 Yeah, welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel and this series is History is Here to Help. We need to know history. We need to learn history. We need to see how history affects the present and the future. So how history explains Europe's move to the right and what historical factors are now emerging or re-emerging in Europe. And for this discussion, Tim Affichella, my co-host and Manfred Hennigson are esteemed guests who is an emeritus political science professor who served in Manoa for a long time. I'm not even going to say how many years, Manfred. Fifty years. Oh my god. All right. Thank you for that. Tim, let's start with you. The first point is, is Europe moving to the right? And what are your reasons for saying that? Yes, I believe Europe is moving to the right. They have been doing so for quite some time. And I think a big part of it is immigration and what is the underbelly of immigration, racism. You can think Brexit partially because they didn't want to accept the EU's quota on immigration numbers. And it's problematic in France because there's a large influx of Muslim population. And socially, culturally, that's clashing with the existing French culture. Germany has its issues with the same. So when you have populations intermixing in cultures that are, I won't say segregated, but have not had a high degree of immigration, there's conflicts that are bound to take place. And I think all populism, nationalism, begins with immigration issues. And that is the ultimate social wedge issue. You know, I was so happy to see Angela Merkel accept Middle Eastern migrants when they were having so much trouble in the Middle East. But you know what, what you just said and what we know today in retrospect was predictable, wasn't it? I mean, she was being very high moral bound in leading the effort in Germany to accept immigrants. And other countries were following her lead, too. It was a very noble thing. But wasn't it predictable that this would have a corrosive effect ultimately? I think so. When President Biden came into office, there was outcry about him lifting the numbers of immigrants above and beyond where Donald Trump's numbers were. And I think it goes into a fear of economic insecurities. The old adage that they're going to take your jobs away. Well, those aren't true. Those jobs aren't going to be taken by Americans in the first place. But there's a economic fear factor and it's alive and well. And that fear factor, like all fear, is a great rallying point for populism. Yeah. I don't know why, but this reminds me of Trump's comment, Manfred. Well, the comments of some of his followers about how this group of that group would not replace us. We are the white supremacists and this group will not replace us. And maybe that's what was going on in various countries in Europe when the migrants were heading north and resettling themselves all the way up to Papua Scandinavia and to Britain. And so I ask you, what is the process historically? Is this something that was predictable and historical basis? Look, I'm a little bit reticent to follow Tim's suggestion that immigration is the major issue. You have to remember that you have large non-ethnic groups in almost all Western European countries, especially the people who have colonies like France, Holland, Belgium, England. That was not the issue in Germany. In Germany, you had the guest workers coming in in the 60s from Italy, Spain, Turkey, especially Turkey. And you have now more than 3 million Turkish Muslims living in Germany. Half of them are integrated at German citizenship. The other half don't want to apply for it because they lose property rights in Turkey. So what you have is a somewhat more complicated story. It's not only the recent immigrants. I mean, Angela Merkel asked to keep German borders open in 2015. The reasons for that are not completely clear. She is personally very reticent to talk about motivations for political decisions that will come out maybe in a book in two years. But people, I mean, she often talked about her experience as living in the GDR, having no freedoms of movement, and these restrictions played a major role. And there was another one that I think played a role also. And that was this failure of the conference in 1938 that FDR had organized in order to deal with the issue of the Jewish refugees from Germany and Nazi-occupied Austria. And as you will know of the 32 countries that came to this conference, only one was willing to accept refugees, namely the Dominican Republic. All the others refused. And Angela Merkel is a person who reads a lot of history books and invited when she was chancellor, historians to give talks in the treasury. And I think these two backgrounds, motivations played a major role in her decision. Now, you have also, I think, to understand that in East Germany, you didn't have much experience of non-ethnic Germans. You had workers from Mozambique, from Angola, from Cuba, from North Korea, but they were living in camps. They were not roaming around in West Germany, where you had not only the Black GIs, but you had three and a half million of them from 1945 to 1990. But you had a lot of students from Africa, from China, and other places. So you have, in a way, an ethnic mobility in Germany long before this immigration problem, this recent immigration problem, became an issue. What's the question of degree? There were millions of Middle East migrants, millions of them, they were everywhere. Well, there was a million coming in 2015, but you have