 Mr. Fukuyama, looking back to the Reformation some 500 years ago, what in your view is the single most important message of the Reformation to a world today that is undergoing disruption in so many ways? I think that there's a moral message in the Reformation which has to do with the fact that freedom exists within side of us. Every individual is free to make choices. And it's not something that can simply be determined by our external circumstances. And I think that's really the basis of modern democracy that we have to keep in mind that whatever the problems of democracy this is a political system that is built around individuals and their individual freedom. This conference on the Reformation and Danish society has as a premise that the influence of the Reformation can be traced in Danish society today in so many ways. But I cannot help thinking that it's because now today that we are celebrating the Reformation that we tend to sort of overestimate the influence quite a bit. How do you see that? Well, a process like modernization and the emergence of modern Denmark is a really complicated thing where there are many factors that go into explaining why a country got to be the way it is. So the Reformation I think was important culturally. It was important politically in many ways. As I said during my talk, among them you wouldn't have a strong Danish state if it weren't for what happened in terms of the state taking over the properties of the church. But there's other things as well. Denmark's geopolitical position on the Baltic, Hanseatic, port city trading with other countries right next to a big country like Germany, all of these things I think affected the way that Danish history unfolded and not everything is traceable to the Reformation. Plus there's a pre-existing Danish culture, the Viking culture that I think also needs to be part of the national story. But Western society today is certainly very much indebted to the ideas of the Enlightenment. But I read that you also believe that there's a very strong connection between the central ideas of the Reformation and the ideas of the Enlightenment. And you trust upon that in your speech also to elaborate on it? In a certain way Enlightenment thinkers presented a secular version of Luther's doctrine. So Luther believed that all individuals are free, they're morally free to choose God or not. And an Enlightenment thinker like Emmanuel Kant really had a secular version of that. He said that there are rules of reason that are universal, that all human beings are ends in themselves, that is to say they have moral freedom and they can make the right choice based on those rules of reason. So in a sense it's very similar to Luther's view, but it doesn't require a scriptural authority. According to Kant this is simply something that's derived from reason alone. So in that sense I think there is a very close connection between those ideas. But on the other hand you know we had the Protestant countries of the 16th century, we had book censorship, we had the totalitarian state, we had witch burnings and things like that. That's not part of the Enlightenment. Well I think that liberalism, modern liberalism is the doctrine that says that we should tolerate different approaches to life, different religions, different political points of view in a society that promotes a certain kind of diversity and pluralism. And that was not a direct outcome of the Protestant Reformation. I think that was really more of an outcome of all of the wars of religion that occurred after the Reformation in which Europeans spent a lot of time killing each other over the doctrine of transubstantiation. I mean these issues that today would seem to be really absurd sources of violence but in fact people took them very seriously. And I think as a result of that violence they decided that it's better to live in a society that had rules that permitted different religions to live side by side rather than having the state simply impose one particular version of religion. So there is an indirect relationship I think between the Reformation and the emergence of a kind of modern democratic liberal society. Let's look to the figure of Martin Luther. The idea that a single person can transform a society and sort of redeem a historical development is quite a controversial discussion among historians. How do you see Luther in that connection? Well I think that ideas are important and they interact with material circumstances. So Germany in the 1520s was ripe for rebellion against the church and against the empire. You had a lot of princes that were very unhappy with the corruption of the church with the fact that they had this overlord, you know, the Hobsburg Emperor. They didn't like the lack of their own political freedom and so Lutheranism gave them an excuse really to break free of that system. But it was also an idea that had independent merit as an idea. If Luther had not been a brilliant theologian he wouldn't have been able to persuade people that his different interpretation of Christian doctrine was a superior one. And so I think as in, you know, many historical, big historical developments there's a interweaving of underlying material causes and ideas and you can't really say it's one or the other. The two of them are very dependent on one another. Some scholars at least here in Denmark argue that the Lutheran ideas of poverty and work and charity and the role of the state are really sort of precursors of the Scandinavian welfare state. We've heard that quite a few times when celebrating the Reformation this year. What are they right about that? Well, they were right, but I don't think it was exclusive to Lutheranism. I think that, you know, the medieval Catholic church took poor relief