 Good afternoon everybody and hello. My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the Director of Research here at the Institute of International European Affairs in Dublin. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this webinar. We're truly delighted to be joined by Stefan Auer, Associate Professor in European Studies at Hong Kong University. Professor Auer will discuss the challenges relating to Europe's Eastern border in a time of war in Europe, amongst other things. Professor Auer is going to speak for approximately 15 minutes and then we'll go to Q&A with you, our audience. Professor Auer will use some slides at the start of his presentation. As ever, you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screens. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you. And we'll come to as many of them as possible once Professor Auer has finished his address. And finally, by way of housekeeping, a reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. And please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. I'll now formally introduce Stefan Auer and hand the floor over. Stefan Auer is Associate Professor in European Studies at the University of Hong Kong and an expert on nationalist movements in Central Europe and crisis governance and management or mismanagement within the European Union. Some of his major works include European Disunion, Democracy Sovereignty and the Politics of Urgency, published by Hearst in 2022, and Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe, published with Routledge in 2004. And this book was awarded the prize for best book in European Studies by the University Association for Contemporary European Studies, UACs, the Leading Academic EU Studies Association in Europe. Professor Auer, of course, has written widely on European affairs for the likes of the South China Morning Post, the Australian and CNBC and elsewhere. I'm really looking forward to this timely discussion. Professor Auer, thanks very much for being with us. Thanks for being back in virtual Dublin, of course. The shame you can't be with us in person, but I guess this will do. And the floor is yours for the next 15 minutes. Thank you. Thank you, Barry, for your kind introduction. I'm flattered. I'm humbled. I'm honored to be invited. It really feels like a return to Dublin. I have very fond memories of Dublin. It's where my academic career started at the University College Dublin, the Dublin European Institute, back then headed by Professor Brigid Lafan, later Ben Tonra, both excellent colleagues and friends. I could not have wished a more amazing start to my academic career, so very fond memories and a great honor to be with you and with your guests. So, Hartford, thanks to Dr. Barry Colfer and Alexander Conway for invitation and organizing this. So this is a return of sort, even if only virtually. In fact, it was almost exactly 20 years ago that at UCD we organize a conference on a similar topic reclaiming the future, the Central European quest that was at the time of the UCD and EU enlargement. Of course now the EU faces much more challenging enlargement and much more challenging Central European quest, which is what I want to discuss and can you see my slides. Yeah, yeah, all good. Yeah. Because just a year after that, I was fortunate, lucky enough to have met Vassal Havel, who also features in my lecture today and Shea Muzhini. That was a very nice event. Vassal Havel was awarded from Amnesty International Ambassador of Conscious Award and the Laudatio was presented by Shea Muzhini. And this takes me to my book and the topic of this talk, right, European disunion. I want to talk about finding Europe's Eastern border, European Union in times of war. That means that I will start pretty much where I finished my book. I was fortunate enough to be allowed to write a short afterward like authors note about 10 pages at the end of the book that was a month after the invasion. But most of the actual book is written before February 24th this year, and yet I believe that the number of issues that I discussed there, and I'm looking over the, I'm looking at the decade of crisis that the EU went through, that the global issues became even more pertinent. But in this talk, I want to talk about Central Europe, Eastern Europe and what challenges it poses to the EU. Now, so until quite recently, people in Central Europe. And if you are wondering about my accent, it comes from Czechoslovakia, the Slovak Republic. So until quite recently people in Central Europe had just one desire not to be a part of Eastern Europe. That was also one of Havel's key aims. And one of the questions I want to ponder now is whether that quest was accomplished at the expense of Ukraine, and maybe even at the expense of Russia, whether another options were there and other paths that were not taken, and were being more fruitful. So the EU's challenges now of course are, if anything, even more formidable than 20 years ago. The first challenge is more imminent, the EU needs to find a way to offer Ukraine continuous support, right, continuous economic support, and also support to enable its victory. But Europe and Ukraine's problems won't be over once the war is over. The second challenge is thus formidable too, and that is to live up to the promise that the EU has already formalized of EU membership. What is also not clear, of course, is what is to happen to Russia. So in that way, I'm going to talk about yet another return of Central Europe, a topic that kept me busy for the last 20 years and that kept me busy also when I lived back in Ireland 20 years ago. And I tried to convince everyone who would listen that Ireland too was a part of Central Europe in a peculiar way, which I hope to explain. So this is the book that I derived from, and it is something of an accident that the colors of course now invoke also the color of Ukraine, but as I said, I believe that a number of issues that I raised there are very much relevant to the current challenges. It is about sovereignty, democracy, and the politics of emergency, more than ever, of course. And the book finishes on a poetic note partly because I struggled to make sense of what is yet to happen, right. So it finishes by accepts from the poem by Czesław Miłosz, a brilliant Nobel Prize winning Polish poet and an essayist, and it's quite kind of telling that the poem that he wrote about 1945, the end of the Second World War, speaks to us today. And particularly the lines I cited as the last words of my