(low pulsating music)
- Welcome to Ethics Matter, I'm Stephanie Sy.
We're discussing the rise of far-right populist movements
in Europe today with Alexander Gorlach.
We are also discussing what he calls
the threats to liberal democracy.
Alexander founded a debate magazine called The European
and was editor-in-chief there until last year.
He is now a visiting scholar
at Harvard Center for European Studies.
Alexander, welcome to the Carnegie Council studios
here in New York.
- Thanks, Stephanie, for having me.
- A lot of the issues that you have researched throughout
your career came to the fore with the Brexit vote
and the U.S. presidential election in 2016.
Do you view the outcomes in these democratic
exercises as threats to liberal democracy?
- On a general note, the outcome, let's say,
of the Brexit referendum, but also to another extent
but still the same general pattern, are based on lies.
So if you look into the promises like
the Brexit campaigners in England made,
one of them was that they would pay the money
that would go to Brussels into the National Health Fund,
which did not take place after that.
Nigel Farage after the day of the Brexit referendum said,
"Oh, no.
"You must have misinterpreted me."
These major elections happened on the basis of
wrong and false arguments.
We are still finding this in terms of Brexit,
but also in this country in the debate about
alternative facts and fake news and all that.
So these sorts of techniques just really overcome
the voters' will through extensive lies.
It's of course a threat to liberal democracy.
- What you're saying is that
lies and
the alternative facts,
are the threat to liberal democracy?
- Oh, there is of course, at this time we face plenty.
But just because you mentioned these two elections,
I would say they are hallmark, a negative one,
because you can see, you know, you always keep saying,
"Oh, they politicians may lie about this or that
"or they may not give you the full picture."
Or, let's say, the German system, where I'm from,
it's a parliamentary one,
where several parties form the government,
so of course every party has to give in,
so you never get 100% of what one party
would have campaigned for.
But this is a totally new dimension,
where you have already polarized societies where
this or that lie may just tip the result over the edge,
like 48 to 52 in the Brexit referendum.
You can totally see that it was a tiny margin by which this
existential decision for the United Kingdom was made upon.
- Let's talk about that and what happened in the U.S.
because President Trump won the Electoral College
but he lost the popular vote
by some three million votes to Hillary Clinton.
That did raise the question of other aspects
of the U.S. constitutional system.
Do you think that the system undermined itself in some ways?
- I think this debate you guys have,
it is not the first time you've talked about this,
that the popular vote and Electoral College do not match.
If you would ever want to fix that, you would have to,
of course, do this before an election and not afterwards.
The debate about this is, can democracy
overcome itself by its own means, as in elections?
Being from Germany, it is always easy
to see that this can happen,
because Adolf Hitler did not attain power by a military coup
or whatever; he was elected,
and he was elected on an agenda and on a program,
that of course after it unfolded and got more cruel
and violent as he has campaigned for, but still,
of course, there is always the threat that democratic people
do not want to be governed by democracy anymore.
I have a dear colleague at Harvard, Yascha Mounk,
who did research on that.
You do surveys, and you ask people, more or less indirectly,
to figure out how fond they are of liberal democracy.
They get sentences to sign upon and say yes or no.
His and his colleagues' findings were that the approval
rates of liberal democracy shrink in Western societies,
so that people may prefer to live
in a secure environment more than in a free one.
So we are at a time where the measures of liberal democracy
are newly negotiated, newly discussed,
or undermined by people like Farage in England.
- Some people call these
illiberal democracies.
Is that a phrase that describes the phenomenon
that we're seeing in the United States.
- This is even going back to Plato
and the question of what a fair,
and a just, and wise form of government would be.
Of course, there is a democracy that you can imagine
does not have all the features of liberalism
that we embrace today.
However, the history of how democracy unfolded,
especially after the horrors of the Shoah
and the Second World War,
we designed our modern democracies as liberal
in that sense that you would watch out
and look out for minorities, that you would try to strive
to be better and to include more minorities;
and to understand that the society as a whole
is not a monolith, it is a heterogenic sort of entity.
People like Mr. Erdogan in Turkey or Mr. Putin in Russia,
but also the new right-wing movements we will surely be
talking about, they leave the impression behind
as societies who are not like this.
You will be looking into all major Western societies
in the last 10-15 years, after 9/11,
they have come up with surveys and debates about who are we?
