Well, today we're doing something different today we're interviewing our director of the Europe Stories project and of this podcast,
Timothy Garton Ash. So Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European Studies at Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford.
Timothy has really led us through this project and guided us taking time to work us through the research stages,
as well as the writing stages of Europe stories.
In this episode, we talk about Timothy's latest project, which is a personal history of contemporary Europe,
which follows 10 books of contemporary history and political writing.
Yes, and in the interview, we discuss with him many of the findings in the Europe Stories project.
So we get Timothy's personal takes on many of the issues we've discussed throughout this podcast series.
Hello, I'm Timothy Garton Ash, welcome to the Europe Stories podcast.
What the young Europeans want the European Union to do and to be.
Over the last three years,
an amazing group of young Europeans have worked with me here at the European Studies Centre at Oxford University to answer this question.
And this podcast will present their findings.
Host Anna Martinez and Lucas say have a series of conversations with the authors of our concluding report and give you their answers.
OK, so what was the inspiration for this project?
Why ask what stories does Europe tell?
So the inspiration for this project was the sense that Europe has lost the plot that it's stumbling from crisis to crisis.
Pretty much the last decade, and we needed to find out some better sense of where Europe is going.
And then gradually we narrowed it down from this very vague question about the new narrative for Europe.
To the question, what stories does Europe tell, what stories are Europeans actually telling themselves about the real Europe we have?
And then, as you know, to this even more precise question, what stories young Europeans are telling?
And then even more precisely to the question what young Europeans want the European Union to be and to do by, say, 2030?
And I have to say I'm absolutely thrilled by the result.
You have been the most amazing team of young Europeans, and I always knew we had great students at Oxford.
But you've been a fantastic group of students and it's been really a very exciting journey.
If I could add on a little bit to Anna's question,
was there something dissatisfying or lacking in existing ways of telling Europe stories that this project is trying to address or respond to?
Well, first of all, a vacuum is normally unsatisfying, and that was something of a vacuum there.
I mean, with the possible exception of Emmanuel Macron,
it's hard to point to a European leader who's really putting a story out there in the way that earlier European leaders did.
The only other thing that was, of course,
was this great attempt by the European Commission under Jose Manuel Barroso to find what was called a new European narrative.
But as you both know, we very rapidly concluded that that was precisely the wrong way to go about it.
From Brussels out from the top down the bar, trying to prescribe what should be the new European narrative,
rather than starting democratically by finding out what Europeans actually want.
So you were a historical firsthand witness to the events of 1989,
which were considered a formative experience or formative moment actually for older Europeans and by the swimming Europeans born before 1972.
So the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War.
This was either formative or our best moment in the opinion of these Europeans, as opposed to younger Europeans,
namely those born after 1989, some of which did identify that is a very important moment.
But the majority of these young Europeans identify as a formative moment, actually an experience, not a historical moment.
I wonder as a historian and as a firsthand witness to that pivotal moment in European history,
do you see a continuity between a formative moment that is about the fall of a wall,
the ultimate border, if you will,
and freedom of movement being so formative or at least a condition for the formative experiences of a whole new generation of Europeans?
Is there a continuity here or is this just different expressions of the fundamental modern value that is liberty?
Well, in a way, of course.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is the ultimate expression of the desire for freedom of movement as an aspect of a larger freedom.
I think that's important to say. So there's obviously a continuity there, but it is really interesting because as you said already in this podcast,
we started out with this idea from the attributed Napoleon quote that we had to find the formative moments.
And for most people of my generation older, we found some.
I mean, actually, my own formative moment was the birth of the Solidarity movement in Poland, in the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk in 1980.
So it was a whole decade of the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe, which was both formative and best moments.
But it's really interesting that in your generation and European, slightly younger, even that isn't the same specific historical moment.
It's almost as if you've had a really fortunate time out from a European history of moments good, bad and ugly.
But of course, the substance of what you've been talking about the experience freedom of movement as the
core of a larger sense of freedom is exactly what my generation were working towards.
You know that the great phrase we use coming from a rather unexpected phrase maker, namely George H.W. Bush.
Not a natural poet who in fact, he himself said he he distrusted the vision thing,
but he actually produced the best phrase for the goal of our generation, which was a Europe whole and free.
And we've got closer to it than ever before in European history precisely in the last 30 years.
I would love to dig a bit deeper into this question of free movement.
Something don't and I have found in doing these episodes is that it really does touch on so many of the topics that this project has been about.
And it serves maybe not quite a master narrative,
but it's almost has this magnetic quality where all these different issues can be tied with free movement in one way.
And one of the attempts in this final chapter is to think both about the synergies and the trade offs,
and it can be actually a bit difficult, I think, to think about the trade-offs of free movement because it's such an important and in many ways,
a very positive experience for many Europeans, in particular young Europeans.
