 I'm like a Turk in Turkey. Well, first of all, thanks for having me here again. And it's a pleasure to be here with you, to reconnect with the liberal libertarian ideas every year, like in this wonderful place. I'm going to speak about how the Ottoman Empire and its transformation into modern nation states influenced the Middle East and why it might not be a great thing, at least it's debatable. But before that, I would like to touch upon Dr. Stone's, Professor Stone's speech. I'm a fan of Dr. Stone and his work. I very much agree with what he said about Turkish society and culture and history. And one thing I would like to emphasize probably on that, or at an angle, is that I think Turks have been struggling to understand whether westernization and modernization are the same things. I think the Kamalist revolution basically was the idea that you need to modernize. And modernization means you have to westernize. So you have to get rid of your traditional culture. That was one model. And the people who objected at that model in Turkey, which partly includes me, are not necessarily anti-modern. Few people would be anti-modern until the traditionalists in Turkey. But they said, well, we will modernize, but modernization doesn't equal westernization. So it means you don't have to listen to Mozart, but you should get more technology and make more music, your music better, or you can have your Bollywood as the Indians do, but you don't have to be the exact replica of Hollywood. You can modernize within your culture, retaining your values. Of course, you'll change some things in your culture. But the idea in Turkey, especially the Kamalist idea, that you have to be like the West exactly. And that's why we had excesses of that revolution, like the famous Hetz revolution in 1925. Boller Hetz was made compulsory. And the Fez was banned. So the idea was by varying both the brimmed hats. We would be modern. But I think, on the other hand, the other camp, the political camp in Turkey, which ultimately the AKP is tied to, says, no, we will not change our hats or we will not change our Fez, but we want railroads and telegraph and now internet and construction and we'll build our country. We need education and so on, but there's a distinction between that and I think in the Turkish political sphere. And Turkey has been this, is a, I think a case study of experiments in which these two forms of modernization, these two visions of modernization have struggled throughout the 20th century. And I'd say now I think the conservative side has been more dominant lately in Turkey. The side which views modernization something that you can do within your own culture. Well, anyway, that's another philosophical or like a political discussion. Today my talk, which actually haunts you know, brought to discussion a few months ago brilliantly, is the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Middle East. And I would like to begin with a map we have I think that technology right now. So this, well what you see here is, well the Ottoman Empire was a big place and this is what was the Ottoman Empire in its largest form, like a broad map. What we call today North Africa, the Arabic Middle East and the Balkans was the Ottoman Empire until, well, this is the Empire's largest form in the 17th century and the Empire lost its Balkan states gradually from the 18th century onwards. But the Arab provinces remained as a part of the Empire well into early 20th century. And when the Empire fell in World War I and during the process which led to that destruction, some 26 nation-states emerged from the Ottoman Empire. All the countries we're speaking about in the Middle East right now, like Egypt, Tunis, Algeria, Libya, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, these were all were the Ottoman Empire. It was based in Istanbul of course and like it was one of the, like it lasts for six centuries, one of the big political phenomena in world history. And of course we, as the products or as the children of the modern age, we always assume or not we but we are taught to assume that the age of Empire was like a black, dark age and with the rise of modern nation-states everything got better. It's not a, I mean it's a debatable position. It's a debatable idea. So I'll try to bring that a little bit to discussion today. What happened is that when the Empire fell, all these nation-states emerged and they were modern and they defined themselves in a national way. But there was a problem with identity with all those states because in the Ottoman Empire the political structure was by definition multi-ethnic and multi-religious. In other words, there was not a Ottoman-ness that conflicted with your Turkish-ness or your Kurdish-ness or your Jewish-ness or your Armenian-ness. You could be an Ottoman-Armenian. You could be an Ottoman Turk. You could be an Ottoman Arab. You could be an Ottoman Albanian. In the pre-modern era, before the 19th century, this was secured by the Islamic system of Zimmi's, which protected people. The Muslim-Muslims were superior. Jews and Christians were given protected status, not equal but second class protected status. But in the 19th century, even that was reformed and the Ottoman Empire accepted the idea of equal citizenship for Christians and Jews in the middle of the 19th century with the Islahat reform of 1856. It began with the Tanzima reforms of 1839 but 1856. The Sultan declared, all citizens are equal and they are all Ottoman, they are all Ottoman. That's why the Ottoman Empire employed large numbers of Armenians or Jews or Greeks in Ottoman bureaucracy in the 19th century and late 19th century. And when the Ottoman Parliament was opened in 1876, there were a large number of Jewish-Armenian