its politics, which is interesting to note on up to those elections later this month.
They're not always very happy with the reality. That's the problem.
Daniel, I'm going to quote you because you're you're you described this very interesting study by Chatham House and what I took.
One of the things I took away is that the tribes, the tribes that we, the media and part of the media like to make so many headlines about, honestly,
necessarily always the representative of the state of public opinion in Europe and in particular,
the tribe called EU rejects that China makes a lot of headlines.
But in the end, that survey you mentioned, it's it represents 14 percent of people across the continent.
Parts of Europe is up for grabs. And the widest reaction is not.
Rejection can do just hesitancy. But and the Gisela Stuart said she mentions the McCullen St. Collins photo exhibit to the tape gallery in London,
which I really encourage you to go see.
And she mentioned the photo of a young boy in 1961 in East Berlin looking over the Wall, and she said, This is my story.
Whatever happens with Brexit, I won't let that story take it from me.
But that was interesting. I'm Jewish love, Hungary warned us.
The Western liberal culture has become disconnected from reality.
Man is a communal being said. The individual has earned such a position that the community is left to ignore or disparage Slavic Slovenia.
The self-described is a good cold said, but he listed amongst the amongst the key accomplishments of the EU, she said.
Independence, the safeguarding of independence. And he asked us separately what's NATO's supply to the EU?
At dinner, we were all I think moved extremely moved by Peter Opposers recollections of his childhood in the Austria of the 1930s.
Witnessing the Anschluss, which marked the end of the Second World for him and to him, the beginning of World War Two,
those were stories of Europe and we were 20 like windows into a tortured changing shift.
And reinvented continent. I'll go on for for a few more minutes with quotes Andrew Harrell,
who was one of the two or three people asleep in the room on the first day, who voted to put up his hand to say, I'm a federalist.
He told us early on, and that goes to the conversation that the debate that we've just had,
we've just heard very, very stimulating one who said there was an internal interest aspects to our discussion.
He reminded us that much of Europe's narrative has been in relation to the other.
Europe is no longer in the middle of the world. CALIPSO Nicolaides us asked us.
We all have our stories. Just thinking about the Europe from other team presentation.
We all have our stories. But how do they connect? Europe is a bubble.
Yes, but it does have some simultaneous translation.
And she mentioned the importance of feeling recognised, which I really take away as an important thing.
Quarrelling, calling amongst each other amongst ourselves, even throwing insults of each other is also a way to know each other.
So there's a silver lining to contestation since it is so common.
The singer, who spoke in the presence of a space identity Kafka,
the Chinese walls that are not boundaries with mental constructions, boundaries or futile an illusion.
And yet they are vital. She mentions Thomas Monson as the perfect, liminal space, she said.
Half land, half water, like a natural pair of literature, helps establish identity,
and the beauty of literature is also to explore what happens when your identity falls apart.
I go on for a few more minutes with quotes, and Kershaw reminded us of the somewheres versus nowheres narrative,
and she said multiculturalism works in London or Oxford,
whereas where there is natural intellectual mingling, but not in the north of England, where I come from.
Margaret Macmillan told us looking at Europe from the outside helps, helps see confusion.
But let's not create a narrative Europe that is a work in progress.
No single narrative supersedes all the others. Andras Wilson said Europe's crisis is undeniable, but it could prove less damaging than we think.
In particular, if the British decides it's much better to stay and to take to the open seas on sunset,
it's from the House of European History in Brussels said something very important to control emotions.
She said people tend to go to museums to confirm their world view, but that can change the world for you.
The world. You can change just the opposite a museum. If they are made to feel emotion, if they are made to feel empathy.
Michael Schwartz from the Travel Foundation told us about a smart question that his
team asked politicians and peers from various countries rather than asking them,
What's your position on fiscal policy? The question was Why are you a politician?
And I think I think that that really makes sense to really widen the question, you know, what is it being European?
Why or why? And ask any piece or any other question, why are you a European politician?