as one of its duties. So they ran, you know, the mendicant orders, collected money on behalf of the poor and redistributed it and this sort of thing. And in some Protestant countries those mendicant orders were driven out or shut down and so the poor actually did worse as a result of the Reformation. But it's true that in many Protestant countries you had the church playing a very important role in providing a kind of social buffer against poverty and disease and other kinds of misfortunes which eventually were actually incorporated into the state. The state simply took over those functions as you got to the 19th and 20th centuries. But Franz also has a big welfare state today. Franz also has a big welfare state. So it's not exclusive to Lutheran countries. I think, you know, everybody eventually ended up doing something very similar. You have argued that Luther's idea of the inner faith and the inner man can be seen as a precursor of the modern concept of identity. And you touched upon that in your speech also. Could you also say a little bit about that? Well, the modern concept of identity is based on this belief that deep inside me there's a different me that's not the surface me that is more authentic and that the way I act are shaped by these external social forces that force me to be somebody that I'm really not. And in modern identity we give a great deal of value to that inner person. And in a sense that was what Luther was doing. He was saying that you may observe the rituals of the Catholic Church but none of that matters if the inner person does not believe in God, does not have faith. And you have to search within yourself to know whether you have faith because nothing you do externally is going to be a sign of it. It's something completely subjective. And so that's why I think that he's one of the first thinkers that really made this distinction between the inner true core of who we are as a human being, the moral core and the outward conformity with social norms. I read it might have been satirical but a guy wrote some days ago that we wouldn't be discussing LGBT rights today if it hadn't been for Luther. Well, I think that Luther would not have approved those specific rights but in many ways that coming out of that inner being is really what's happened with the Gay Rights Revolution that many gays and lesbians felt that they had an identity that society was forcing them to keep bottled up inside them and that the authentic identity was that but they weren't allowed to express it. And that has some relationship to Luther's view that true human freedom was that inner self that needed to be uncovered and in a sense liberated. In your book The Origins of Political Order you wrote that the truly lasting impact of the Reformation in Denmark came through its encouragement of peasant literacy. What did literacy, the educating of the people really mean in those centuries after? What's interesting is in the 19th century the Danish peasantry of course Denmark is slowly transforming itself into a more modern industrial society so people are moving off the land but Denmark still remains a heavily agricultural country but it is able to be competitive because farmers create these cooperatives they upgrade the technology that they're using they connect themselves to export markets very efficiently in a way that let's say the Russian or the Polish peasantry simply failed to do. Why did they do that? Well they could read, they could read about the latest farming techniques they had a much higher degree of education they could make use of modern agronomists that could give them advice on agricultural productivity and all of that would not have happened if they were illiterate and again you just have to look across the Baltic to other lands where the peasantry wasn't educated to see the terrible economic and social impact of that. But that's really a legacy of Gondry isn't it? Well it's a combination I believe that there was already by the end of the 18th century a high degree of peasant literacy because of the need to read the catechism and other Lutheran books and then Grünweg accelerated the process of generalizing education. Did the reformation in any way accelerate or even fortify what you have called the necessary components of modern political order that is a strong and capable state the state's subordination to the rule of law and government accountability to all citizens? I think that it played a role in all of those certainly in terms of the emergence of a modern state it had a kind of direct impact in terms of the rule of law it took Catholic law and generalized it in many ways and in terms of democracy it produced democracy in the end because of the belief in the fundamental moral equality of all people what needed to happen was the definition of who is a person expanded to people without property to women in the 20th century then to racial minorities and others but I think the idea that we are we have dignity as a human being because of our moral, inner moral ability to make good choices that I think is an idea that comes out of Christianity and specifically the Lutheran view of Christianity The 16th century was a time of upheaval and disruption we would call it today with all the conflicts in the world today which one worries you the most? That's hard to say clearly the one in the Middle East is going to grind on for a very long time and as we've seen it's been very destabilizing for Europe I actually think that a bigger challenge is going to be China simply because it may be the largest and most powerful country in the world in another 20 years and getting used to the world being dominated by a non-Western country I think is going to be something that's going to be quite hard to adjust to