or Greek or some other non-Muslim representative of those non-Muslim communities. And in the Ottoman constitution of 1876, Ka'ununi Asasi, the fundamental law, because I mean the Ottoman was a monarchy but it became a constitution monarchy with that law. One of the clauses states all citizens are called Osmanlı, Ottoman, regardless of race and creed. Again, you could be a Jewish-Armenian, you could be a Turk, you could be an Armenian. But in the new states, this thing, this pluralism got challenged. And let's see the next map, please. Sorry, it's a complicated. I'm not really good with the technology, so I'm not modern enough yet, so Turkey is maybe doing a good thing. Okay, this is the modern Middle East in which we have all these nation-states. And Turkey is only one of them and there are some 20 more of these nation-states. But the borders of these states were not drawn according to some natural border. I mean the border between Syria and Iraq, as you can see drawn by straight lines, they were drawn not based on the realities on the ground, they were not drawn according to Ottoman provinces because the Ottoman Empire had a system of provinces. So for example, the country that we called Iraq was actually three provinces, Basra, Musul and Baghdad. And but the Musul province was going a little further north. And for example, in Syria, it was like Damascus was a province. And these were, there were no borders between these countries. So for like a villager in 1920 who was living in what became the Turkish Iraqi border, there was no concept for a border before. So these borders were drawn by mostly, well by treaties, by the French and the British who decided to colonize the Middle East. And it was actually decided in a famous agreement by the British and the French called the Cycus-Picot agreement of 1916. Can we check the next slide please? Yeah, this shows the French and the British zone of influence. The blue part is the French influence which ultimately became Syria and Lebanon and the pink and the red one ultimately became Iraq and trans-Jordan which became Jordan and also of course Israel there as well, Israel-Palestine. So these countries just sat down basically on a map discussed, this should be the country, that should be the country. So it created these countries called Iraq or Syria. There was historical regions there but they were not separate countries. So then in just a few decades, what you had was that before you would have a country called the Ottoman Empire from one end to the other end you could just go without any border. Then you had these very well-defined borders. And actually there's a funny movie about this by a Turkish director Sinan Cetin called Propaganda and it was actually shown here a few years ago. It's a story of a village in southeastern Turkey, probably a Kurdish village. And like one day in the early 1920s, a delegation from Ankara, the new Turkish capital, comes with their marches and so on and they say, we brought you a border. And they say, the villagers say, what is a border? Like it's just this barbed wire which will protect you from your enemies. And they say, we have no enemies. Like the next villages that I'm talking about, like it's their relatives. So the whole, so and the borders actually were created and even not just barbed wire but land mines were made or planted. Today, still between Turkey and Syria, there's a border with land mines and barbed wire on both sides. And the people on both sides of the border are basically the same ethnic and religious groups. They're relatives. They wanna see each other, actually. Turkey recently began an open border policy, allowed visa-free travel and that's a good thing. And I'll come back to that. But until today, these societies which actually were the same society were actually divided artificially between these nation states. Now, but having a border is not just enough. If you are a nation state, you also want to, I mean, having a border gives you idea of a tidy country. You can well define it, you know, where it ends and begins. But you also want to have a well-defined society. You want to have a nation. Again, that is the new idea which began with the French Revolution and which actually created, killed the Ottoman Empire, was, I mean, the Ottoman Empire lagged behind the West in terms of technology and military skills and so on, definitely. But what really killed the empire was nationalism. Because after the French Revolution, this idea that an ethnic group should become a nation and should have its own state became a fashionable idea. And it began in the Balkans with revolts against the empire, the Greeks, the Serbs, and the Bulgarians. And these moments of national liberation are often, you know, traced as moments of freedom for those countries. In one sense it was because, I mean, some consider the Ottoman rule as an Ottoman yoke. And that's, I think, it's volatilistic when you look at it from a historical perspective. But creating a nation state also created the zeal to make that nation homogeneous. There was a famous slogan in the Balkans, Serbia is for the Serbs, Greece is for the Greeks, and Bulgaria is for the Bulgarians, which meant the non-Serbian, the non-Bulgarian, or the non-Greek people would become a problem and they would be forced to migrate. Or they could remain and become, you know, like a community discriminated against, or they could, in many cases, they were forced to migrate. They were ethnic cleansing. That's why in the Ottoman psyche, the idea of a national liberation within the empire is connected with the killing and the slaughter and the expulsion of the Turks. Because throughout the 19th century, when there was a national liberation movement in Serbia, Serb, Turks, or