To came to me from the worlds of theatre told us about losing the plot.
The story means three things where it takes place, where it begins and ends, and what happens.
And she asks us, Europe, one place, one day one is that if you had to choose, what would it be?
And she put it all in place to help us find inspiration.
And the quote was to see the world in a grain of sand. So I checked that, folks.
I found I found the larger, the larger quote, and I'm going to read it because I think it's truthful and this.
This helps us to see the world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.
But then, after all of this came the Timothy Snyder bombshell.
Yes, fable of the wise nation. Europe is a soft was a soft landing for empires and not the result of a wise nation or wise nations.
Having learnt that war is bad. And you told us the trouble with our general narrative about Europe is that not only is it delusional, but it actually.
The narrative of those who say there is a place to go back to after Europe after membership, the nation state says that doesn't exist.
And meanwhile, said empires outside of Europe are waiting, waiting for us to pounce on us.
So it was a brilliant, tense down to Fletcher, not one that everybody agrees on.
Agreed with, I would say. But maybe Timothy Snyder was right on one thing.
Maybe we don't need a narrative. Maybe we need history and common sense politics.
Still, I think I wasn't the only one to be a little bit shaken by this,
but his talked and I felt a little bit like the man he described at the very beginning, saying this man who arrived in Oxford had lost his luggage.
I felt like I was going to be scrambling for my luggage. There were many, many metaphors for friends, as you said.
As you said, some of the carpets, the carpets, music, weaving threads,
a ship sailing in one direction and people on its deck moving in another direction.
The carpet was a poignant metaphor by it, but I am so, so sorry.
And also, she mentioned that the musical metaphor, you know you need a tune you need to know, do you need a Pete Hudson member song?
And so does her very emotional, striking film fulfilment.
I am a Romani woman. I am European. And she said, if we need a new story, then that story has to be about diversity and solidarity.
But I want to throw in another metaphor, which is the fox,
and I'm stealing it from from Tony Jones book post-War, it's right to the beginning of the introduction.
He quotes the great poet who who puts the fox and the hedgehog in the same sentence,
and he says the hedgehogs the hedgehog knows one big thing the fox knows many things.
And I think and until he does this, Europe knows many things.
And perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is, is not so much.
You know, what is what is or what is the sound?
He produces a cacophony. Is it probably for me? Perhaps we have to take stock and ask ourselves, What do we know?
What do we know about ourselves, about this region, this part of the world and its relation to others?
And then, like foxes, maybe we have to us knowing what we know, what can we do and how do we do it?
And that's my takeaway. Thank you very much, method that.
This work. OK. Thank you. Thank you.
I took one at least promising things from your tongue.
Somewhat sombre introduction of setting the stage is where we are now, which is that people in the Trump administration read something.
So that was a positive for me, as positive for me as an American, which sort of leads me to confessing my outsized status.
This has been a day of outsiders and I want to. I'm an American, I'm half British, but I consider myself an American and worse than that.
I study American history. So to say this is not my field, we find it mildly.
But I have been listening to whole conference and I would like to kind of play the hedgehog who values Fox and
try to bring us together some picture of the kinds of stories that we at this conference have told this week.
So perhaps not the stories Europe tells of the stories we have told over these past few days.
And to do that, I'll leave you with them on safe ground for myself with the American parallel, if you let me and lurch us back to 1910 or the.
A moment in which America was facing a great immigration and migration crisis of Europeans, Poles, Bohemians and Scandinavians, Jews,
Irish Germans all coming in huge numbers to the states and forming is all the time fragments of European nations inside the US.
There was a lot of debate about what that meant for American identity.
Reading Cross was famously to the idea of melting pot and in its most extreme form, Teddy Roosevelt's idea of 100 percent Americanism.
But there were opponents to this, including one who wrote a very famous essay in the Nation for US Cable and Democracy Versus the Melting Pot,
and Taylor articulated the problem that America was facing then in a way that might feel familiar to people who have been at this conference.
