 The American Association of University Women in Sheboygan, and we are very pleased to co-sponsor this great decision series with the need public libraries. I've been attending some of the great decisions programs and managed walks over the last couple of years. They have a hundred people at their programs. And I thought, wouldn't it be great? I didn't have to drive to Manitowoc. We can do it in Sheboygan. And our library director, Gary Erickson, was on board right away. So here we are. We are indebted to Jeannie Gartman, Mead librarian, who's been very helpful in putting this program together, and to the need public library foundation for funding the programs. There are eight programs in the Foreign Policy Association series. We are only going to do four of them. And depending upon the response, we hope to expand that next year to six or eight. All of our professors from this series of four programs are from the University of Wisconsin here in Sheboygan. We will take questions and after the presentation, we will take our last question at a quarter to eight because we have to be out of the building at eight o'clock. There are guidebooks which you can check out at the back of the room before you leave if you'd like. They contain reference information for all of the programs in the series and before that we're not going to do. They're all very timely topics as you have noticed from the series that we are doing. So it was my pleasure tonight to introduce Dr. Elise Cohen, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UW Sheboygan and UW Mandatois. She received her PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Delaware and her BA in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her current research focuses on global governance, refugee policy, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. And so Dr. Cohen is going to talk to us about the future of Europe. Thank you so much. I'm really grateful to the series for having me and I'm honored to be here. It's a really great turnout, by the way, so thank you all for coming out on a warm October night. I want to begin by letting you know that I definitely don't choose the title of the future of Europe. This is the Foreign Policy Association official title because I would never be so bold as to stand out crystal long. And I can just tell the entire future of an entire continent. So what is mine is the subtitle of the presentation. And this is really bringing my own scholarly research into bear on the broader topic. So I'm going to define some of these. So if these look like jargon, foreign language words to you right now, no worries because I will let you know what is nativism, what do we mean by populism, and then the really fun one, what is Europe skepticism. So to begin, I just want to provide a little bit of background. We're talking about the European project as a whole when we think about what is changing in the region of Europe and how US foreign policy should change or how perhaps US foreign policy might even affect and impact this project. And this really has its roots historically in the post-World War II project of rebuilding after the war. So this sort of got its start, what you now know as the European Union. Got its start in the 1950s with the so-called EEC, European Economic Community. This was originally six European countries that were in Western Europe and really focused on trade regarding coal and steel. So it was especially an economic union to begin with. And then we saw it enlarge throughout the 1970s and 1980s. So we had more and more European countries that wanted to be part of this project of sharing trade and working together. And so this was the very origin of what is now this really impressive major international organization called the EU, the European Union. It started in 1950s just with these original Western European countries. By the time we have more of European countries wanting in on the deal and we get to the 1990s, there's something called the Master Tree in 1993. And this is really what paved the way for what we now know as the European Union, where we will have not only trade cooperation but policy cooperation, creating free travel without what we think of as borders and the EU for border control within this new community. And so that gets us to today what we now know as a 28 member international organization called the European Union. And this is the flag of the European Union. So you may have seen this before as kind of a symbol of Europe united. And that is the symbol of being united together as part of the project at its start. So this is how it looks today. We've grown from those original six Western European countries really focused on economic cooperation to this amazing project for creating unity and peace and stability and economic prosperity as well as this idea of being able to move freely. Not just goods, trade in terms of free movement but people in terms of immigration, for example. You may notice a couple things that jump out at you like that little white blob between France and Austria. Oh, I don't know. I should think of a nicer geometric statement. That's Switzerland. So Switzerland is not in yellow because they have had a couple of referendums on whether to join the European Union formally and the people voted no. They have a very strong economy and they feel like with the bilateral trade agreements they worked out over time but at this point they are happy just to partner in some trade negotiations without actually being a member of the European Union. And then you may notice up in the fingers of the northern Europe, Norway is the one in white. So that's why Sweden and Finland are part of the EU. But Norway actually is part of the European economic area. So in a lot of ways it almost is a member already. They have absorbed a lot of the EU laws into their own Norwegian laws and they have already the sort of trade benefits that come with being part of the economic agreement. But they have a history of sort of feeling dominated by their neighbors Denmark and Sweden. So for sovereignty reasons they haven't officially joined the European Union. There's also something just related to the free movement of people and that's called the Schengen zone. And so the Schengen zone countries are now showing up to you in the sort of turquoise, I guess you call it. And you see the darkest turquoise, those are the current members of the Schengen free movement of people. And then you have even some Schengen in the light, like Norway and Switzerland that we were just talking about. And up there Iceland, right, the island country, they're not members of the EU as you may have remembered from the previous map but they really wanted in on this free movement. And so this is sort of like the common borders. And then within this area there are no internal country borders. And so you can move freely. If you are a European Union citizen you can be a resident of one of those countries in green and just travel to another without needing to worry about a visa and border control, border check. You could go for work, for education, whatever family visits. And you don't have to worry about going through the entire process of like you're traveling to a foreign country. Then you may notice there are some in grey, like over here, there we go. The UK, which has been a member of the European Union, we'll talk about it might be moving out. But even though it has been a member of the European Union, it opted out of the Schengen so it does have its own border control. And you would need to indeed get a visa and go through the sort of border control process to go to the United Kingdom. Well, I was going to say Q&A for the end but let's just wait because I may answer some questions as I go too. That happens in classes sometimes also but we'll see. I promise I'll get to questions at the end. And then this is the Eurozone for the money. This is the currency and these are