What does it mean to be French,
what does it mean to be German,
what does it mean to be English?
It always alludes to a thing that to me to thing
that is not existing, to proclaim a society as a monolith,
so all are white and Christian,
which if you go to the streets of New York,
you see that's not the case.
- Is that something that the far-right movements in Europe
have in common with what is called the alt-right movement
in the U.S., that feature of white Christianity?
- Actually, it is very interesting,
because the approach to society and what a society
will stand for, even though we are all referred to as
the West, there is a difference between how
Western Europe faces that or sees that or the United States.
The main difference is how we approach history,
how we understand history.
The French philosopher Baudrillard,
he wrote this book America, and he pointed to this
in his chapter which is called America,
I am almost quoting him here,
saying that, "America is a constant utopia."
This is what this country was designed upon.
You live always in the future present
so you do not care so much about the past.
He would say that "when the settlers came from East to West,
"they came into landscapes which were vast and big,"
if you look into the role model of an American city,
whether it be like, let's say,
Dallas or Houston than New York.
So you have the vastness and the spread-out country
where he would refer to that history that the settlers
brought with from Europe has vanished
or out spread within the territory.
Whereas in Europe, whenever you debate something today,
it always has a referral to the past.
When we now debate these right-wing movements,
we discuss a lot about what happened in the '30s,
in the last century;
is this the uprise of a new Hitler, yes or no?
Obviously it is not,
because there is 70-80 years in between.
But still we make references to history.
This country is not so much burdened with
or doesn't give so much about this historical framework
as Europeans would naturally do.
Why I say that is that, yes,
it seems from the outside to be similar,
but I'd say the historic memory in Europe
is a different one than in this country.
- But the issues overlap in many cases,
anti-globalization sentiment in the United States
also reflected in the Brexit vote
and in the rise of far-right movements in other countries,
including Germany and France,
the anti-immigration sentiment that comes from that;
and some of the cultural values seem to
overlap in the movements as well.
- The overall subject to keep the West together
is neither followed by Theresa May in England
nor by President Trump.
He congratulated the people of the United Kingdom on Brexit.
This is congratulating Europe on breaking up
or being on the verge of breaking up.
This is contradicting the policy
of 70 years of United States presidents.
This led us through the Cold War.
We were an entity as the West.
This is for me utterly stunning,
that you now have a U.S. administration who does not really
bothered if Europe stands or not.
- What does that mean?
What impact does that have,
for the European Union to not have the support
of the American government in the whole experiment?
- This puts everything upside-down
that we know about the West.
So when you say, "Okay, let's just follow that argument
"and say the right-wingers and the populists of all sorts
"in the West want the same,"
the destabilization of that what
is the West doesn't play in the favor for the United States
in total or of any European country.
We have been seeing so many successes
in this multilateralism in the last 70 years.
So you contradict.
You know what happened, what the successes are of the past,
and now you come up with an agenda
that would totally destroy this order.
This poses this general threat to liberal democracy.
- Let me parse out what you just said.
The successes of multilateralism,
and I assume you're referring to that
in a foreign policy sphere, and the stability of Europe,
surely since World War II,
because of that multilateral world order.
But what about the individual worker in the Rust Belt,
or in the equivalent of the Rust Belt in Europe,
who feels they have lost out
to globalization
and multilateralism?
- I'd say actually we do not know if they were
even worse off if we would not have formed
a unity to face globalization.
Of course, you can now think about and dream about a world
like in the mid-18th or 19th century,
but reality is what is the case,
and now we have the means of transportation
and communication to create
and uphold a global economic order.
Since authority
and legitimate rule is still
confined within the nation-state,
there are things that a nation-state can work on,
let's say the social welfare of its inhabitants,
but it is not in total and full control of trade, let's say,
or how finances go, how money goes throughout the--
- So you're saying some of these far-right movements,
which are anti-European Union, often for economic reasons,
the austerity measures that have been unpopular in Germany,
that they're not grounded in current realities?
- What these right-wingers say is,
"Okay, we lost our sovereignty to the European Union."
Basically that's not true.
Every law that comes from Brussels
is to be ratified in national parliaments.
There is a European Parliament.
You can always improve democratic institutions
and the participatory means of the populace
or the citizens of all the Member States.
But it's not the case that Germany, France,
or England, especially Madame Le Pen in France says that,
and Mr. Farage after the Brexit vote said,
"Now this is our independence day."