book. That's the beginning in a sense of my presentation in the fine capitals. They still like to talk yet the 20th century went on. It was not they who would decide what words were going to mean. And that is the perspective of an ordinary soldier and that to me just reinforces the kind of situation we are in right now that it is the outcome of the war in Ukraine. And the people of Ukraine fighting that war, who will have a decisive impact on where Europe is going to be in years and decades to come. And I also found it moving that the Seamus Heaney, whom I started with, wrote about Vaslav Havel back then, the Laudatio, but also about Czesław Miłosz. He had a love affair with Central Europe. He praised Czesław Miłosz as someone who was tender towards innocence, as tender towards innocence, as he was tough-minded when faced with brutality and injustice. And this is, in a sense, to my mind, the challenge that we Europeans face in response to Russia, right? Can we live up to our ideals and can we defend our ideals in a way that would provide Ukrainians with sufficient support. This, what takes me back to this Central European quest, to this tragedy of Central Europe, and this is the idea when I said that even Ireland is, in some ways, in terms of its historical experience, a Central European nation. I'm talking about an influential essay by Milan Kundra, which I discussed to some extent in the book, The Tragedy of Central Europe, in which he defines a small nation as one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment, a small nation can disappear and it knows it. And he talks about Central Europe as that uncertain zone of small nations between Russia and Germany, which represent the greatest variety within the smallest space. And he contrasts that with Russia that was founded on the opposite principle, the smallest variety within the greatest space. And he goes on describing Russia really as a different kind of civilization. He went into a lot of trouble for that description, actually. I mean, he received a lot of criticism. He writes about Russia as a country as a nation that knew another greater dimension of this disaster, another image of space, a space so immense, entire nations are swallowed up in it. Another sense of time, slow and patient, another way of laughing, living and dying. Again, it's kind of strange to be re-reading that essay in the context of the current war. It is strange to see Kundra vindicated, in a sense, and Kundra's suspicion of Russia, not just the Soviet Union, Russia vindicated. And that is the suspicion that, of course, many central European elites, including political leaders, including people like Vatslav Havel, who were opposed in many ways on a number of issues against Kundra. They shared that awareness, that concern with Russia, but that was not equally received in the West. So in the West, of course, including in Ireland, in my experience, people looked frowned upon what they perceived as the rational fear that central Europeans had against Russia. So let me just fast forward towards the more recent history and the predicament that we find ourselves in now. And I want to illustrate through two pictures, one of the key points that I tried to advance in my book, and a point that is, I think, relevant to the situation that we find ourselves now with respect to Ukraine. So starting where I finish my books. 24th of February this year, of course, marked a radical break, right? Whether you call it Zeitanwende, as the German Chancellor described it, or something else, it was a radical break. The full blown invasion of Ukraine is dramatic break, which forces us to examine our assumptions about Europe, politics, power, and violence. And my book is a polemic against the view that we live in a post-conflictual, post-political world against the idea that through interdependence we can solve all the problems that we have. I think Ivan Krastev actually observed that early on after the invasion that Europeans deceived themselves believing that interdependence that worked within Europe, Franco-German reconciliation, et cetera, could be easily exported outside of Europe. So in relation to Russia, now I would argue even in relation to China, that approach has its limitations. And my book is a polemic against that. When Mark Leonhardt published his book, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, that was about 20 years ago too, it did not mean to suggest that Europeans would revive their imperial dreams of domination, but rather that Europe found a way to move beyond the world of great power, politics and domination. And we know now that that was not to be right. The soft power Europe as a model for global governance has lost a lot of its credibility through this conflict. And I think there are two pictures which perfectly illustrate the tension between the aspirations of that soft power Europe and the reality in which we live now. If you want between the Europe that the lights of Mark Leonhardt or Andrew Moravchik whom I could also discuss celebrated and the one we ended up having. So this is the first picture. This is the revolution of dignity, the Maidan movement. I love this picture and I've been using it for the last eight years in my teaching here in Hong Kong, teaching European studies. Because what we see there right there is a flood of Ukrainian flags, but in the middle of these upheavals and and that and that revolution of dignity right by current standards was was relatively nonviolent. The regime murdered more than 100 protesters but by the standards of the current war it was relatively nonviolent. You see in the middle of the picture, the EU flag representing Ukrainian aspiration to return to Europe to reclaim its rightful place amongst the advanced, prosperous, stable, liberal democracies of Western Europe, right? Now fast forward, eight years. This is a picture from Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament. And what we see there and what is missing. We see the Canadian flag, the British flag, the Czech flag, the Polish flag, the United States NATO, the one that is missing conspicuous by absence right is the EU flag. There is no German flag there either. There is no French flag right. There was the EU at the time of the invasion. The picture is just three weeks before the invasion. But but days before the invasion, and shortly after the invasion, the EU was nowhere to be seen right. And I'm not necessarily upset by it right. Of course, the EU has no military capabilities and neither