But I wonder about two things. One is what might the specific trade offs be of free movement becoming more and more ordinary as an experience?
And then also secondly, and more broadly,
why is it so important to think about trade offs as we wrap up this report, this podcast series and this project?
Well, Arnold is, of course,
a student of political theory and has read Isaiah Berlin and Isaiah Berlin famously said there are lots of values out there and lots of good things,
but you can't have them all at once. You can't have perfect freedom and perfect equality and perfect justice.
You have to plumb to prioritise, to balance. And that's of course, true in this case too.
So self-evidently, it gets interesting and difficult when you start making those trade-offs.
Now, in the case of freedom of movement, I would say a couple of things.
First of all, as we discovered in our really interesting Europe wide polling, not all Europeans love freedom of movement.
If you remember, the figure from France was a very large number.
Nearly 50 percent actually didn't think freedom of movement was a good thing for their country.
Freedom of movement arguably gave us Brexit.
The combination of immigration from outside and immigration from inside the EU was one of the principal reasons for the Brexit vote.
So the problem here is that we have roughly speaking 50 societies, 50 percent ballpark,
not freedom of movement, 50 percent ballpark hesitant or sceptical or hostile to it.
So one of the big problems I think to come out of the report is what do we offer the other 50 percent?
So one of your recommendations I like very much is it shouldn't just be about Erasmus, which is about us.
It's about people who go to university. There should be versions of Erasmus and all sorts of different, you know, all different parts of society.
The other huge trade off, which for me is one of the big takeaways from this whole exercise,
is between freedom of movement inside the EU and the lack of freedom movement for people outside.
Anna, you were there, I think, at our meeting in Berlin. It was an amazing moment.
We had students from China and India, and all the Europeans were talking away about freedom of movement and the press.
Our Indian friend and then our Chinese friend piped up and said, Hey, you try getting into the EU as someone from India or China.
And I think that's going to be a huge issue for Europe going forward.
What are we going to do at our own frontier and beyond?
Yes, I remember that moment quite well, indeed. And the whole visit to Berlin, which was very impressive.
On the 9th of November 2019, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Our team was in Berlin for a conference about the post 1890 generations co-organized by the shift of MacArthur and the Down to Earth programme.
We interviewed Hart with Meyer, professor of politics at Oxford, for our project.
Hear his thoughts on the lasting impact of this moment.
The moment the wall came down, we had idealised narrative both in the West as well as in Europe,
and we thought we could just continue with this narrative and not understanding that alternative narratives,
alternative perceptions, some illusions about what the West alone, what Europe alone could do certainly came up very, very soon.
And from then onwards,
from this idealised version of Europe as the project of milk and honey and individual freedom and justice for everyone and the West.
Globalisation, individual standards.
Human rights, environmentalism spreading all over without really expecting the type of resistance and contestation that we see now,
I think, was the mood of the 1990s.
But it shifted quite quickly, and I think we are now in the struggle of preserving what we feel excited about in Europe,
in a world which is rapidly changing and which provides a lot of avenues of contestation.
Now, turning towards the topic of social and environmental Europe, so the vision for that Europe,
one of the surprising results we had when we question Europeans on climate change and environmental policies was that first of all,
this is a cross-generational concern against the general assumption that there's a general divide on
this issue that young Europeans are much more concerned about the environment than older Europeans are.
This was a surprising result, a good result. On the other hand,
one of our research findings indicated that a majority of young Europeans believe that an
authoritarian system would be better equipped at dealing with climate change than a democratic system.
I'm curious about your reaction to both of these results.
So first of all, both of those results were quite surprising to me.
I assumed there'd be a big age difference in the salience of climate change.
And 53 percent saying authoritarian states are better than democracies to tackle the climate crisis is a pretty shocking result.
You know, we're talking now in the context of all around the time of the German elections.
And it's fascinating to see in the German elections how all the parties,
including even the Christian Social Union from Bavaria, very Conservative Party,
have absolutely woken up to the Climate Change Challenge,
are really building serious economic and technological plans into their programmes for the next government.
And frankly, the EU too, with Frans Timmermans, with whom we have a very good interview on the website.
So I actually think I mean, I'm not given to excessive optimism,
but I actually think one could say that Europe is beginning to wake up to this challenge and to get serious about it.
Whether it does enough soon enough is another question, but it bloody well, better because if not,
then I think young Europeans will conclude that democracy just can't deliver.
It can't do the business because what we find when we ask behind that polling
result was it is not that people love Xi Jinping's China or Putin's Russia.
It's not like the 1930s when people really thought fascist and communist regimes were an impressive Russian alternative version of modernity.