He wrote, Our spirit, the American spirit is inarticulate and our voice.
But of course, of many voices, each singing a rather different to what must.
What shall this cacophony become like unison for a harmony?
And Kaitlyn's response was not to say a hundred percent Americanism.
It wasn't quite to deny anarchism, but it was to pull it in a clever dialectical trick and say the rise.
I'm quoting the rise of the cultural consciousness and social autonomy of the immigrants.
Irishmen, German Scandinavian Jew poll or opinion is Americanisation.
Americanisation, he said, has no trust nationality. Americanisation has liberated nationality,
and he went on to say that American civilisation may come to me in the perfection of the cooperative harmonies of European civilisation,
the waste, the squalor and the distress of Europe being eliminated by curiosity and unity and orchestration of mankind.
As you said, a symphony. So two lessons, I think, from this entire conference.
The first is that American experiment doesn't work out, come to America, and we'll take care of it all.
The second is that Kaitlyn gets less money out of this cacophony by pulling this kind of dialectical by saying the more American is,
the more national. The more diverse right Americanisation is liberated nationality.
And I would like to suggest that that's one thing that we've seen at this conference.
The idea that Europeanisation, if I could put it that way, far from repressing European nationalities,
liberates them or perhaps more than liberates them and makes those nationalities possible and makes them possible by protecting them.
And that's the coalition that I think I'd like to try and draw from this kind of cacophony.
The narratives that we've heard here have been, I would say,
almost universally centred on protection, and that word has come up quite a lot over the past year.
And now that that's the reason the thought of unity is that there is some question of whom or what Europe is protected.
And I would say that there are two kinds of protection narratives that we've seen.
The first, which Tim Snyder would tell us is what we get from the fable of the wise nation is a narrative of Europe as a project.
The protests, its nations from themselves, from Europe on worst in six months or more.
And it it creates a system that protects from within.
And the second is Europe as protecting its nations from something outside from the rest of the world, which is, in a sense,
the narrative that we get if we accept tennis history that she gave us yesterday and was, I think, the narrative she was encouraging us to take up.
What struck me about the conference is that the first narrative Europe as protecting its nations from themselves.
Well, it's perhaps true that this is a widespread narrative outside of this conference room.
I did not hear much of it here. We heard it to some extent on the second day Congress version told us that they had to think of
the EU as perhaps a quote binding set of principles that protects Europeans against themselves.
And also to carving out mechanic in for that country.
Ballots were counted. Europe is a region like it is banal. It is miraculous because it protects from within.
But what's striking to me is that as I look back through my notes,
I actually couldn't find many instances of that narrative coming up all over the Europe as self-protection.
So the narrative that should come out of the wise nation fable that in so brilliantly eviscerated last night was actually,
I would say, at the conference, largely absent. And instead, when I look back through my notes, I saw a lot of the second protection narrative.
Europe has protection from the outside.
One would expect to come from chains corrected in quotes historical record, which is perhaps to say that in fact,
rather than tends to ensure destabilising us, we were moving quite readily towards the narrative that he was going to push us to accept.
And that began even on the very first health where we were told by Isabelle Hoffman's
opinions that far from globalisation and EU integration being linked in people's minds,
quite to the contrary. People saw Europe as their whole showed as the quote protector against globalisation on day two.
Andreas version and I'm quoting him again because he put these things so well and so concisely said that this was not.
The European narrative was not a question of the nation state versus the EU,
rather than it was quote the assertion of the nation state and the return policy where the nation states.
I would actually say this is quite close to the argument that we are moving toward.
After his talk on Friday, instead of the EU nation state dichotomy,
the EU enables nation states as they consider themselves to survive by protecting them and cutting them off from the threats outside, Calypso replies.
I a similar argument later on. Asked in question Isn't the European story about a rescued,
radically open nation state in a Europe and that nation state exists only because Europe, in her words?