a lot of, I mean, look, you had three and a half million Turks in Germany, and you had close to 60,000 German Chinese students. You had a lot of African students. Let me ask this question. Was her decision and the increase in migrants a part of Germany, or that group in Germany that has moved right, did it make people move right to see these migrants? Would you agree that Germany is moving right? No, it's not moving right. These Reichsberger people who want to restore the Reich, it's not the Third Reich, it is the Second Reich that was founded in 1871, and there is a very funny German song you can get on YouTube, it's called Wir wollen uns ein alten Kaiser Wilhelm wiederhaben. We want to get our old Emperor Wilhelm again, but the one with a long beard, meaning it's not Kaiser Wilhelm II, the nut who came to power in 1888, but his father. It's all about nostalgia. I mean, it's a part of it, but look, the Reichsberger are also people who did not want to accept the legitimacy of the Federal Republic, and they did something that you had in the United States too in the Northwest with refusing paying taxes, and you have these anti-tax movements in a way you could say in some countries as a beginning of right-wing populism. You have it in Scandinavia and Denmark. Glystrup was a very famous anti-tax activist, and he graded then strangely enough a party that was called Progress, even though it was just the opposite of Progress, what he graded. Sounds like that's sedition, if you reject the federal government. No, absolutely. It's a seditious movement. I mean, like you have it in the United States. But I mean, look, in the United States, you have the background of the Civil War. And as I mentioned the last time in our discussion, what is sad about the history of the United States is that people do not remember that the people who were in charge of this sedition in 1861 were not indicted. They were not put before a court. They were not- It's too late for that now because Congress might get around to that. No, but I think people don't know that, you know, that Lincoln's successor, I mean, Lincoln was assassinated in April of 1965, and his successor Andrew Johnson was a Southerner, a former slave owner, and he exculpated all of these treasonous people. And Jefferson Davis, the president, was under house arrest for a few years, but he was never indicted. He should have been hanged. And so what happens then, this lost cause made the Southerners angry, and they put up everywhere monuments with these losers sitting on horseback in parks and at university campuses. And so what you have in the United States is this institutionalization of the lost cause, and we are still, in a way, suffering from this- Oh, sure. I mean, there are people around that say the Civil War is still going on. Let me shift gears for a minute, Manfred. So we saw an attempt to turn the government upside down in Germany, and what does that represent? Who is doing what and why, and what can we learn from their effort? And what can we learn from the reaction response of the public and the German government? Look, it is a deranged group led by a deranged leader, finally the 13th, Prince from Royce, whatever, all of the other family members call him a nut. And he is- I mean, that group is not a neo-Nazi group. It is a resentment group that for some strange reason feels that the West German constitutional order that came into being in 1949 is an illegitimate imposition by the Allies, the victors of World War II. And for that reason, they want to return to the Reich. Now, the Reich is not the Third Reich, as I said, but it's the Reich that collapsed in 1918, you know, when all of- when the Kaiser and all of the other monarchs in Germany- They don't have the Nazi ideology then. No, but I mean, they're attracting some of the people from the right wing also, so they have not merged. So they are a group of- I mean, they are a group of disaffected ideological people, and I think they are led by people who are deranged. Okay, well, let's go to others in Europe. I mean, Hungary moving right. Marine Le Pen, you know, made an interesting showing against Macron, and she'll continue to- So, Tim, tell us what it looks like in terms of these various countries, which all have indications. You know, as Manfred says, maybe it's just spurious, but it's there, and it keeps on repeating itself across borders. What's the connection, and what causes this, and what effect does it have, and where is it? That's multiple compound, but I really- I'm sorry to say this, I enjoy asking you multiple compound question. Yeah, I know that. You know, what's the common denominator? I'll kind of stick with what I said initially. I think it's someone's attempt, and I'll call them a wingnut, be it Donald Trump or this prince the 13th. I mean, the common denominator is preservation of a culture, and the audacity of a world leader or my country's leader to somehow diminish or blemish the culture that we're accustomed to. By the way, for the record, the best thing that ever happened to England was either through colonialism or just immigration over the last decades. Their food has never been better. That is true. I mean, that was- Thank you, Manfred. You measure society by its food, eh? Yeah, absolutely. Food, art, you know, what they drink. The empire. Yeah. The bad food. So, I mean, let's not forget Italy, and the recent election there, and I think a big part of them, again, is this- I won't call it nationalism. I'll call it cultural preservation. Let's call it