showing you the countries in yellow here that use the Euro as their currency. So you see there are again some countries that opt out that are a member of the European Union, again like the UK, right? But they don't use the Euro, they use still the Sterling, the British Pem. So there are some of those that it's not like you have to use the Euro, right? Some of the economies they chose to keep their own currency, they're still in the European Union. They may even be a member of the Schengen free movement of people within those borders but they can choose, you know, did they want to adopt that as their currency or not. But you see most of those countries have adopted the Euro, we have 19 of the 28 EU members that did adopt the common currency. And the idea is like a unified financial market with the exact same currency with the same rate so there can be planning accordingly. There's criticism of that but then if there's an economic recession like we saw a few years ago, each country has a very different economy but they won't be able to tweak the response as well because they have a common currency. So again we might get into some more of this in the Q&A. We're just trying to provide some background in case the EU concept is maybe new to some people in the room. The other big part of this is why. Why even try and have this shared borders with free movement of people and free movement of goods and a shared currency among some members. And we really have to again look to history and understand how dire the situation was after the Second World War. The people really felt that these rival nationalist movements were a source of violence and a source of self-harm. So if there was a way to overcome extreme nationalism, instead of thinking of we're French and we're German and we're British, if we could all identify as one like well we are those things but also we're all European then maybe that would help prevent war in the future. So that's a really important part of the story and I think it's easy to take that for granted because we're so far removed historically from the major world wars that it becomes easy to fall back into taking for granted the idea that we don't have arms races between the European Union member countries. We don't have a nuclear proliferation crisis among European Union member countries. And so people that support the European project would say there's a reason for that. There's a reason we can sort of take that for granted because the European Union helped overcome the causes of sort of nuclear proliferation or causes of invasions and conflict between nations. There's also a theory that's really prevalent in international relations that a lot of people point to for why those European countries felt like this was in their best interest to join together. And that theory holds that if you can get countries cooperating on things like trade and they realize it's good for them financially to work together, keep the trade flowing then you can prevent them from fighting and going to war. So it's this idea that there's like a spillover effect. If countries are working together and cooperating in their economies they can also better work together and cooperate in their politics. And so that's another idea that this will foster political cooperation and help prevent war. And then when we think about what it means to identify with the European Union, there's also been a project to sort of build the sense of being European as an identity on top of whatever each individual national identity is. And that's another idea that if you have common values and common identity then those countries will be less likely to fight. They will feel less threatened by each other because they feel that they share some common values and principles. So the European Union has really tried to foster that. They focus on democracy for example and human rights as some of the key components. And when a country joins they really have to work to get their own human rights laws or the way they run elections in accordance with the sort of standards that the European Union will set. Okay so now that we get to kind of where my research has focused a bit more, the pushback to all of that. And so the first area of pushback is what we call Euroscepticism. And if you write down the words it kind of sounds like just what it, or it kind of means like just what it sounds. You've got skepticism, right? So being skeptical of this European project. So Eurosceptical. So these are political actors. This could be political parties, people, leaders that feel as though the European project for unifying Europe into a broader political entity is somehow misguided. There are different versions. There's like they call hard Euroscepticism where they say the country should just exit the European Union. And maybe you've heard of that in recent news, right? Exits completely pull out. And then there's a soft version that well maybe it's too radical to completely pull out of the European Union, but from within it we should push for all these reforms and all sorts of change. I would say that the biggest manifestation that comes into a lot of the domestic politics of the countries in the last few years is more the hard version. And so you see vivid symbols like this one of the flag with the European Union symbol and this big red X through it that no, we actually are so opposed to the European project that we don't want to be part of this shared union anymore. A lot of the countries where you see those movements of grown and power articulate them in what they call sovereignty concerns. And well I don't know if you're watching even our president Donald Trump when he gave his speech to the United Nations a couple of weeks ago in New York City. He made history because he was the first American president to use the word sovereignty a record number of times. He said it 19 times in just the one speech to the United Nations. So this is not something that's unique to the European political context. It's something that we see those who study this sort of reassertion of national sovereignty happening in different parts of the world. And so we have it as part of our own current sort of foreign policy approach with the new administration. And these are some pro-Brexit people. So these were people associated with the UKIP, the UK Independence Party. And really the main platform of that political party in the UK, the British political party, was that they should leave. So a hard Euro skepticism that Great Britain should not be part of the European Union. And you can see some of those national sovereignty phrases like we want our country back vote to leave the European Union. Other part of Euro skepticism brings in another concept that we study in political science which is this distaste, dislike for any quotey elites. And so what is an elite can be varying? It could be a political elite, someone who's in political office and is able to control the budget and easy to criticize the people that control the purse strings. It could be a cultural elite, like a professor, right? Because I'm definitely not elite in any other way than that. But in that way, in terms of knowledge, because I have these fancy degrees as anti-elites would say, maybe I think I'm an oil and I try and tell the government what it should do because of my long line of education. Or it could be, you know, just wealth-based elite, someone that is very wealthy and has a lot of money financially. So in general though, those kind of get lumped together. And we see the Euro skeptical movements articulate also like anti-elite, and instead we should fight for the ordinary man. And they kind of juxtapose, they contrast and put against one another the elites that are running the government or maybe have a lot of education and training and something, and just the commoner who may be suffering and the elites don't hear their voice. And so this brings us to the most famous