This is totally false.
It's not true.
These are claims on which you oppose multilateralism,
on which you oppose globalization, because you say,
"It has taken away sovereignty from us."
- What about the Schengen borders and the fact that
Viktor Orban, who has aligned himself with
and was one of the first European leaders to endorse
Donald Trump, he believes that sovereignty was at issue
when it came to the migrant crisis,
that the Schengen borders dictated that they had to
open these borders to migrants that were coming from Greece
and through the Balkans route,
and he asserted Hungarian sovereignty.
Isn't that an example of
that tension between
the nation-state and sovereignty and the rules of the EU?
- Sure, I mean,
the Dublin treaty that is the foundation of how you
take in refugees and how we distribute them within
the European Union, has been flawed from the very beginning
because you have coastline states, like let's say Italy,
and they face a lot of influx from Northern Africa.
And then some European countries would say,
"Oh, yes, you just keep these refugees to yourself."
And then they say, "Oh, but we have this treaty."
So then the routes changed, and the Syrian conflict broke,
and then the refugees came through the Balkan route,
which they would enter through other countries.
So you could have seen,
and I would totally agree to that,
that Europe has not come up with a constant strategy
of how to deal with global migration,
be it from Northern Africa, where all the states,
and we can argue, Morocco and Tunisia are stable,
but in the aftermath of the Arab Spring
they are all weak and at the verge to collapse.
So we are surrounded by regions
that have failed states or about-to-fail states.
Europe should have come up with a strategy
how to combat that, how to work on that, and they did not.
Another thing about the Eastern European countries,
like Slovenia, Hungary, and Poland, even though I am
not an expert on those, but it's interesting.
They reinvigorate their national narrative through culture,
language, and religion.
They are more explicitly hostile toward Muslims than,
let's say, Germans because they say,
"No, they are not Christians, and we have no mosques here,
"and we are not going to build any,
"so we will just keep these refugees out."
This is again also a very historic sort of argument
that you may not buy into in America, saying,
"We were for 1,500 years Christian
"so why do we now take in people?"
This country is totally founded on another ideal of religion
and the place of religion in public life,
than many, many European countries.
Whereas I have always argued that Christianity is
our civil religion, where, even though you don't
go to church, you resemble that heritage,
and you see it all over the place
with churches and castles and whatever.
- That's a paradox to me.
Because Angela Merkel, who has taken what a lot of people
would I think consider a moral stand
on the welcoming of refugees, and even economic migrants,
in Germany, welcoming one million of these migrants,
is a Christian and she is the daughter of a pastor.
And yet, what you're saying is those countries
whose national identity is most aligned with Christianity
are the ones that are shutting their borders to refugees.
- In fact.
But also, Angela Merkel never said
that she took in refugees on a Christian argument.
This is always like supposed to be,
and I think it is also true to a certain extent.
But Merkel would always say,
"Okay, we have the Geneva Conventions.
"We are somehow obliged to do that because we signed it.
"Also,
"in policy making, you have to, ethics matter,
"politics is nothing without ethics."
But coming back to what you were saying,
the sociologist Elias Canetti wrote a fascinating book,
Crowd and Power, in the '60s, of the last century,
to generally explain how Hitler and totalitarianism
could come to power and rise.
He said something about the mobilization through religion
in Europe, because religion has always been a trigger,
and we see it today again, to rally people against others.
He said, "You cannot do this in Europe
"through Christianity anymore because people have lost
"their faith in the afterlife."
I am quite sure he is right about this,
because I identify as Christian
because this is my culture which I grew up in.
But if we now talk about angels and virgins and whatever,
it is just kind of a different story.
So you have people in Europe, of course they are
true believers in that sense, and I do not want to
argue about whether or not that is a good thing,
it is just like saying the approach to religion
in Europe is a more historic one,
as I tried to point out the differences
between both our countries or hemispheres.
So you would have an argument that you say you are
a cultural Christian and not a real believer in that sense.
But the heritage of the Enlightenment
was restricted by this.
It was like, okay, what religion can provide,
in terms of morals and to make humans better,
that is so welcome, and that is what I should do.
Whatever is liturgy and dogma and all that,
we don't care about that.
- Again, going back to the rise of these far-right
movements, what is the role of ethics and morality
and these historical ideals of Enlightenment?
Where do they fall on the platforms
of these new far-right parties?