It's that they doubt the ability of contemporary, consensual multiparty democracy with all the checks and balances,
with all the lobbies, with all the influence of corporations to actually deliver the change we need.
What seems to be one perception underlying this distrust or hesitation about slow moving consensual European institutions is maybe
some kind of mismatch between the perceived urgency of climate change and the perceived pace of which European institutions move.
But, you know, speaking as someone who looks at 20th century history,
I think about many consensual and slower moving institutions that did major infrastructural or other kinds of policy projects.
So there's nothing inherently it seems like the European institutions can't achieve in terms of climate.
So I'm I'm curious about your analysis of whether there's something specific about the European Union today that gives
people that sense that its mode of governance and procedure somehow isn't fit for purpose to deal with climate change.
So that's a great question, Lukas, because you're absolutely right.
And of course, the achievements of Europe post 1945 a post-war recovery were largely thanks to change through consensus.
If you think of the way the economies were rebuilt after 1945 or welfare states which were supported both by Social Democrats and Christian Democrats.
So there's absolutely nothing inherent in change through consensus to prevent decisive action.
And what I think is peculiar to the EU is that you're doing that 27 times over.
So you're trying to put together 27 versions of consensual democracy so that
any one moment there's a national election coming up in some EU member state,
if not two or three, in addition to which you have added in the direct democracy of the European Parliament.
The role of the other European institutions, so it is an exceptionally complicated multilevel system of consensual democracy,
which is trying to reach agreement, by the way, so often by unanimity at all levels across 27 countries.
And that hasn't been done historically before.
Still on this question of institutions and democracy, and again,
with regard to the results of the perception that authoritarian regimes might be better equipped at tackling climate change.
One alternative interpretation of this results that some of the authors of this report have is that this is actually
just the expression of a general frustration in line with what you've been saying with democratic institutions.
But that does not necessarily mean that young Europeans do not have democratic values at heart
as older generations that were either deprived of those values and indeed had to fight for them.
And in fact, one of the other findings we've had in this report,
young Europeans value performance over procedure is their risk of the type of populist
rhetoric that emphasises results over procedure being more appealing to this generation.
So one thing about this kind of consensual, multi-party, slow moving, often coalition democracy,
what the French called angry is the five day meetings in Brussels to achieve some
result is that it's very boring and boredom is an underestimated factor in history.
George Steiner has a wonderful essay about Europe before 1914, when he talks about the cold ennui, the great boredom,
and I see in some enthusiasm from relatively small sectors of young Europeans for radical nationalist populist parties, an element of that boredom.
In other words, there's no much Carl Schmidt in there.
There's not much romance, there's not much humour, there's not much dynamism and action and indeed no violence.
And let's not forget, the violence also has its own attraction.
So that's the problem of boredom, which I think is a serious problem of Europe.
Brussels has no theatre that Washington has theatre.
Washington is like a soap opera of politics that you can follow with all its faults.
Westminster have theatre. Brussels has no filter. That's one point to make, and another point to make is.
You know, let me step back for a moment while we we've been working together on this project.
I have been writing a personal history of contemporary Europe since 1945,
but particularly over the 50 years that I personally have witnessed in Europe since the early 1970s.
And one thing I found missing, and if I can put it this way, all your thinking about this was a sense of the historic fragility.
Of what has been achieved in here. I mean, I spent many weeks in former Yugoslavia during the four wards of former Yugoslavia.
I've spent time in Ukraine, which is still at war at the moment.
You see just how quickly Europe can go all the way back to the barbarism of the first half of the 20th century on a smaller scale in Brexit.
You see how things we thought almost irreversible can so quickly be reversed in the COVID pandemic.
Frontiers go up again between European countries so that one of the things I think is is somewhat missing in this report and is really,
really important. What I'm trying to do in my book is to convey this,
this sense of the fragility of this project that what young Europeans regard as normal is historically speaking, extremely abnormal.
It's an exceptional condition which will be lucky to hang on to for a few more decades.
Bruno Vietnam-era is a Portuguese novelist who often writes from the perspective of disadvantaged communities.
We interviewed him for the Europe Stories project. Listen to him speak of Europe as a delicate ideal.
You know, it's such a wonderful and oversimplified idea you because we are living in unprecedented
times of peace in Europe and sometimes we don't understand really all our rates.
Wonderful. These artificial construction is.
This reminds me when I was studying Habemus and all of us had this reaction, you know, it's so dry, it's almost impossible to read.
Very boring. And our professor told us that the reason why habemus wrote that way,
at least his political theory, perhaps not so much his journalistic or opinion articles,
was that he did not want any trace of anything resembling rhetoric narrative because of what Germany went through with Nazi Germany.
How that came about. And I wonder if there is a similar trauma at the core of the EU we have today.