populism. And I think that is the common denominator. That's the entryway. That's the camel's nose under the tent, and it goes from there. Then it just becomes an under-adulterated quest for power, which ultimately leads, I think, to fascism. Yeah, but populism is dangerous. Is populism good for Europe? No. It's not my opinion. No. But you see, the Italian case, there is a different dimension also. They have never really processed their history. I mean, in 1943, Mussolini becomes removed from office. It was just the reaction of other military leaders to the successful landing of the Allies in Sicily. And then the German hijack, the hijack Mussolini, and put him up in office in northern Italy, where he was then, in the end, captured by the partisans with his mistress, sentenced to death and hung by their feet in Milan. It was really an extraordinary picture. Never escaped in a red, sports car. But that also, no. But you see, the interesting thing about Italy is that you do not have really the same kind of active confrontation of the record as you have had in Germany in the last, since the late 70s, or the mid 70s. So for that reason, I always surprised, you know, encounter fascist statues in Italy. And now, you know, the Prime Minister, she is self-declared neo-fascist, you know. So, when you go to Scandinavia, it's different. You know, in Scandinavia, you have this nostalgic notion of a past, you know, that they do not want to let go. They want not to have the Euro. Only Finland has it, but Sweden and Denmark, even though they are part of the European Union, they don't want to have it. Nor we didn't join. They want to keep their monarchies. You know, even though you have these tensions between these three countries, because Sweden was too close to Nazi Germany, the king was a close friend of Hitler. Whereas, you know, the Norwegian king left. And the Danish king, you know, was obviously not supportive of the Germans when they occupied it in April of 1940. But you have within, you know, Scandinavia, these tensions between the Norwegians and the Danes on one side and the Swedes on the others. You know, they have not forgiven the Swedes for their collaborationist mentality during World War II. The Finns are different, you know, they were fighting on the German side. So there are all kinds of complicated historical issues, you know, in Scandinavia when it comes to that. But what combines them now is this unwillingness to replace their ethnic identity through letting millions of people come in. In Germany, you have now 25, 20 percent of people having a migrant background. Now, it's not always migrants from Africa or some of the Middle Eastern countries. They also come from within the European Union. So you have a lot of, you know, Bulgarians, Romanians, Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and, you know, over a million Russians. Yeah, I wanted to talk about that. You know, so Ukraine has a fair number of migrants, millions coming, a lot of them from Poland, but some of them to other countries, you know, in Eastern Europe and moving to the West. And so we have a mass migration again. At the same time, we haven't stopped the migration from the Middle East. That continues. But, you know, what I'm getting is now, you got it coming from both sides. If you weren't irritated with the migrants coming from the south, you can be irritated. Some people, I'm sure, will be irritated by the migrants coming from the east. So the whole thing seems to be in flux. And my question to Tim, to both of you, is how does that affect the solidarity of the EU? So one thing we know that people, you know, react to migrants by trying to return to their ethnic history. But the other thing is we need the coalition now in order to, you know, in order to support Ukraine in a war that disturbs the global liberal order, in a war that, you know, undermines the notion of sovereignty. So what effect does all that have on their ability to stay with the coalition? Well, the effect, obviously, I think maybe I'm wrong on this opinion, but it was an underlying reason why Brexit vote went the way it did. And that is, again, the concern of taking on immigration quotas from the EU that Britons felt and they were stoked. But Britons felt that their society and their cultural existence was being diminished. I think half here right now is a real fear, a white male fear, that they're being pushed back in the back of the room. You'll hear the term white replacement. These are very, very emotional issues that people don't take for granted. They're embedded in the human psyche. And when you start threatening people and their cultural existence, be it true or not, and most of it's not true, but the right leader, the right demagogue, can persuade them that that is the issue of the day. You agree with that, Manfred? No. Well, yes, but no. Thank you. We've had that before. One of the most fascinating export articles of Denmark told the United Kingdom and the United States, my brother who's a Scandinavian specialist in Germany always tells me, and it's not a joke, it's male semen. They all want to follow up on Trump's comment, why can't we get these Norwegians? And so the semen export is really a booming industry in Denmark. That's not a joke. I don't think it was the Norwegian aspect. It was the white aspect of that. Yes, but that's no. Yes, the white aspect, but was especially pronounced by Trump's remembrance of how Norwegians look. But that's not the issue. I think Brexit, for example, you always emphasize the