Muslims who were also considered as Turks, even they're non-Turkish, were seen by the Serbs as the enemy. So they came back, they fled to Istanbul, and Turks saw these refugees coming from there. And that fear of an enemy within which will create its own territory and then will exterminate your people is the background of the decision to expel the Armenians. That disastrous decision in 1915 to expel the Armenians from Anatolia because when the Ottomans were in war in 1915 and Russians supported the Armenian insurgency and some Armenians revolted against the Algorand Empire, the Ottomans then thought, the Ottoman government of the time, the young Turk government, they had internalized the nationalism of the era. And they said, now we will do it first. And unfortunately it was a horrific disaster. I'm not like supportive of that decision. And hundreds of thousands of Armenians perished. But the blame was I think the whole era and the whole spirit of creating these nation states, homogeneous nation states. And I think none of the countries or none of the societies at that era is totally immune from that I think problem. And some of the countries were homogenized by ethnic lyncings, expulsions. There were more civilized means that we call population exchange. And Turkey did that with Greece right after establishing a republic in 1923. Actually even before the public in 1922, there were many Greek citizens, there were many Greeks in Turkey who spoke Greek, there were Ottoman citizens before. Now they would have the Turkish citizens. And there were many Turks living in Greece. And the two countries decided to have a population exchange in which Turks, just Turkey told its Greek citizens to leave the country overnight. And they were put on ships and sent to Greece. And the Turks living in Greece were similarly sent to Turkey. Some people were left and especially Greeks in Istanbul were exempted from that. And the Turks in Western Thrace, some particular part of Greece were exempted. Still we have those as minorities, both countries. But one of the tragedies is that those people were seen as aliens before they immigrated. They were seen as aliens in where they went as well. So for the Greeks, the newcomers were the Turkish Greeks which they didn't fully like and didn't see as fully Greek. And the same thing happened in Turkey where the newcomers were seen as the Turks of Greece which were not again the same people. So this effort to create these homogenous societies created a lot of trauma in the lives of these peoples. And all across the region. A particularly tell-tale example is the situation of the Kurds. I mean, that stone referred to the Kurds in a brilliant way. I mean, how the Spanish have a problem with the Basque or the Basque problem with the Spanish. Maybe one difference is that the Kurds are also on the privileged part of Turkish society where the Basque region is not like a poor part of Spain. But the Kurdish story is very interesting because it tells us, it shows us an important case study of this transformation between the empire and to the nation state and how it created a important trouble. Next slide, please. Okay, here's a map showing Kurds as a people. This dark color. The Arbaker is one of the important Kurdish dominated cities in Turkey, like Oreal and the Kurdish cities. As you can see, the Kurds as a people are scattered in a large geography which is covered by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. I mean, the Ottoman Empire, there was not a Kurdish issue because the Ottoman Empire was not a Turkish state. So, Kurds were just one of the peoples of the empire which were not, you know, inspired by the ideas of modern nation states. So, you don't have nationalist Kurdish rebellions against the Ottoman Empire. There were some reactions to centralization in the 19th century. So, there were some extra taxes and some Kurdish local chief days who didn't want to pay taxes. There were some problems with that, but there was no Kurdish nationalist uprising. But, in the 20th century, when the Middle East was divided between Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and when these countries wanted to define their notion of citizenship, the problem began, especially in Turkey because Turkey is the country in the Middle East which is most modernized, but also it is also the country which went to the most extremes in terms of homogenizing its population, or at least trying to homogenize its population. And you can see this transition in the Turkish definition of citizenship clearly. In the Ottoman Constitution, as I said, it said all Ottoman citizens are called Ottomans regardless of, you know, race and creed. In the Constitution of 1921, when the Turkish parliament, the war parliament, did, you know, hastily in the time of war, but there were also Kurdish deputies, it said, it didn't define any citizenship, and it said the state of Turkey. State of Turkey, not the Turkish state, but the state of Turkey. In 1924, though, once the war was won, because the war was a war of the Turks and the Kurds together against the occupying powers, the definition of citizenship changed, and it said every citizen of Turkey is called a Turk. And in the Constitution of 1961, which the generals drafted, and in the Constitution of 1982, which the generals drafted again after their military coups, because in Turkey the military does a coup once in a while, you know, when they put the board in their barracks. They're not doing it anymore, but you know, that was the case until recently. And they drafted these coups first. It says every citizen of Turkey is a Turk. That's a constitutional clause of Turkey. But Kurds don't think that they are Turks. And once you define