should it have military capabilities. The Ukrainians were right to see that they need support from the US, from NATO, from the nation, states of Europe who are willing to support them. So this is nothing to be more on as such. But for me, what these two pictures represent is that the EU, the soft power era was strong enough to motivate the democratic forces in Ukraine to fight for democracy, to fight for their place in Europe, but it was not strong enough to protect Ukraine against an aggressive against Ravanshinist Russia, right. And this is what I would describe borrowing from Kundera, a Ukrainian tragedy of central Europe, right. So then the days after the invasion, the EU was nowhere to be seen. And German government took a couple of days to declare site and then the consequences of which we are yet to see Joseph Borel then try to overcompensate for the lack of decisiveness by promising days after the invasion that the EU would supply Ukraine with weapons, even fighter jets, he said, only to disown that promise a day later because of course he had no authorization by NATO or Poland or the US to send fighter jets to Ukraine and to this day, they were not sent there so rather than demonstrating that the US power, the bold announcement exposed Europe's relative impotence. In a similar way, Borel responded more recently to Putin's reckless remarks threats to resort to nuclear weapons by promising that the Russian army in Ukraine would be annihilated in response. Now, who is Borel, right, to make such promise. Does he have an army under his command. He does not have a foreign minister of the EU but we of course know that he is no such thing, because the EU is not a state. And he does not have a foreign minister Borel is the higher representative of the Union for foreign affairs and security policy. This is to repeat what I would describe a Ukrainian tragedy of central Europe that this in between political entity that the EU is has created an in between status for Ukraine, which put in Russia was quick to exploit. Where the evolving aims of the Russian invasions, the invasion are at their core it is an attempt to turn Ukraine into, you know, just just in between region that they can dominate tragically to that is the actual meaning of that Ukraine so what Russians want to do is to turn Ukraine a sovereign state into the Ukraine the borderland, which is the meaning of the word in Russian in Polish. So instead of becoming a part of the EU and NATO, Ukraine had to accept an inferior status within the EU neighborhood policy, and also has been a semi permanent aspirant for NATO membership in many ways. This brought about the worst of both worlds that they were in this no man land right in this blurred in between world. So repeatedly the EU soft power was strong enough to inspire Ukraine fight for democracy and freedom, but not strong enough to deter Russia from the invasion in 2014, then again in 2022. And that criticism is of course valid towards NATO to some extent, but that's not my focus. So that makes me think and this is our finish basically on an open any question that is very much my next research agenda. That makes me think whether we need to think differently about the success of the post 1989 EU enlargement the central European vision of a return to Europe succeed too much in a sense. So what we accomplished at the expense of those left behind. In other words, getting rid of the East European label for the countries of central Europe, including my homeland right and delighted for Slovakia to be doing so well, meaning getting rid of backwardness instability and cows that characterize the region. We're going to do away with Eastern Europe as such the border dividing the world of political stability and prosperity just shifted further to the East. Finding Europe's Eastern border for the European project now is a more formidable challenge to address it, we need to be bold, asking difficult questions about what went wrong. It's a mistake to pursue both conflicting goals at the same time, which is something I'm discussing. I did discuss in the book, you know, you deepening and widening my hunch is that that was the mistake. Remembering that alternative plans were considered Gorbachev talked about a common European house a concept that I was very dismissive at the time. But it was there. Right. And it had some some supporters some credibility the French also pursued some ideal of confederation that didn't go anywhere. But they had in mind that they would create something that would encompass the whole continent and Margaret Thatcher of course and I'm not going to gain many friends, citing Margaret Thatcher but that sure advocated the speedy enlargement at the expense of deepening in fact she was hoping that through enlargement the federalist agenda would be subdued. None of these scenarios gain sufficient support. But this is not to say that the EU which we currently have is the one and only worth having. That is, I believe the delusion of retrospective determinism which is a term coined by Timothy Gatton ash and I strongly support that that concept right to see how we best address Europe's future challenges we should be open minded about analyzing past steps and I think that we should think again about about that solution that was found back in the 1990s that the EU went ahead with both deepening and widening I think that the number of problems that Europe currently has, including the crisis that is not not gone yet in my view can be traced back to the Treaty of Maastricht and that decision that was taken that to make Europe viable, it had to be deepened before it expanded and so it worries me that right now when we face a bigger challenge of enlargement with the promise made to Ukraine to bring it in. Similar logic seems to be inspiring leading politicians like Olaf Scholz suggesting in Prague of all the places that the unanimity requirement in foreign security policy should be abolished so I think that the German dominant attitude to Europe, whatever the question more Europe is the answer is not very helpful. I was to summarize the key argument of my book in in one sentence it is a polemic against this widespread assumption about the EU captured by the metaphor that Walter Halstein I believe coined that the EU is like a bicycle that you have to move on it has to advance towards a never closer union towards more integration for it to succeed. I would just conclude by saying that the EU is not a bicycle, and we can do better than that. Thank you.