quota issue. But you see, England had more than two million workers from within the European Union. Because of the Schengen Agreement, they could move there. Now they are lost, and England suddenly realizes, and I say England because it's not a Scottish or Welsh and a Northern Irish problem because they did not vote for the Brexit. Well, at least Northern Ireland and Scotland didn't. They wanted to stay within the European Union. Now what you are facing in Great Britain today as a result of the Brexit is an economic collapse. And they do not know how to manage that. Now that was predictable. But when you are looking, you also have to remember, and Jay is always talking about contemporary immigration. You have to remember that all of these colonial powers, after they abandoned or their colonies became independent, a lot of collaborating people moved to the metropolitan societies. I mean, you had that in France. You had it in suddenly in Great Britain. You never had it in Germany because Germany was not long enough a colonial power. It ended in World War I. So what you had in Germany, were these guest workers who came in the 60s from European countries initially and then Turkey, and now Germany needs every year 500,000 immigrants in order to keep their level of productivity. Now, ordinary Germans are not aware of that, or I don't know whether they understand that, but people in power know that. The German economy will simply collapse if you do not have this input of foreign... Let me just ask this though. If you have a downturn in the economy, that kind of validates the concerns of the people who think that the migrants are a negative feature. It validates their fear that they will lose their jobs, they will lose their quality of life, their middle class status, whatever it is. And if we have a downturn, for example, in Britain, am I right? Britain is going to move right. So when you have instability in the economy, you have a turn to the right. Isn't that predictable? Yes and no. But remember, the English Prime Minister now is not a white man. He is a guy with Indian background. I'm talking about the economy, Manfred. If the economy goes down, people tend to track that back to the migrant issue. Margaret Thatcher got in that way. Yes. But the interesting thing in England is that despite this downturn, these problems as a result of Brexit, you have now, you could say, a migrant prime minister. So the contradictions are quite amazing. And they are also fascinating when you're watching the Harry and Meghan story. I mean, the unwillingness of the Royal House and the Boulevard press. And I would say a lot of people in the society as a whole, they didn't want to accept Meghan, you know, this mixed race American woman because of racism. I mean, you have not only classism in England, but you have racism as well. And I'm looking forward, you know, watching tonight, you know, the second part of the Harry and Meghan story on Netflix, because I found it absolutely fascinating how intelligent these two people are, the way they are talking, you know, they are not nuts. And it's not simply a kitschy performance. No, it's a very powerful political story and the failure of, you know, the Royal House, you know, after the disaster with Diana, to have the second controversy hit them, you know, this is not good. No, it's not good. It's not good. Let me shift to one other area that we have talked about so often. And that is the connection that that right wing movements use autocrats or would be autocrats use in order to advance their interests. And that is technology. It is social media. And let me add that, you know, Vladimir Putin is using that actively. There was an article a couple of days ago about how Vladimir Putin is trying to divide the German group, the German people on the issue of whether they should support Ukraine. And his argument is a subterfuge argument that he uses social media to advance is that the Ukrainian refugees in Germany are having this negative effect on Germany, on, you know, its social and economic status, and therefore the German people should oppose supporting the war. And the article was in The Times. But look, he had done that before. He does that all the time. That's what he does. But, you know, the thing is that when we find it would appear to be a coincidence about movements around Europe that go to the right, we find also that those movements are supported, if not fomented, by social media, which come from somewhere else or which blanket all of Europe. And so if you say as we suspect that Europe is moving to the right, then social media and the internet have to be part of that. Tim, your thoughts. I couldn't agree more. I mean, social media is the vehicle. But what's behind the vehicle? What's in the vehicle? And that is propaganda. Propaganda is the dark art of rhetoric. Sorry, but Donald Trump, if you didn't watch him from day one, he's using multiple propaganda techniques that are quite effective. And the problem with the United States is, and the media specifically, they weren't well armed to understand and recognize propaganda as it was occurring in front of their very eyes. And so moving forward, I would appreciate the media to point out propaganda techniques that are being employed right then and there in front of the population. Well, they did that in Germany. It came out in the newspaper and, you know, and Vladimir Putin was blamed for it. Manfred, what are your thoughts about this? You have a specific problem in Germany because you have a lot of