So is it devoid of that narrative theatre, as you say, because of its past with nationalism?
Is it also, on the one hand, the effect of nationalist rhetoric and thinking, on the other hand,
also the fear that a sense of threat might be reignited if the EU is perceived to be intending to act as a state or as a nation.
Therefore, it became this very technocratic organisation that tries to steer clear of those elements that are typical of nations.
The historical element, the mythical element.
So I think another couple of things in there which one might want to disentangle the harbourmaster point is a very interesting one,
although I would like to think one can be serious and sober and still lucid and readable.
And actually, you know, I think habemus can be quite readable.
And sometimes the German companions are very powerful things analytically,
but certainly particularly in the German context, one wanted to avoid the sort of humour extremes of rhetoric.
That's absolutely right. I don't think that means you need to be boring.
After all, there was a village Brandt, who was a tremendously exciting post-war German leader,
actually exemplifying the best qualities of a democratic Germany and so the EU itself.
The basic point is this that everything we have tried to add on on in to turn it into a full,
multifaceted European Union and political community at heart.
It's still a European economic community, what it started today.
And at the heart of that heart is a regulatory union.
That's the main concrete thing the EU does regulation, trade negotiations, all that stuff,
and that stuff is bureaucratic and is technocratic, there's no way around it.
We've seen this in the Brexit negotiations.
The question is where is European leadership with the strategic vision and the power to inspire, to move, to motivate?
We don't find it on the whole in Brussels. We find it in individual national capitals.
The closest we've come to it in recent years, I would say, is Emmanuel Macron.
Some of this discussion makes me wonder how these themes of fragility and boredom would look like if we blew up
the map and zoomed out a little bit and kind of link this discussion with the third theme in the final chapter,
which is Europe in a changing world and whether it's in this report or reading the news in the past few months.
We hear a lot of discussion about strategic autonomy.
Of course, underlying that is the perception and a frequent accusation that at the European level, as well as at the national level,
there has been a lack of coherent foreign policy and also a lack of a narrative about Europe's place in the world.
And I wonder how seeing Europe in a changing world might give us a different perspective on these questions of fragility and also of boredom.
Of course, theatre in the sense of Europe as a stage, but it is also an actor and in particular,
whether having that narrative about Europe in a changing world can give us at least some entry points into cherishing that for Jose of that project,
as well as resolving some of these cul de sacs that follow from boredom.
So in a way, what you're referring to is a very old dream.
It's expressed in the French phrase law presence or, as Tony Blair put it, we want Europe to be not a superstate, but a superpower.
And that informed an older generation of Europeans France, Britain, Germany could not be world powers anymore on their own,
but through Europe, they would again together become a world power.
I think it informed Blair's approach, and in a world increasingly influenced as you know, so well, Lucas,
by non-European powers, notably China, but also countries like Russia, we actually need that to defend our interests.
So I vividly remember a supper.
In the kitchen of a woman called Mabel's and Alonzo with a guy called Mark Leonard,
where we said what we really need is a European Council on Foreign Relations.
And this became something called the European Council on Foreign Relations EGFR,
which for nearly 15 years now has been working to try to create a more coherent and effective European foreign policy.
And to be quite honest. We haven't got all that far because we've been rowing against the tide for all those years against the,
so to speak, central centrifugal and disintegrating tendencies in Europe, so measured against the ambition.
I don't think we've got very far. What we have achieved is what I would call a shared strategic culture.
In other words, there's a pretty good understanding in Paris and Berlin and London and Rome and Madrid and elsewhere that we need something like this.
We need strategic autonomy that we need European sovereignty. But we haven't got very far to realising it.
And in a way, this is a question back to you because, you know,
for people of my generation and in know sort of elite discourse around the EU, this is actually the great new narrative for Europe.
It is that in the post Western world. We need a stronger Europe to defend our values and our interests in a world of dance.
Europe needs to be a giant itself. I've said that myself many times. What really struck me was how relatively little resonance that had to you guys.
It wasn't something that anyone or very few people came up with spontaneously.
If you ask people, Would you like a European foreign policy? They said, Yes, absolutely, we love it.
But it didn't seem to be a personal priority. And this leads me to a last thought, which is, I think increasingly we're beginning to look at a Europe,
which is no longer universalist, either in the old colonial way or in the new post-colonial way.
But in a sense, more exceptionalist, that's to say, increasingly, what people are really talking about is defending a European way of life,
which we no longer think the rest of the world is going to admire and emulate.
But just defending it for ourselves. If we could pause on that for a moment.
Because what you're saying is just so interesting, and it brings me back to that moment in our colloquium earlier this year.
I believe this is how it went. You asked whether Europe should be a superpower.