example we have in the last couple of years and that is the Brexit vote. So Brexit is British exit from the European Union. This is a map showing you what the breakdown of the vote looks like regionally with those voting to leave in red and those voting to remain in the European Union in blue. And you can see, and of course that's Ireland over there, so just the north is part of the United Kingdom, northern Ireland, and then the grey is a separate sovereign country or a public of Ireland. So you can see the country was quite divided and this is actually breaking it down because the UK is a union of four different nations into one political sovereign. So in England that's where we saw a majority a little bit voting to leave and that one made a big difference. So 47% of those living in England wanted to remain in the European Union but 53 voted in the referendum last summer to leave the European Union. And then we see, if you look at Scotland, they actually quite strongly wanted to stay in the European Union. So the Scottish part of the UK, 62% wanted to remain, a little over third wanted to leave. The Welsh, we see was really close but slightly the Welsh vote went 52% to leave the European Union. And then Northern Ireland over there on the top of the Irish island was much more strongly favour of staying, 56% to remain. So that's why when statistically you know you crunched it all together, it was very narrow but it was 52% voted in the referendum last summer in 2016 to exit the European Union. And Theresa May, the current Prime Minister, went ahead and activated that back in March and so if all goes according to the way this would play out, the plan would be that by 2019 the UK would no longer be part of the European Union. That would be the first time someone's left rather than joined because the trend has been growing, growing, enlarging, enlarging. How did we get there? What kinds of propaganda and rhetoric and campaigning did we see to push the vote that it's a good idea to leave the European Union? This was a really prevalent poster that the UKIP, again that's that political party I mentioned that was really favour of leaving, saying we want our country back, national sovereignty. And this was one of their most prominent campaign ads. The EU has failed us all. We must break free of the European Union and take back control of our borders. So then they have a little message, vote to leave the European Union on the 23rd of January. By the way, can anyone tell what does this look like? Right, so this was the poster, they're not named, there's not like an arrow saying here's who these people are, you know this guy's name is that or something or here's their story, but just sort of this flood, this wave, a tide of migrants and refugees, you know, swarming, coming in, pouring in to the borders. And those aren't my words, those are the words of the campaign rhetoric. Swarming, flooding, overwhelming. And some of the campaigns and rallies and marches became very explicitly focused on that issue of immigration and refugees. And you can see some of these, they were not only burning the European Union flag saying we're Euro skeptical, we don't like the European Union project, we want out. But then also specifically saying the refugees are not welcome here. And we don't want to be part of something that might pressure us to take in refugees as a part of an EU refugee sharing arrangement. And so that was actually a very prominent sentiment for why a lot of the people that supported UKIP said that they supported that party. They just felt so strongly about immigration and not wanting to take in the refugees from the crisis. This was a really fun one and I can go back to it during Q&A if people want to look a little more. But really it's just showing you some nice data on how education and location really matter. And here we can see the London area people are the pink bubbles. Those are the voters from London. And then they're also showing you the blue or the Scottish voters. And then the green, you know, other parts of the country. But if you look at the axis on the bottom there horizontally, it's showing you the percentage of people with a college degree. And so as you move right on this, it's showing having more education. And as you move left, having less education. And then what we have with the y-axis is how many people were voting to leave. And as you move up, those are people voting to leave. And as you move down, those are people voting not to leave, but they wanted to remain. And so what we ended up finding with this one, like a lot of other similar movements that are your skeptical, is education is negatively, or was negatively correlated with wanting to leave the union. So that means, you know, people that had more college education, had more years of education, were less likely to want to leave the union. And they were more likely to want to remain. Now the other thing that I've been studying in my own research is what we call PRRs. And I'm going to define that for you. It's populist radical right. So these are the political parties themselves. So I was talking to a moment ago about the UKIP, the UK Independence Party. They were really the one pushing the Brexit vote. And that is absolutely the kind of label that scholars put for parties like that. Very nationalist, Euro skeptical parties. But they also talked into what we're going to call populism. And so not only are they anti-elite and Euro skeptical, but they are very anti-immigrant. And that's one thing that unites them. You can look at a PRR in Germany, and you can look at a PRR in Spain, and you can find these commonalities, which is really fascinating for researchers. In very different contexts, maybe very different unemployment rates, or economic contexts even, still they will have the same messages, which are really focused on being against the European project, Euro skeptical, and being anti-immigrant. And so what's fascinating for me, because I really look at this a lot in my own research, is how the anti-immigrant, especially today, gets conflated with an anti-Muslim sentiment. Because a lot of the refugees from the refugee crisis are coming from Muslim majority countries. That ends up linking together being a foreigner, being an immigrant, or a refugee. And maybe then being this religion that is you just threatening. So this is one of the ads that was used in Denmark. I'm going to just tell you the exact meaning here. Okay. So this one is saying, Well, here we go. Is this your Denmark? It needs Denmark. Is this your Denmark? And then below, and I know it's kind of blurry too, but all the while I'm just going to read it to you. Translating from Danish. A multi-ethnic society with mass rapes, crude violence, insecurity, suppression of women, and forced marriages. So is this your Denmark? And then it lists all these awful things, about rape and criminals and forced marriages and oppression. And you can kind of see the picture that the explosion is supposed to be a woman in a burka, meaning that she's Muslim and she's like very religious and wears the full burka covering. And so then at the bottom it says, Is this what you want that's in the yellow? Do something. Be a member of the Danish People Parties, the youth for a new future. So the Danish People Party is like the UKIP, it's one of those populist radical right parties in Europe that really focuses on we need to leave the European Union, they're Euro skeptic and very anti-immigrant and that's where they found the most success is by articulating an anti-foreigner lens. This one is taking us to France, so we're going from the Danish context into France and maybe some people were even following the French election. I don't know if people noticed that for the first time they actually had someone from a PRR, a populist radical right party, Marine Le Pen, who came very close to winning the presidency of France. She ended up losing to