Russian, Russians living there. I mean, you had 300,000 Russian Jews coming in the 90s when Henry Cole said, you know, any Russian Jew who wants to come to Germany can do so without a visa. So you have the Jewish population in Germany being around 250,000 at this point, many of them coming from Russia, and they are not joining the traditional Jewish communities in Germany. But you have then in addition to that, 1.5 million German Russians, I mean, Germans who were invited by Catherine the Great in the 18th century to settle in Russia, they have come to stay in Germany, and they are very often a target of Putin's propaganda. And sometimes, you know, it works. There was a story of, you know, that they used in order to incite all kinds of unrest that a young 15 or 13 year old girl was raped by a group of Middle Eastern immigrants. And that story really made headlines in Russia, a lover of the Russian foreign minister, you know, used it. And then it turned out that was not happening. What was happening is that this young woman, you know, had Middle Eastern friends and talked with them. But there was no rape involved in the story. But it had become an independent story and worked, you know, emotionally, very well for Putin for some time until they realized he was lying. So I... Well, that's what he does. He does it in Europe, he does it everywhere, does it in the United States for elections. Right. Well, remember propaganda is the creation of a whisper of the truth that's been concocted into a big lie. So there's always a whisper of something that was truthful at the moment. Maybe the characters were the truth, but nothing else other than that. You asked about the European Union before. And I think one very interesting, I mean, one bad thing that happened was this corruption scandal with the vice president of the European Parliament. You know, her father was seen with a suitcase leaving a hotel with, I don't know, 500,000 euros. But the other thing that I... The positive thing about the European Union at this point is that they managed to stop giving Orban money because, you know, and they had the majority for that, which is quite extraordinary. And on the other hand, Orban did not stop these plans for the reconstruction of the Ukrainian infrastructure. You know, the European Parliament passed a resolution that they will do that. And Hungary did not veto that, and Poland didn't veto that either. So those are positive signs that indicate to me that whatever the scandal, you know, of the Greek second deputy leader of the Parliament may do to the stability of the European Union, it's the Oslo von der Leyen, you know, the president is still, I think, doing a good job. I wanted to ask you about that, Manfred, because, you know, the two are, they affect each other, the stability of Europe, which we've been talking about, and the stability of the United States, which we haven't talked about. And so the question I put to you, and it's the last question because we're running out of time, the question I put to you is, what kind of policy should the United States have in terms of affecting this of, you know, somehow encouraging, somehow, somehow preventing, preserving, preventing the move to the right in Europe, and preserving democracy such as it exists. What can we do? You said that Biden doing a good job. What else can he do? What can his successor do? Well, Biden is, I think, doing a good job by supporting the European Union. It's political goals. The European Union as such, Trump was against it. You know, he didn't want the European Union to succeed. He wanted to promote nationalism. And I mean, he went to... He was successful in the sense that he tended to destabilize the EU, didn't he? Yeah, that would work. And now it's a matter of recovering from that. It didn't work. I mean, yes, he destabilized it by supporting Orban and the the piss party in... I'm sorry, that's the acronym for the ruling party in Poland. He supported both of them because he felt, you know, these are the two countries that almost troubles him for the stability and unity of the European Union. And so he exploited that. But I do not think he has succeeded. I think on the contrary, whatever Trump does when it comes to Europe will unite the European Union. And for that reason, you know, I do not think that the European Union is in danger. I mean, there are troubles, but it's not in danger of falling apart. So what can we do to preserve it? What can we do to, may I say, reverse the move to the right? By getting rid of the right being threatened in this country. Well, what a perfect answer. Okay, we're almost out of time. Tim, why don't you take the anchor on this? I agree with Manfred wholeheartedly on his comment here. What can we do? Try to educate all citizens that immigration isn't a threat to their sovereignty, if you will, to their cultural identity, that a lot of positive things do take place when we get different society and cultures enmeshed into our society, our current society. So the greatest thing you could do is start educating on the values of different peoples and population and helping them out in really dire situations. Yeah, it's about the United States as the city on the hill, the beacon. And if we could be more pure about that, then we could be a global leader on these issues. Well, thank you so much, Manfred. Great to have you on the show. Manfred Heddington and Tim Apichella, thank you both. Aloha. Thank you. Aloha. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktecawaii.com. Mahalo.