So that's the good side of this narrative. But I think we also saw a lot of the negative side.
The narrative produced by Europe as protector from the outside can be used to very sinister ends,
too, and I think we learnt that at this conference and I would say that's starting to hurt the most.
So we heard anger against the EU, anger against in the first panel from Katrina Hoover against quote the EU of industry, oligarchs and tech companies.
In other words, an EU that had failed to protect against globalisation that had failed to protect.
We now talked today. So the narrative goes against refugees, perhaps, and have those that question the refugees so determines one's view of Europe.
As we heard both might today and from the Chatham House survey.
So again, the question of protection for the new protect against refugees or to protect refugees from the things that are coming from.
But either way, the frame is the same. Europe is a protector, and we heard that also from the second panel on Thursday.
Question either coming from anti-EU financing in voice of Hungary or even from a professional sports from the.
There's always the narrative of Europe was centred around whether it had succeeded in protecting its people.
Terrible yesterday called this cold called this kind of of a buffer.
I am today referred to it as a very.
And I think that exemplifies the way in which this narrative can be used one way or the other, as we heard in the last panel.
Can you increase Europe's budget for border control, the proposed increase and,
amongst other things, securitisation trying to reinforce this narrative?
It does have some basis in reality. It seems the EU wants to be a protector.
So what strikes me about all these protection narratives is that they tell a deeply conservative story of Europe.
I knew that in a very literal sense. There is something to be preserved within Europe.
What that thing is, it's up for debate, but it's to be preserved against that or not.
I think at worst, as we can all obviously imagine, this is a very dangerous way to think of Europe.
It's expanding the nationalist mindset out to international borders, but it's making a cut somewhere.
And that's perhaps the dominant narrative that has.
The clip that has come out of this cacophony is a kind of falling to the floor and her liberalism fear European Union of Fear,
a kind of damage control European Union. That's as far but guarding against either itself or against the empires and digital forces around them.
But as I said today, and I'm quoting her, if Europe is very difficult to define, it's even more difficult to protect.
And I wonder our projects as we move out of this conference on part of the research
team is about a very minor generation in Europe and speaking as an even higher myself.
If Europe does not protect against the threat that my generation will be the major threat to climate change,
that narrative of Europe, a story in Europe as protection is not going to work very well at all.
But another story of told my on this, which I won't fully address.
Hopefully we can explore it in the comments is on a slightly different level.
We've been discussing how far you can take the curve, whether we should perhaps be playing a little more cautiously with this term.
I think this is an important note to end on on a conference that is expanding into a project without narratives looking for narratives in Europe.
We've heard from some of our speakers like Haiti and some of our talk about literature,
that there are perhaps places where narrative is better suited to literature, fiction and places where it is less well suited as certain.
Kershaw reminded us of history and perhaps Tim Snider, too.
It seems that perhaps rather than have a narrative of protection,
there might be some case for cordoning off the idea of narrative itself, given that orders.
And so I think that what that leaves me with and what I like to kind of open for up to if that's
OK is a question of both what stories we've told here and in what form we should be telling them.
And and some caution about not exaggerating the importance of those stories too much for the public.
And I wasn't planning on ending all this, and I sort of promised myself I wouldn't.
But since now we've brought it up. I'm Tony Johnson and.
Of course. His voice has looms large over this conference for me.
And last night, I went back and read an old essay writing 96 called Europe a Grand Illusion, where she urged us to exercise that same kind of caution.
And I, I promised, I promised myself that I would never, ever, ever try to speak for him.
But I can, at least if I can remember the quote, right, said that Europe is more than a geographical notion, but less than an answer.
And perhaps what we can take from this conference is that Europe is more than the narrative, but less than an answer.
Thank you very much. And, you know, it's interesting because in a way, if you're today speaks,
more questions can be raised in Europe a grand illusion than it does to the very cautiously optimistic conclusion of Post War,
which is of course, published just before the high point of what seemed like European success without five six.