Macron, but it's the first time that France had as a major presidential contender and second place, someone from a populist radical right party. And so this was one of her rallies a year ago and it says no to Brussels and it has the European Union flag and because the EU is seated in Brussels, Belgium, that's where that no to Brussels comes in, so saying no to the European Union and then yes to France. So reassertion of French sovereignty, right? French sovereignty first, not this international cooperative organization. And they really use the symbol of Joan of Arc to try and also have this power of like, Marine Le Pen is like the Joan of Arc of today and she's going to fight for us and fight for Western civilization and Christianity instead of Islam and so vote for her will be like returning who we are in our heritage. And then this one is taking us to another Danish people and I like this because of the visual, it just says ask the people right there referendum on the European Union now. So it's like they didn't have a referendum but they were calling for almost a Brexit but in the Danish context and I like the visual because it's the hand with the EU flag on it and it's strangling the Danish flag. So you really, it's not subtle, it's like the European Union is killing us. It is choking us and suffocating us. So we should have our own referendum here to exit and leave for Denmark, for the Danish people to leave the European Union. So I talked before on my first slide about nativism and there are lots of definitions that kind of relate to it and so this is one that I'm using to help you understand this concept. The basic idea with nativist movements and philosophies is that the country's people should be the native group, like they are the native inhabitants of that country. So what this often looks like is really intense opposition to foreigners like immigrants or what's really interesting to me even internal minorities. Like we have a lot of nativism in this country that's not only anti-immigrant but geared at American Indian, you know Native Americans or at African Americans. So it can be any internal minority. They don't have to be an immigrant. But in some way they're viewed as foreign and they're viewed as a threat to the way of life of that culture and of that country. So that's the key to remember with nativism that they are viewing some group as a cultural threat. In our context it would be if we said this group is un-American and they're threatening the American way of life but in the British context it would be they're threatening who we are because the English people and our English customs. So I have another one for you here that I'm going to translate. So this is showing us an FPO, another populist radical right party but this one is in Austria and this is an ad from 2006. Is this our future? Austria says no. Austria will remain free. And then at the bottom it says sign up and sign our petition. So what strikes you here? What is the message here? Anyone notice what the message might be? The woman is wearing one of those burqa type things right? Which if you don't really know about Islam then it doesn't matter. You get the message even though it's not correct. It's like oh right, she's supposed to be Muslim. She's wearing a flag. That's it. The European Union flag is her burqa. So oh my goodness, it's so powerful. That's why I'm so glad we got a computer projecting so that I can have images. Because the images are worth a thousand words. It's not only the question of if we allow all these foreigners in or even maybe they are our own natural Austrian born citizens but they are Muslim which is like a foreign religion to us. Yeah, she has little eyes probably this is an actress, this is someone in our model and then they said oh we're going to put you in this thing and pose for the camera and then this will be the freedom party of Austria which is their populist radical right party. I keep mentioning populist party and populism and so this is what we refer to as the anti-elite kind of sentiment. So the idea of populism, this philosophy or I should say ideology really, it's that the people which the ordinary common people are betrayed by, again that could be a political elite in someone in government, an economic elite very wealthy or a cultural elite, someone with a lot of knowledge or intellectuals, something like that. And so the populist radical right movements they combine the two. They do the anti-foreigner we have this internal group or this immigrant group that's really a threat to our way of life and then we have these elites that work for the European Union that are not recognizing what a threat this is and are actually aiding the enemy to take over our society. So here's one that the UKIP ran in support of Brexit, this is one of their campaign ads. On the left is the common person you right, you're the commoner, you're the audience your daily grind sitting on a bus, working hard long hours, it's not fun funds his celebrity lifestyle and that's supposed to be a European Union official so it's got the little EU flag above funds his celebrity lifestyle it's very small and then at the bottom it has what's actually an exaggerated number it's not accurate but so the UK pays 55 million pounds a day to the European Union and it's Eurocrats taking bureaucrats which come on nobody likes a bureaucrat and then combining it with European Union and he's in his limousine so life is easy for him he sits back and makes these policies that destroy our country and let it all of these foreigners and they really start taking over from the inside out this is another one that was run for Marine Le Pen in France and so there you have choose your neighborhood and vote for the front the national front the populist radical right that equivalent in France and that's it, choose your neighborhood it's either the nice French girl with the French flag stickers or paintings on her cheeks or again it's the burqa the burqa is ubiquitous and then my research into these populist radical rights that was like the most common tool used in their ads across different countries in different languages was just some woman in a burqa and in addition to the anti-immigrant and sort of nativist sentiment where what these Muslims are threats these foreigners are threats we also have the economic so combining here's your European Union policy of work this is in the British case British workers are hit hard by unlimited cheap labor now you may recognize this in our own country because we have similar narratives that link unwanted immigration with job competition and so that's maybe one that's really familiar even in this room that you've heard that and so really what the populist radical right parties do is they combine them they use the economic fears combined with the fear of something foreign or culturally threatening to mobilize people that the European Union is the root of the problem if we leave the European Union we can reassert who we really are and our own national sovereignty and deal with these threats or ourselves of these Muslims who are threatening I'm gonna maybe skip over this one just for time because during Q&A I can always go back to things okay so what are the PRRs doing politically this is what gets really fun for me as a political scientist fun in quotes first of all they're using the fact that there's been a refugee crisis for the last four years the biggest one we've seen since World War II and they're using it for political gains and what's happened one kind of cost of that is there's been a lot of confusion of the difference between what's a migrant and what's a refugee and so in the campaign rhetoric of these populist radical right parties in Europe they don't make any distinction and they don't recognize the official legal definition of a refugee is someone fleeing from persecution so this is an international human rights law a refugee must be based on a well