And I think in the first instance, very few people said yes.
And then you asked again whether Europe should be a civilian superpower and many hands went up.
And I think that matches on quite. Well, with what you're saying about these shifting views of what Europe's place in the world is,
and I wonder from observing the explicit and implicit expressions of younger Europeans.
What that means. Does that change what we even think as a superpower?
So something that we suggest at the end of this chapter is Europe as a green superpower, Europe as a civilian superpower.
Those terms are new terms in many ways, although they have histories, and I wonder whether that will mean not just for Europe,
but that the very notion of what a superpower is might look very different because young people seem to
have a very different sense of what they want to defend and how they want to defend what they cherish.
Lucas, thanks for reminding me of that amazing moment because you see, for me, I have no problem the idea of of wanting Europe to be a superpower.
But when I put it out there, I mean the chilling silence in the room.
And when I tried to get you to explain, you said, Well, for us, superpower means sort of George W. Bush and the 86 airborne.
It's about hard power, American style or one might add Russian style or Chinese style.
So that's almost a semantic point about the connotations of superpower.
But if we say civilian superpower, then we have to stop giving substance to that then.
And since this is not something for which there are many examples in history, we have to start putting meat on the bones.
If meat is appropriate for civilians who are all vegetables on the bones of a civilian superpower.
It's quite difficult. First of all.
It's quite wrong to think that economic power is soft power.
For the recipients of the people on the receiving end of economic power in Europe has a lot of economic power.
Economic power can be quite hard power. And Europe plays hardball in trade relations and trade negotiations and its economic policy.
Secondly. If I'm a migrant or refugee from the Middle East or Africa trying to get into the European Union.
What I met with does not look very civil or civilian to me.
I met with frontier forces at places like Ceuta and the Spanish frontier to Morocco or the island of Lesbos or the sea south of Lampedusa,
which are now turning me back, pushing me away.
So the reality of working out what a civilian superpower means in its interactions with the rest of the world, I think requires a lot more discussion.
I mean, obviously, we don't like invading Iraq and then occupying other people's countries.
We don't want to do that.
But what is the nature of those interactions between a civilian superpower, Europe and a rather uncivil and civilian rest of the world?
On that note of discussion of European soft power,
which is often referred to as normative soft power in the sense that Europe's fundamental principles and the laws that emerge
from those principles end up influencing other parts of the world that look up to that legislation as an example to follow.
We're all faced with the challenges of a daunting digital age,
and one of the clear results from our study is that communication is a challenge for the
European Union in the sense that there is no lack of information about how the EU works.
And nevertheless, young Europeans aren't very well informed about this, and the problem might not be exactly that.
There's not enough information out there,
but there aren't many mechanisms of democratic engagement beyond traditional participation methods like voting.
So how do you see Europe adjusting to the digital age, perhaps becoming again,
an example of liberal democracy that is aligned with the new forms of communication,
especially the forms in which young Europeans have grown up used to communicating?
So a couple of things on that. First of all. Just as the amusement to either of, you know, what's happening in Brussels today.
Now. Lucas? No, you haven't turned on your television set with bated breath.
The Washington that found the Lion delivering the State of the Union speech.
Well, he is actually delivering the State of the Union a European Union speech today.
And as we. Found, in our opinion polling, most Europeans then just not care about it, they didn't even know about it.
I mean, we had a stunning result that most Europeans don't know who delivers a state of the European speech, even even highly educated Europeans.
So apropos communication problem point number two on the digital thing.
I mean, again, I would want to say to be fair. I was just spent a few days in Brussels.
People were saying our two biggest challenges are climate change and digital.
So, so the EU has in some sense in principle, woken up to the digital challenge.
They view it a characteristically being a regulatory union, particularly as a regulatory challenge.
You know, the old saying, if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
And our problem is that Europe is a digital rule setter.
But America is the digital trendsetter. So all the actual products, the platforms, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the Googles,
Twitters come from the US, all from China in a couple of cases like Ticktalk.
And there's nothing or very little that comes out of Europe from below that we can really see as a shared European digital platform.
And I think that would be a very unfortunate division of labour if America went and China went on doing all the inventing and all the creative work,
and Europe was just the regulatory union. The other point, in terms of a European public sphere about the way we talk to each other.
Is, of course, a very simple one.
That we all speak different languages, and I regard that as an absolutely first order constraint on the creation of a European public sphere.
I'm literally as we talk, just finalising a commentary that I'm writing about the German elections and the EU.
The only way to reach a genuine Europe wide audience is to publish it in seven or eight different languages in the national media.
If you do it just in English, you're reaching a tiny elite.
So I think we've got our work cut out trying to find the sort of digital paths
to creating a European public sphere across these many languages that we speak.
I just have a very quick question about language.