Turkey as a Turkish state, then the minorities, like the Kurds, have a problem. And that's why the Turkish Republic had its major, you know, uprising in 1925, right after the Constitution of 1924, in which a Kurdish group led by an Islamic, like a Sheikh, revolted against the Republic. And you know, there was a big clash between the military and that group. And that was suppressed, you know, quite brutally. And then from that point on, from 1925 to today, there has been more than two dozen Kurdish rebellions in Turkey. And the Kurds rebelled because they did not, they wanted to be defined as Kurds and they did not accept being Turkified. And in the face of that, the state intensified its effort to make them more Turkish. So there's a famous motto of Ataturk that every Turkish knows and it's written in every wall. And it says, ne mutlu Türküm DNA, which means how happy is the one who says, I am a Turk. So it's a different concept than the, for example, U.S., the founding of U.S. in the United States, you know, there's the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So there's the idea that you will pursue to your own happiness. Here in Turkey, the state tells you how you will be happy. You will be happy by being a Turk. And the funny thing is, I mean, it's about happiness, but the first time I went to the Arbaqur, the biggest Kurdish city in Turkey. Well, now the biggest Kurdish city is in Istanbul, that's a different story, but the traditional biggest Kurdish city. In the Arbaqur, there's this military garrison in the middle of the city, which is protected by like watchtowers and machine guns and so on. And in one of the walls of the garrison, it says ne mutlu Türküm DNA, how happy is the one who says, I'm a Turk. Then there is a very high barbed wire wall to protect that writing from the citizens of the city, who are not Turkish and who are not really not happy by defencing. So this making people Turkish has been the amazing policy of the Turkish public court decades. And it is like engraved in every official text. For example, every Turkish student when they go to school from the beginning, from age 17 to the high school, you have to take an oath every morning. And the oath starts by saying, I'm Turkish, I'm righteous, I'm hardworking. Then it goes on and you say, oh my the other Turk, who has given us this day, we will relentlessly walk on your path, then you do do it, come on, something. And at the end of the oath, you say, let my existence be a gift to Turkish existence. So there are two problems there, I think, from my point of view. First of all, the individual is sacrificed for the collective, that's one problem. I mean, I'm a Turk, but I don't want to sacrifice my existence to Turkish existence. I mean, I respect Turkish existence, but I can sacrifice or not sacrifice it, it's my choice. That's one problem. The other problem is, some people are not even Turkish in this country, why would they sacrifice their existence to, I mean, I would not sacrifice my existence to, with all the respect of Scottish existence, for example, and I'm a Scottish, I respect them very much. Why would people do that? So Turkey has struggled intensely with this problem, and for decades and decades, the state did not accept that there are Kurds. It was actually illegal to say that there are Kurds in Turkey. In 1982, I mean, this was the paradigm created under Kamalist period from 1925 to 1950, where Turkey was a single party regime. The only party was the Kamalist party and it was running the whole system. They installed this cult of Turkishness and that everybody, the idea that everybody is Turkish. And then after that period, there were times of little softening because elected governments came to power. They decreased some of the hawkishness of the regime, but then the military would come and restore the regime and also be focusing on the Kurdish question. So, for example, the military government of 1982 imprisoned Seraphettin Elci, a politician in Turkey, for saying, I am a Kurd and there are Kurds in Turkey. That was separatist propaganda, so he was imprisoned for that. So until 1990s, it was illegal to say that there are Kurds in Turkey, legal to speak Kurdish because there was a law saying that any language other than Turkish cannot be spoken. Well, English is fine, that modernizes us. French is fine, but local languages other than Turkish could not be spoken. Now, none of this, of course, I should say, justifies the brutality of the Kurdish insurgencies. I mean, including the PKK. So, I mean, they reacted to this oppression, but they created their own very oppressive movements in which attacks civilians and it may kill many people in Turkey. But the insurgency between the state and the PKK created like a huge death fall. The number of casualties as a result of the war between the PKK and the secretive forces is 40,000 people in 20 years. This is like 10 times more than the death toll of the conflict between the IRA and the British government. It's a huge death toll. And where Turkey will head from that, still unknown, there was a bomb in Istanbul two days ago. I mean, Istanbul's a safe, nice place generally. I mean, if you wanna go, but occasionally, with an Istanbul, they can make an attack. And of course, the conflict is mostly going on in the Southeast. And right now to, and this is just one of the conflicts which arose from the legacy of the idea of these nations stays in the Middle East. If you go to Syria, well, you will see there's a different structure there. In Syria, in Turkey, there's this majoritarian majority, rule on the Kurds and Kurds as a minority feel oppressed. If you go to Syria, there's a minority rule. The minority, a Levite minority, which rules the country because