founded fear of persecution it could be their political opinion their nationality their race, their religion but something about who they are has led them to be a target of intense persecution so they're really fleeing the country but is their home country to survive that's a refugee that's very different than a migrant a migrant is someone who chooses to move maybe they're looking for a better job or reuniting the family that lives in another country or maybe it's for education they're moving to pursue a better life and so it's voluntary not something where they're actually fleeing for their survival because they fear they may be killed or harmed but what's happened in the rhetoric about this crisis and how they're flooding the country and overtaking us is that the station has been lost and so people that are really qualifying as refugees under international law and if you're a foreigner you're another migrant so for someone like me that studies refugee policy that's a really troubling aspect of all this the other thing is we sort of have a scapegoating of whatever crime or social ills are happening in countries kind of trying to link it to refugees and this is a sign where they actually were calling them rape fugies and there was even some fake news that was going around of false stories of rape by gangs of refugees and then some fact checking websites came and said those things were not substantiated but as you may know from social media fake news can move very quickly it's very hard to stop so some people were also really afraid that oh these refugees again maybe not even knowing what a refugee is compared to a migrant are harming our women or somehow contributing to crime really disconnected from people that work on the ground that actually work with refugee resettlement programs that heavily vet a lot of those people applying for asylum so the reality of who are the refugees is kind of lost because the populist radical right parties don't care about accurate depictions for who the people are they care about using that fear for political gain and the other scapegoat aside from the refugees themselves are the European Union officials and sort of the European project as a whole and so the EU becomes its own scapegoat if only we weren't part of this EU then we wouldn't have to worry about taking in these foreigners here's another UK idea who really runs this country 75% of our laws are now made in Brussels and they have the EU burning a hole through the British flag like Brussels and Belgium is making our laws from British lawmakers the refugee image has also become really securitized meaning refugees are seen not just as a cultural threat because a lot of them may be from Muslim majority countries but as a national security concern in the wake of terrorist attacks so if you go back to 2015 in Paris we've really seen a stream every few months in a different European country maybe there will be some knife attack or what like the London bridge attack happened more recently or just two days ago in Marseille in France there was a stabbing and in some cases there would be either ISIS claim responsibility or the people themselves had some ISIS literature or sometimes maybe that wasn't even clear if it was linked to ISIS but they were Muslims and so that was part of the identity and they linked that and so that only kind of gets the cycle going further because as people fear refugees and migrants and people they think maybe from the East or Muslim it reinforces the sense that they are a danger and they are bringing terrorism into the country and so as part of this sort of cycle of violence we've also seen tremendous spikes in European countries of violence against refugees and violence against people that are perceived to be Muslim there are so many and just for time I selected a couple but this is one after the London Bridge attack in the British context they had this big spike in physical assaults and attacks and hate crimes against mosques in the UK and Germany and Austria both have seen a series of attacks not just a few but arson attacks on asylum centers where refugees are living and so some people were setting those on fire and sprayed painting like Nazi swastikas and so it's like we kind of see this violence manifesting in different ways terrorist violence that contributes to this fear that maybe all refugees or all Muslims are to blame and then what I call nativist violence which has been targeting people that are viewed as foreign or culturally threatening with arson attacks or assaults as we think about the future for the US and Europe it's really interesting to see what's happening with Brexit so this was something that we saw in the immediate aftermath the British themselves were questioning did we make the right decision did we rush into the vote to leave the European Union so this was a headline grab more than one million people just a couple weeks later wanted to change their vote when they were interviewed when they did a nationwide survey from leave to remain maybe after they saw the effects the media coverage and talk to people this one to me is maybe the most disturbing and that these are the Google results the day after the Brexit vote this is what people in Britain were searching on their computers the day after they voted number one what does it mean to leave the European Union number two what is the European Union that I just maybe voted to exit from which countries are in the European Union I'm supposed to go to college in another country a year from now oh wait that is impacted if we're in the European Union or not can I go there for less tuition and for free travel what will happen now that we've left and how many countries the Google results were suggesting that a lot of people also just didn't know basic things about what they were voting on which again maybe you can relate to democracy that's kind of a universal problem and then we also have some interesting discussion about what does this mean for the new U.S. administration and that's a Trump meeting with Theresa May because the bilateral trade agreement we would have to work out with just the British economy right instead of the European Union as a whole that we've had in our transatlantic partnership there's some economists saying if we just have the U.S. U.K. there might even be some labor shortages in that trade agreement once they leave the European Union so kind of the future of U.S. U.K. trade is also a big question right now one thing's for sure regardless of Brexit the European Union is not doing a good job regarding the refugee crisis and we call that burden sharing of taking in these people fleeing very desperate circumstances and this is just to give you a sense of where are those refugees really being hosted and despite all the populist radical right campaign ads and rhetoric the majority of them overwhelmingly are hosted in the Middle East by Middle Eastern countries not by Europe definitely not by the United States and so these are the top 10 post countries in our current refugee crisis and so you can see a lot of them like Turkey has over 2 million they have the largest number of refugees that they're hosting especially from the Syrian crisis Iran, Jordan we get some into South Asia and into Africa but overwhelmingly for the Syrians they're being hosted in the Middle East and then when you go even broader to Afghani, Somali, Iraqi refugees it's still the least developed countries there are actually some of the poorest countries that are least capable to take in refugees that are doing the job of taking them in and so when we compare that to for example Europe it really dwarfs the number that the European countries have taken in and really it's just Germany and Switzerland that have also done most of the resettling in Europe the other problem is we know that the European Union has continued to grow in the first slide where you can even see from the start of