If we had a space for another chapter in this report, I would have loved to read one on language because it's such a first order theme,
as you mentioned, and at least it's been one of my own learning experiences through this project,
even though we haven't specialised in language policy to just be aware of the full implications of that diversity,
both the benefits, but as you said, the constraints.
And but my runway of reflection has only been in the past two or three years, whereas you've been thinking about this for many decades.
And I'm just curious whether your sense of optimism and pessimism about language as a condition or a constraint on European identity in public sphere.
How has that shifted over the years? Do you find yourself more optimistic or pessimistic than you started out?
I never believed that we could make a United States of Europe.
Remotely comparable with the United States of America, because as John Stuart Mill famously wrote in his essay on Representative Government,
You need a united public opinion and for that you need a single language.
So I've always thought that that that was unrealistic and continue to think that the key to the success
of the European Union going forward is the same as it's been over 2000 years of European history,
which is finding the balance between unity and diversity.
That is the absolute key. To a good future for the European Union.
And interestingly enough. The historical polity that did this most successfully is the one that most people laugh out of and think was a joke.
The Holy Roman Empire, you know, Voltaire was a kind of cleverness of a newspaper columnist, said it was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
He's quite wrong. It's the longest lasting, most successful polity in European history.
Hitler talked about a thousand year Reich. This one actually lasted for a thousand years, and to many of those centuries,
it was very successful precisely because it understood that you had to do both unity and diversity.
So you had a strong central European institutions with a great mystique around the Kaiser, around the empire.
But then in individual territories, most of them were not nation states originally.
You had enormous flexibility and you allowed and accepted messiness and compromise and muddling through.
And that's how you make your work.
Our team, as Tian Xuelong, professor of European politics at Oxford, what he would like the EU to have achieved by 2030.
Here is what he said.
One of the things I would like to see most is still to see Europe finally achieving something what Massimo actually called an archipelago spaces,
which is not Europe of states of Europe of space. This network of difference and mosaic of overlapping diversities.
I always believe that there is more to Europe. It's just nation states and the EU as such.
How have your views on your generation and younger Europeans changed, if at all?
After the course of this project, after this report, so I was born in 1955.
I'm a boomer. I'm a post skater. I very came of age just in the tail end of 1968.
And. My generation was incredibly lucky.
We were just too young to have to go through the horrors of the mid-20th century,
but now we're going comfortably into our older years at a time when things are also looking very tough.
So that's my first reflection. But you know, we've had it pretty good.
Boomers. My second reflection is one that really informs the book on writing this personal history of contemporary Europe.
Which is we got some things right. We have that vision of a Europe holding free in my case and that of many of my contemporaries,
particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in Western Europe, also in Spain and Portugal.
We work towards that vision through the seventies and eighties, and we seem to see it in.
In the 1990s and the early 2000s, which was really peak Europe, if you like, around 2004,
2005, if I had died in the end of 2004, I would have gone to my grave, a very happy European.
Things looked so good. Looking back from now, what you see is that our old Greek friend hubris was at work.
And actually, we became complacent and overconfident, particularly in the what a free market economy,
a globalised financial free market economy was going to deliver, but also in other ways.
And so I think that is that is in a way my self-critical reflection on the work of our of our generation.
Do tell us more about the book you're writing at the moment, which is as far as I understand,
partly based on the research we've been doing on this project.
The subtitle of the book is a personal history of Europe in our time,
and it's quite unusual kind of book because it's it's not straight autobiography and it's not straight history.
It's history illustrated by memoir,
illustrated by things in that quite a few of them that I myself have seen and heard recorded over the last 50 years.
For example, visiting the former East German Communist leader Harry Connick in prison for talking to Trump,
that Helmut Kohl in 1991, who told me that did I realise I was sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler?
Which is a little bit of a conversation stopper. I have to say all at the same time,
talking to Margaret Thatcher checkers about German unification and her quite salty views on the desirability of German unification.
So a lot of moments like that, but but used always for the purpose of bringing home and illustrating this.
History and I've actually been writing the book during the last four years while we've been working together on this
project so that I've just decided that one of the last chapters is probably going to be called letter to a young European,
and it's going to be about our work together on this project.
And in a sense, what my generation, the work that my generation as well, of course,
as the rest of what's happened in the world has left your generation to do.
In Europe, I think you have quite large challenges on your plate, but at the same time, I have to say.
You remember Churchill's famous remark about democracy, that it's the worst possible political system,
apart from all the other systems that have been tried from time to time,
and I would say this is the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europe that have been tried from time to time.
So, Timothy, we ask of our authors at the end of each interview this question, and we thought we would ask you to.
Do you feel that what we've found out and discussed in this project and this report
makes you feel more or less hopeful about the European project as you see it?