the French left them behind, has like a domination over the Sunni majority. And the Sunni majority is revolting these days and the people of Assad are shooting them for protesting against the regime. If you go to Iraq, you will see different status. Like in Iraq, the Sunnis used to be the dominant class, whereas the Shiite majority, which makes almost 60% of the population was marginalized. Now they have a comeback and after the fall of Saddam, now Iraq is trying to create like a system in which this metered Shiite known as Sunnis will be marginalized. And of course there's a Kurdish element in Iraq as well. If you go to Lebanon, you will see a very different system, you have even more groups that are trying to maintain a political system after a bloody civil war. If you go to like Gulf states, you will see Sunni majorities oppressing some Shiite groups. And Shiite is always seen as a problem. So the states which are basically legacies of the colonial rule and the political structures which are legacies of the colonial rule. Because in most countries, as I said, when the British or the French were leaving, they left behind something. It was sometimes good. I mean they left that good education system on nice railways. I mean colonialism has exactly the contributions to be honest, to this part of the world. But it also, it was a doom to legacy in the sense that it left a particular group that the French or the British decided to work with as the dominant group. Or in some cases you had like independence movements which fought against the British or the French or the Italians in North Africa. And then those groups becoming, I'll tell you the website. So what to do in a region like this? Like will this region be like this always? And will there be ever peace of mind? Well there are theories about how a better Middle East came. And here is a theory, a particular theory which I don't like, but it's an alternative. Can we please check the next slide? This is a suggestion by a U.S. Colonel published in a U.S. Military Magazine and he says this can be a better Middle East if we can create a group for every ethnic group, a state for every ethnic group, it will be better he says. For example, then Turkey would be divided, there would be a free Kurdistan. Syria stays there, Iraq is divided between the Sunni Iraq and Arab Shia state. There's a greater Jordan, I mean Israel's back in pre-67, that's a good idea, but you know sort of thing. There's Medina and Saudi Arabia is divided, everything is divided. So the idea is that there are ethnic groups which don't have their estates, so let's give them more states. So let's create a, let's just continue the tide. I mean it began with the fall of the empire and like Balkans and with the Serbian revolt. Let's go on more, so let's give the Kurds another state. But when you do this, you will have other problems. For example, among the people whom we call the Kurds, there's another group called Zaza. And Zaza says, no, we are not Kurdish, the Kurds want to assimilate us. So we'll create a Zazaistan among Kurdistan. And in every region that you define by a majority, there's always a minority. Among the Kurdish parts of Turkey, within the Kurdish part, there are some Turkish ethnic groups. And Kurds live not just in historical Kurdish areas, as I said, they live in Istanbul as well. So there is actually no way that you can really give every ethnic group a state and think that this will be a wonderful place. And now the alternative idea, which first of all, there's no good idea around, but the probably better alternative is not to just create more and more states, which will probably fight with each other and turn into sparas in themselves, like war machines and which will try to create their own homogenous societies. Instead of doing that, let's just accept the status quo, let's just try to diminish the role of these states, decentralize them, and let's get rid of the borders between them as much as we can. Let's just, instead of maximizing the state system, let's minimize it. Let's just make the state system less dominant on our social reality. And actually that's an idea that is being promoted right now by the Turkish government, Turkish foreign minister Ahmed Davutoglu. Now Turkey is defined by Erdogan in the past, because if you type Erdogan, everybody knows him. He's a strong prime minister, sometimes a little angry, so there's two angry prime minister. But Turkish foreign minister Davutoglu is also an important man in terms of shaping Turkish vision. He is the brain behind Turkish foreign policy. And from the first day on, he was criticizing this divisions in the Middle East, artificial divisions, and he says, we have to get rid of them. How do we get rid of them? Well, you cannot abolish states in one day, at least. But his vision was, he said, let's get rid of these borders in the sense of let's promote free trade. Let's open all the borders and people should be able to travel. Let's promote free travel. That's why Turkey now abolished its visa system with Syria or Jordan or like Beirut. So you can, without a visa, people can travel around between those countries. Turkey began to promote something like a primitive EU in the region in the sense that countries can have more ties. And in one of his speeches, Davutoglu said, the, your security, the security of our country is not based on the number of tanks in your border, but on the number of trade agreements you make with your neighbor. The more you trade with them, the more you understand that you're interdependent and the more you will want them to flourish and yourself it will flourish. So I think that that's a better vision for this part of the world and maybe the whole world, but especially