the 50s to today we went from 6 to 28 so every few years since the 1970s has been a wave of more countries that joined and that's what we call EU enlargement more and more countries joining this European Union but the problem is as it's spread you might say horizontally vertically in terms of the people in those countries believing what they're doing is a good thing but that has not been done very well so there's a lot of work to actually convince ordinary British people ordinary Danish people whatever it is that this is really something that's in their interest and kind of reminding them what was the whole European project to begin with and so you might say the EU has failed not only in the refugee crisis response but also to really communicate to average citizens why is it in our interest why are we in this European Union and kind of the future of Europe part if we look in the crystal ball it seems like these nationalist trends of reasserting sovereignty over collective cooperation are growing and so these PRRs it's populist radical right parties that I researched they're not going anywhere it seems like in fact they may be gaining a lot of ground and I don't know if people just saw in September there was a big election in Germany the first time since World War II in that country they had a radical right party gain seats in the Bundestag so that's really big because of Germany's history and even like the aspects of Nazi imagery that they have criminalized you know and the fact that they now have members of this it's called the AFD alternative for Germany the translation that's just to kind of show you the election results the two main parties in black and red for a long time in the dominant parties but then you can see in blue the AFD is now like the third most major party in Germany's political system and that's a populist radical right party so that is really something some of the AFD alternative for Germany has come to our similar themes that we've had before this one is saying new Germans will make our own the reason is because that's supposed to be like a white German lady who's going to bear the future youth of Germany herself not relying on immigrants because some people pointed out that Germany's aging population actually is in demographic decline so they need fresh immigration to help keep their economy growing and so a lot of people were pointing out that economic logic that oh we actually need the immigration and so it's kind of a counterpoint well we'll do that ourselves the women will get to making babies and we'll make our own German population we don't need to rely on those foreigners coming and that's going to give you a very similar theme that you've seen in a lot of these campaign ads Birkas we prefer bikinis and then it has the image of the bikini clad German women again playing on the opposite of the Birka like this is what we want, this is who we are and the imagination conjures up the image of the Birka that would alternatively be fully cloaking and oppressing those women and robbing them of their women's rights if, again, you have to connect all the dots the foreigners keep coming in and they're coming from most majority countries and Islam takes over our society why is it so remarkable that this far-right political party has come into German politics with such a force and the guy on the lower right he was one of the senior leaders and he has made statements minimalizing the holocaust and so to understand post-world or to Germany that's something that they really actively have, you know, mea culpa like we are taking culpability we're never going to let this happen again they have holocaust memorials contrary to their neighbor Austria they have really fully come to grip that this was part of who we were and so we're never going to let that happen again and he that's really remarkable, he actually said regarding one of the main memorials to the holocaust in Berlin oh, this is like a monument of national shame we need to get rid of these monuments and have a more positive view of our history and so kind of minimalizing the holocaust statements even suggesting that they should remove the holocaust memorials to kind of forget the negative the good things Germany has done and so that is really just again things like that that have happened in Austria and other places but for that to happen in Germany people that follow German politics are just really shocked by it and you know we have some other comments like the guy in the top left he's one of the, he's like the deputy to the director of the political party so he's the second highest ranking AFD party official in Germany and he's known for making very racist remarks and we follow football in Germany what we call soccer but one of the best players right now is part German, part Ghanaian and so you know he's darker skin and he said about this man that oh, he's good on the field but no German people would actually want him as a neighbor just because of the fact that he's racially part black you know part African and so you know these are some of the people they've had at the forefront another senior leader up there he's made really anti-immigrant remarks very anti-European union remarks we just have quote after quote from something like 10 of AFD leaders reminding us of what is the populist radical right party what unites them but even getting some of that holocaust minimalization is something new to me one of the most interesting things too because sometimes people will play up the economic logic and say it's all about the job competition people are hurting people are worried about their employment opportunity that's why they're anti-immigrant or that's why they're anti being part of the European Union but what you see in the northeastern where it's really dark in East Germany that is where AFD got the largest share of the votes and that is where per capita they have resettled the fewest number of refugees so a lot of the people that live there never even meet or see a refugee yet they were the ones when interviewed after the vote in the post vote survey that that's like the number one reason they voted for the party was they don't want all these refugees flooding the country but they live in a place where there's hardly any they resettle it by highest economy right and most populist places so they actually go to the wealthier most populist parts of West Germany and they don't resettle many in the East German parts so it's not really about the logic you know it's more about the anti-immigrant or nativist sentiment and then if you've been watching just this week the news coming out of Catalonia as a movement to separate from Spain as their own Catalonian people there's some interesting connection that we can make back to our broader themes of tonight because this is actually from a year ago one of the Catalonian nationalist figures said that Brexit encouraged them like oh well if the British can leave the European Union maybe we can leave Spain we also want to assert our own Catalonian nationalism over being part of an integrated Spain so some people are saying wow Brexit can really create a lot of instability and give a lot of nationalist successions movements renewed hope to break away and then what we're seeing now is the European Union is kind of calling on the Catalonian police to remember that part of being in the EU is respecting human rights because if you're watching the coverage of the last couple of days it's been really brutal treatment of the Catalonians that we're trying to vote in the referendum for independence by the Spanish police so the human rights question is still not resolved even in European Union member states you know there's a I want to give you the alternative because the alternative to a lot of what I said tonight would be there's also some research that shows Brexit made some European populations clean even more to the project and feel even like a stronger