Undoubtedly more hopeful. To have, you know, such a tremendous they own guys,
a group of young Europeans identifying the challenges and actually thinking very concretely about ways to address them with a basic.
Underpinning of confidence that it will be possible for the European Union to address these challenges.
That makes me more hopeful. Of course,
if you guys if a group of carefully selected brilliant young Europeans studying at Oxford
University did not think that was possible and did not come up with some answers,
then one would have to be pretty depressed. Because if you don't come up with them, who else is going to seem more optimistic?
Nonetheless, I think the challenges are pretty big and in all our societies, says the other half of our societies.
That has to be persuaded of the continued value of hanging together rather than hanging separately.
So that was our conversation with Timothy about our report, our project.
His book and now fortunately and unfortunately, Lucas and I will be wrapping up this podcast series.
It's been seven episodes, seven chapters, even though we've gone in depth into six of them, and the seventh was actually written by Lucas, my co-host.
So Lucas had the difficult job of summarising and synthesising,
attempting to harmonise and figuring out where the findings of our report actually can be harmonised and where we can't.
In the concluding chapter, which he called synergies and trade offs Lucas,
we never really introduced you on this podcast, but you are a DPhil candidate at Oxford, at also college, no less.
And your thesis is focussed on transnational networks that connected Republican China with global organisations.
How did you come to write a chapter for a project on Europe stories?
So I think. It was very difficult not to think about Europe stories, having moved to Oxford during the middle of the Brexit negotiations.
I think that.
Certainly, questions of European identity and British identity have loomed behind some of the more specific questions we've asked in this report,
even if they haven't been front and centre. And I think living here, these questions are of every day important.
And as you know, I spent most of my time growing up outside of Europe,
first in Hong Kong and then some years in the U.S. So I do come at this, you know, being an insider in some ways, an outsider in other ways.
And certainly that's part of what I find interesting and hopefully something that
can also give me a different kind of perspective on some of these questions. Mm hmm.
Well, in your chapter, you do the other hard task of trying to organise the several recommendations that are made in each chapter into three clusters.
I don't know how you manage to do that. And I will quickly read those out in their most, most summary form.
So the European Union should deliver competently and promptly on promises,
investigate and imagine the European project in line with young Europeans voices and develop more effective habits of communication.
So I'd say this could boil down even further to basically two main concerns that reflect what we found about young Europeans.
One is that young Europeans are more concerned with outcomes rather than procedures.
And the other one is the need for better communication for democracy to work in the 21st century.
And this has something to do with communicating or levelling up how institutions and citizens communicate.
Given the technological improvements that have existed in communications, so it can't just be one way, it has to be two way.
There has to be more listening rather than just communicating and informing the public about how things work.
Because oddly enough, there is a lot of information out there on how European Union institutions work.
But somehow, young Europeans are really ill informed about how they work,
what they're doing, despite the fact that they're generally pro European Union.
So my question to you is, you wrote this before we did this podcast.
In the meantime, we've discussed with all our colleagues there, their respective chapters.
Is this still the main takeaway for you?
Is there something in the course of these conversations that we've been having that jumped out at you and stayed with you about young Europeans,
about the European Union? In some ways, I think these are still the three questions I would pose at the end of the report, because of course,
this is the conclusion to the report in one way and hopefully the beginning of many conversations in another sense.
And I think these three questions can generate some amount of that.
So just to backtrack a little bit, these three questions were thought up not just by me in a vacuum,
but they were generated, you know, kind of collectively,
at one of the colloquium that we held when the Dawn Dorf lecturer Catherine Dumfries mentioned in slightly different terms that, you know,
these three are existential questions that the EU has to ask itself if it is going to connect with European citizens, including young Europeans.
And in that sense, I still think that they are worth asking. Here's another kind of conclusion that might be.
Between the lines in the report, but I think has become maybe more explicit for me in the course of thinking about
the report and also hearing from our colleagues in the course of the past few weeks.
So Catherine, the freeze also talked about, on the one hand, we need to acknowledge that the EU is a very mature entity.
It's had many decades to evolve, and it's this kind of umbrella of institutions mechanisms that might be slow moving,
but also have a lot of steadfastness to them. So I think we need to kind of understand it on the one hand and at the same time,
be able to ask existential questions about what it's doing, why it's doing and you know who it's talking to.
And I think that ability to do both to acknowledge that these are mature institutions,
but also keep kind of holding them accountable, but asking about their purpose and also by asking them to deliver on their promises.
Precisely and promptly. I think it's something that I really wanted to emphasise at the end of the report.
So how about for you on? What do you think these seven episodes has changed about how you see young Europeans?