in the Middle East, the societies in this region already have these historical contacts and they already have a historical culture connection. And opening up, opening them up will allow them, I think, to create a more liberal state within themselves. And how many Ministers are there in this, five Ministers? Another thing I think we should add upon this is the promises of the Arab Spring, that is lately we're watching that. I mean, it began in Tunis and moved on to Egypt and Libya and Syria became much more dramatic and Libya turned into civil war. But basically there was a prejudice in the West. Many people were looking in the Middle East and they were saying, oh, this country, this region is full of dictatorships. So probably the Arabs love dictatorships. Why would otherwise all those countries are in liberal, strong states, which oppressor people? Well, people actually don't play dictatorships. I mean, the reason why there are authoritarian strong states in the region was not because, you know, majority of the societies favored them, but because it was a legacy of a doomed, like doomed political structure. It began with the fall of the empire and it has historical roots. I mean, it goes back to like a feudalism in this part of the world, you know, that there are historical reasons for it. But also, that was also the fact that some of the Western countries, especially the United States, for a long time preferred dictators to more liberal regimes. Because dictators were the one who were helping the US in terms of foreign policy with oil contracts or making peace with Israel. So for a long time, the West said, we don't care. We just want a strong man in that country who will be good for our interests. And it was none other than Condoleezza Rice, who accepted that in 2005. She said, you know, for a long time we preferred stability or democracy and you know, it was not good for both. And so I think the region, all like the uprisings, the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia has shown that people of this region, like people everywhere in the world, want to be free. They want to be free from a government which imposes ideologies. They want to be free from a government which tortures people and which is not, you know, questioning people's addresses, like aspirations. And in the long run, what will be is that, what will be good for the region is, first of all, forcing those countries to liberalize their laws and systems. And secondly, allowing those countries to have better links between them. Because the more closed a society is, the more borders you have, and the more barbed wires you have around society, the more the authoritarian state in the society has a grip on its people. And that's why invading Iraq really did not help the Middle East, but giving them Twitter and Facebook helped a lot. So allowing people to go beyond their, you know, bar guard borders, understanding the world, being exposed to new ideas has been helpful, as in this case. And actually the history shows that, you know, the history between the West and the East shows that people in this part of the world have always benefited from peaceful interactions with the West. I mean, think things and foundations and schools in this part of the world have always been helpful. That helps, you know, force liberal ideas, democratic ideas in this part of the world. But on the other hand, invasions and bombings and they do not help. They do not help. They create more reaction and actually they create a feeling of being on the threat. And also to add up on that, the peace between Israel and Palestine, that's another important thing. And if they cannot be sold, people in this part of the world will continue to think that, you know, the West is against them or not, you know, caring for their rights or not looking at them in a justice, from a justice perspective. So ultimately, I think this history shows that there is nothing that honorable or that, you know, there's nothing about the nation state that we should really take as a great idea. I mean, for a long time people thought the empires were the dark age and the nation states emerged and nation states are the best era. That's the zenith of human history and human evolution. I don't think that is the case. That is a phase in our history. Maybe a few centuries from now, people will live in a different structure. Maybe there will be no states. Maybe there will be more loose states. Then maybe there will be a more federation structure in the world we can know. That depends on technology and so on. But the nation state, like all other systems before, had its, you know, some strengths, but also had its own important troubles and problems, especially in this part of the world which is very diverse, ethnic and religiously. The nation state has created maybe sometimes more problems than the blessings it brought. And how to tame the nation state I think will be a key question in the years to come. And the indigenous cultures of this region, including Islam, I think will be an important tool to work on that question. Because in traditional Islamic thought, the state is not seen something that you should venerate. The state is not seen something as, you know, as an object of worship which the nation state has become. It is rather seen as a tool to ensure that people obey law and order. But, you know, as a tool which should be tamed and kept under control. And I have been working on that by the way that's a final point. And can there be an Islamic argument for liberalism? And my answer is yes, but I don't have time for that right now in this talk. This book, which I have in two months, coming in July, I address the Muslim case for the liberalism there. Well, thank you so much.