sense of no we like being in the EU and so among some populations it boosted support for being part of the EU there's also a really fascinating article I was reading kind of an analyst from the European Union looking at all this public opinion stuff on the use of Trump in the EU and the reactions to Trump have also been very negative in Europe and some people say that action may unite Europe sort of maybe not good for US but for themselves to sort of reunite as we are European and these are our principles in opposition to the new American administration and these were some of the headlines that came right after your Trump selection for Europe there's a new threat in town the US EU's president the president of the European Union calls on Europe to rally against the Trump threat specifically he wrote a letter to all leaders of European Union countries saying our top three threats are terrorism Russia trying to take over the medal in us and the Trump presidency and those were like the three top threats identified to Europe and I like this one because it gives us a bigger picture this is support for President Trump in context of support for the past two presidents and what we can see is they picked a couple of main Western European countries the red is the British the yellow is the French the blue is the German and the green is Spain so you can see we're kind of back to George W. Bush levels with the people that study global perceptions of the US and what we know for us after the Iraq war and then we we had problems during the Obama administration too so it was definitely not perfect in fact some say there was already a distancing between the US and Europe even then but we sort of really plummeted back down to the George W. Bush levels of favorability with the new president so that's another one to sort of watch for the whole question what is the future this was the specific question now that Donald Trump is US president over the next few years relations between our country and the US will what and this is taking all European populations a survey 8% thought it could get better with President Trump about half thought it might not change at all say the same and then 37% felt that it will get worse under President Trump so that's another one sort of for the future thinking and then I promise now we can get to all of your questions thank you you're showing a woman in a burqa but the French I believe prohibited burqas at schools I think not oh yes you should have had hey but my question at the beginning I was very surprised to see that Ireland was not a native country in South Africa you would just have to be a cork it was a big parade and there were overwhelming number of barters in that parade so they clearly welcomed barters unfortunately some activists yeah thank you so his question is about Ireland and you're right that Ireland has been in terms of it's even who can be a citizen one of the most liberal of the European countries they have reduced restrictions so that even like being born in Ireland just by that alone not blood to a lot of European countries have blood based citizenship so yes they're very liberal in that sense of accepting immigrants but they wanted to have their own control over that process and so that's why those countries that are in gray even though they're European Union they still want to have more of their own policy making now they cannot deny an European citizen so even the UK it gets to make its own policies in many regards but they can't block or ban other European Union citizens and so that's something to keep in mind that part of the arrangement and part of why UK the vote to leave being pushed as anti-immigrant is that they don't want to have to take any European Union citizen because maybe someone who's really a Tunisian and so they are an EU citizen could then come here and work and go to school and live in our society and well we don't even want the EU citizens that may be second generation or third generation if they're maybe non-white or if they're Middle Eastern origin or especially if they're practicing Islam that's a very quick and simple question and maybe it's a trickle for them to have but it looks like there's a small portion of Finland that is not part of this but shouldn't get it the area is that accurate or is that just a trickle of the map yeah I don't know actually I've never noticed that in the map I would be sure that it's accurate but I almost wonder if it's because there's like part of Finland that's something extraterritorial because I don't think the map would be wrong I've looked at Finland recently excuse me there's another area like that too in southwest Lithuania and northern Poland that's actually part of the question is that what it is? yeah a little territory north of Poland is part of Russia yeah sorry I haven't looked at that one in a while so let me bring the mics so we can all hear the question anybody else have a question? oh come on I think we're all aware right now in the elections in Germany and France and probably in the Brexit as you were looking at all of this did you notice Russian influence in other other European universities in for example, Catalonia yeah I don't know about Catalonia I didn't see anything in that one but I saw a lot about Russian influence and here's a Russian exploitation of Brexit and I also came across something that well you know how currently we're investigating Russian influence in the US election that some were saying a similar bot used on Facebook that's a Russian bot or Russian some kind of Russian hacking device was used to support populist radical right rise in Germany so there was a story about it I didn't have a chance to really look in depth but this idea that the Russians are actively trying to exploit divisions in Europe absolutely and scholars that study the region say that is the biggest concern over something like or if there's a growing rift between the US and between Europe is that Russia is all over that and they are waiting to pounce and that would be great for Russia to have a rift between the US and Europe because Russia does have the designs to sort of regain foothold and be a great power in the region so yeah, there are a lot of concerns of Russian exploitation of all the instability that could be happening in Europe Drive for Catalonia and and then it goes back centuries as in Scotland so I guess it's just maybe intensified maybe for seven days there's nothing new No, no indeed under Franco people have ever looked at the US relationship with Franco. He was very brutal towards any non-Castellanos Spanish and he banned Catalonian dance and language schools and that resentment is still very well known by the Catalonian people so right, it's not that Brexit causes movement for sovereignty and breaking away succession but perhaps it can give renewed hope to some movement like oh now we're going to think about how this could apply to us take advantage of the moment break away as well but from our own country Regarding Brexit and the vote to lead is there any chance that that vote will come again before the population and go the other way? That's a great question. There have been some calls by the Labour Party the Liberal members of Parliament like clearly so many people are against it. They just did a survey over the summer that found now more people would vote to stay than to leave if they held the referendum today so some of those Liberal members of Parliament have called for doing it over or redo so it's a domestic politics issue right now in the British political system because Theresa May is facing kind of a weakened position. She had an even lower support level in the last election they held and she thought it would show everyone that people really love Brexit and they do support her party going forward with it and so some even within her party are saying maybe Theresa May maybe you should step down because you're linked to the Brexit