I think the thing that most stayed with me or most surprised me was was when we were discussing one surprising finding in this
report that there's not a big difference between the urgency that is felt about the climate crisis amongst European generations.
And that's that's that's a big contradiction with what is generally assumed that
young Europeans are way more concerned about the climate than older generations,
and that's just not true in the case of Europe. So that was one surprise.
Another thing that did not come out of this podcast as a surprise, but as out of the project was, I think it surprised all of us.
The finding that 53 percent of young Europeans believe that authoritarian states would be better equipped to deal with democracies.
But then something that through the course of this podcast was possible was like how we can
interpret that finding in ways that cohere with other things we know about young Europeans,
you know, namely their appreciation for freedom and democratic values.
So how do we reconcile that finding with this finding?
And one of the interesting takes on that is that it's probably more indicative of young Europeans frustration with institutions,
and that is much more telling about the state of democracy in Europe and the European Union than it is indicative of their suspicion about democracy.
I want to pick up on one thing you said on AI, which really interests me,
which is you talked about the importance of interpreting our results, you know,
because obviously the polls give us some numbers which can be very provocative and stimulating, but it's not always clear what to do with them.
And you know, we kind of discussed through the course of these episodes that they're usually at least two,
often many more ways to look at what a number means.
And I guess it seems to me like part of what we've been trying to do also is to
bring this interpretation not just between us and our guests and each episode,
but also bringing it to a different kind of audience by having a podcast format rather than just a report or just a specific kind of publication.
And I wonder if you've also had new reflections in the course of doing this podcast about what
kind of public interpretation we could encourage on these questions of not just young European,
but also questions of European identity and politics.
Well, I can't help but think about the media when you ask me that I think everyone is very concerned,
rightly so, with the problems that might emerge from new communication technologies that.
Might be affecting our democracies to a certain extent, and I say might, because that's still not well, you know,
well-studied everyone is talking about, you know, the impact of Facebook and other social media platforms on elections and so on.
And we can definitely see that there is some correlation there, but there's still a lot to learn about the actual connexion here.
It still has to be studied. And when we listen to podcasts, I'm a big podcast listener.
And what I love about it is that there's no time limit. There is no concern with, you know, we need to shorten this message,
get it to bite sized package so it can reach our audience in time for the commercial or something.
And you have our in-depth conversations.
More often than not, you actually have people from opposite sides of the spectrum coming together and having a reasonable conversation,
which is something rare these two to listen to these days.
And what I'm getting at here is that, you know, there's more opportunity for better in depth communication and learning and so on about these issues.
And people can participate via multiple media and can interact directly with their information providers, be the journalist institutions and so on.
They can react to them. They can kind of like become a hybrid in that role as well, like representing fellow citizens,
raising important questions that others might have and so on, depending on the degree of involvement or democratic engagement they'd like to have.
So I think there's enormous potential,
but I think we're in a very confusing time where we're adjusting to these technologies and lightly reacting to their most obvious dangers.
But we shouldn't lose sight of their potential for better democratic engagement.
So I think this means that I'm hopeful, at least about the future of democracy, which also applies to Europe.
Are you hopeful about the future of Europe?
This is a question that you've asked all our colleagues, so I am afraid I must now deliver the favour on their behalf.
Yeah, I totally I agree with you on that there are just so many avenues to explore and
hopefully we've looked at a few of those through the course of this project,
including the report and the research and the podcast. I think it's also another huge takeaway from this project is the importance to be
realistic about what can be done and what can't be done and what the constraints are.
So I think that's, you know, it's part of having a realistic hope to to kind of go back and forth between the aspirations and the constraints.
And I think that that's also what we have to think about, you know,
in the future in terms of experimenting with these modes of public engagement and interpretation is how do we get people whose life is so different?
Who's the different languages, different concerns to come together and find the kind of space that they have in common?
But in a sense, it's been really enjoyable. And I think, you know, I've learnt a few more things about young Europeans in this process.
I I remain hopeful.
Our guest today is Timothy Garton Ash and the author of our reports, concluding chapter synergies and trade offs with my co-host Lucas say.
We're also grateful to our funders, the Swedish Nobleman Foundation, the tights,
diphthong and the System McCarter for making the Europe Stories Project and podcast possible.
A huge thanks to our podcast editor, Billy Craigan, our research manager Luisa Mello and our report editor Professor Timothy Garton Ash.
A special thank you to Ellen Leach, said Lily Structure, May Moynihan,
Sophie Verité and Victoria Hansel for contributing to the podcast Production Music by unicorn heads and Cats.
Finally, thank you to the whole Europe Stories Project team. I'm your host and margins, and I'm your host, Lucas, to thank you for listening today.
Check out other episodes of the Europe Stories podcast and find out more about our research project at European Moments dot com.