vote whether they're actually going to redo it remains to be seen right now her position is we're going to do like a soft exit and we hope to negotiate all of these things to help our economy before we officially leave 2019 but the issue is there's really no way to do it softly because part of getting to be in the free trade part with all the benefits of the economic sharing is the people sharing and that's what really motivated the vote of people wanting to leave was more about immigration than the economy when they did post vote surveys so that remains a question for British domestic politics and her own party if they force her to step down without then being used as a platform to do it over and call any referendum her position has been the people have spoken we had the referendum it was official we are moving on that and so her stance is no we're not redoing it and we're going to be out by 2019 you said that the European Union was not doing enough to help certain is there some way that the European Union could be made stronger or should be taking stronger steps yeah for people that study European Union reform there are so many avenues so there's the economic problem that comes with the shared currency how does the country then respond to inflation how does the country use its own economic background I mean Germany only has like 4% unemployment compared to Spain or Greece where maybe it's more like almost 20% so these are really different economic context and for all or many of them to have this idea of a shared economy can be problematic so there's a lot for we should I think people that may have done the reading in the booklet there's a lot by Dr. Moravchik because he really focuses on European economic reform there's a lot of avenues for that in terms of the refugee burden sharing yes there have been plans of here's how each country based on its wealth and population could fairly share responsibility for these desperate people fleeing looking back to our own history when we were desperate and fleeing war and violence and that has been rejected it's been all talk no action by the actual states viewing that they would really be committing political suicide at home if they took that many refugees in so yeah there are a lot of great plans and I think we just don't see the political will so far to execute them Thank you for coming General Merkel what type of force do you feel she is for holding the EU today yes that's a great question because Merkel in the last election she did win less than her party has traditionally in Germany so some people said wow that's really showing a decline in support for her but she did still win and that's a really important factor because she's so pro-European union the thing with Merkel is she does see a new potential ally because in France the populist radical right Marie Le Pen lost and Macron came and Macron is very pro-European union as well so she has the potential now she has like a new ally in France she can work with Macron they both take a very pro-European union stance and maybe weather her own domestic politics storm of the rise of the radical populist right in her own country so yeah there she is really linked with the European Union the people that voted for the AFD were also very anti-Angela Merkel they link her with refugee sharing because Germany has done so much they've really led, they've been like a model for refugee responsibility sharing but her attackers use that against her and those that support her believe in those principles of kind of who we are in Germans that's who we are we are taking in these desperate people and they recognize their own history maybe positive for her because Macron is there now in France and they can kind of unite and then a lot will be a question mark about Trump-Merkel relations because they were off to a very rocky start but he did recently visit Germany and he, I don't know if people followed but early in Trump's campaign when he was president-elect he said he would not support NATO's Article 5 which is mutual security and defense if one is attacked like we all come for the one and fight to defend them and he's just saying I don't know if I support that and that was really well or I should say really poorly received in the European Union because that's a staple of the North Atlantic Treaty organization but then when he just visited Germany he was kind of backtracked and he said okay I do recognize and accept Article 5 is important and we would continue to defend a European ally like it was off to rocky start Germany-U.S. but if that can improve then maybe that will also help Merkel feel more secure I know you touched on McCroven I'm interested in what he had to say about his his difficulties I think that's what we would eat what is going on what are his problems yeah so the support for Le Pen even though I think it came to like 34% for Le Pen the French right candidate over his 64% so he had a very strong victory over her but there's still that third of the country then that not only wanted the opposite of McCroven but they wanted something even more extreme they wanted maybe even pulling out of the European Union one of his biggest things too he's viewed as an elite because he's also a wealthy businessman so he's viewed as maybe part of that problem of the economic collapse but France has a higher unemployment in Germany so that's more of a concern for him than for Merkel so I would say the fact that he's viewed as an elite the fact that they are having a slightly higher unemployment and the fact that he has a whole third of his country that wanted the populist radical right candidate instead of him I think there was maybe just time for one more let's see what happens the President said a few weeks ago and I think he probably changed his mind yesterday but he was very concerned about they're not paying their fair share and he's saying a lot of different things happen but he's still on that point about the European Union not paying their fair share what's the position now if he has an elite or they change their people right right and it's a great question actually the fair share is about NATO which is your very similar yes but it's a very timely question NATO so there are some false numbers where they say the US contributes 70% to defense spending but that's really misleading because that's saying defense spending all over the world and the US has 800 military bases in the world a lot of stuff in Asia Pacific and the Middle East well outside of Europe so that's a really misleading kind of fake news thing and people are saying oh the US pays 70% we don't pay 70% we do pay 22% of the NATO budget and we liked it that way so that we can control I think the next one is like I may have it Germany pays 14% of the NATO budget France 11% so we're at 22% and that gives us a sense of control and so historically that's why we wanted to control NATO and we wanted to be the pullers of the first strings so that we can feel like our hegemony our power is intact and that we dominate even in Europe that like we are the regional great power of Europe because we control the military also there's a key principle of international relations regarding threat perception and this belief that countries want to judge their military might relative to other countries so we would want to have the strongest military and we would feel threatened if Germany started spending more on its own military or France started spending more so it's a really interesting thing now to hear US presidents say oh they should spend more on their military because all through the Cold War and since we emerged as a major power we've wanted just the opposite we've wanted other countries to spend less ally with us and we'll be the ones with the big guns and we'll be the ones that run the show so yeah there is something to it but also there's a reason why it's been that way and this would be a big departure from our history