- I think, and this plays into what I said about religion
and what I said about culture already,
and this is part of the argument,
we see a total lack of empathy.
You get the argument,
we have to see the refugee crisis through our eyes
and not through the eyes of the refugees.
This is the most heartless thing I have ever heard.
If people walk thousands of miles to just find a safe haven
and they escape a war,
if you are a Christian
or even a slightly ethical, informed person,
you should really have enough empathy to understand
that nobody does this because he or she likes it.
It is not a fun tour.
It is highly risky, and you risk your life
and the life of your family.
You see in all these debates
it narrows down to such simple principles.
Sometimes I think that half of the population
has lost completely the empathy about that.
This does not restrain us from talking about
how to integrate migrants, and it is not always easy.
But the main and counterpoint in ethics is to inform
and help people to be empathetic with other people
and the destiny of other people.
- Is there a tension between being an empathetic citizen
who believes in Kantean virtues,
"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,"
is there a tension between that and national security?
- We cannot take in all the refugees of the world.
It can also not be the goal of all policies to just
really de-locate people from the places they came from.
Rather, people, I would say, in most of the cases
want to stay in the places they grew up in.
If you ask certain Syrian refugees,
they did not come for fun.
Again, that is what I am saying.
Okay, some of them will end up to stay in Germany forever,
and we will have a relation to Syria due to that conflict.
But the vast majority of them, I am quite sure,
would love to return at the earliest hour possible.
I guess these two
are not really related in the first place,
because national security
is always an issue.
I will give you one thing, Angela Merkel, to my opinion,
she did one major mistake after she took in the refugees.
She went on a national TV show and she was asked by
the host if she would be able to draw a line,
how many refugees she would take into the country.
She said, "Oh, well, by law I cannot do this
"because whoever enters European soil and wants asylum."
Okay, but then she said something,
when she was asked about the borders,
then she said something which was widely interpreted as,
"Well, I don't know if we still can
"in our days protect our borders."
And then people got wild.
If you have to say what really triggered
or was the tipping point where the public idea
about taking in refugees,
which was very popular at the beginning in Germany,
shifted, it was that.
I think that was her major mistake,
to leave that impression behind.
She did it in a general argument about migration
these days and people just knocking at our doors.
But maybe that was the daughter of a pastor
talking and not the commander-in-chief.
So that was something where people were like,
"Oh my god, what did she just say?"
That was the problem in terms of Germany
taking in the refugees.
- How has globalization played into that
us versus them sentiment in these far-right movements?
- It's also a source of why so many migrants move,
is that now, through modern communication, television,
and the Internet, you see how people live in other places.
So you have an unrest, an upheaval, in that sense,
like people realize in what miserable
state their country may be.
But you also find when you stay in your country,
you and your lifestyle, your religion, your set of beliefs,
it's also at least challenged by learning there are others.
I grew up in a village in the middle of nowhere in Germany,
where we were predominantly Catholic.
You know somewhere out there are others,
but they are not in the TV or through the Internet,
only at your table every day.
So globalization poses, of course,
a challenge to how we identify ourselves,
because our neighbor, also in the Biblical sense,
is not just the people next door.
You realize the neighbor is everybody.
- That brings me actually to your personal story,
because in some ways I think of your story.
You were the son of Turkish migrants to Germany.
You were adopted as a baby,
so you did not know your biological parents.
But you're obviously a success in your field.
Were you a product of European values
that are now under threat?
Are you a product of that?
- I'd say so.
It is very interesting what you bring up.
I spend a great amount of time, a big chunk of my time,
talking and researching about identities.
To me it was always interesting to learn,
I grew up in this family as you described,
and I was a baby when I was adopted,
so this was normal to me.
This was my identity, this village, we drink Riesling,
and we are Catholic, and we celebrate carnival.
It is like a totally normal setup.
But then, when you are told you are adopted,
you realize every day of my life could have been
totally different if you had been adopted by another family.
It opens a door into understanding how relative
these claims of identity are.
Even if I had been adopted by a couple
from the neighbor village,
which was predominantly Protestant,
I would have been a Protestant kid.
- And what would it have meant
if you were raised by your Turkish parents?
- Exactly.
- I know you wrote about this in an essay,
how big a difference it would have made for you
to have kept your Turkish name given to you at birth
versus Alexander Gorlach, a very German name.
- This is interesting.
I love the German language,
so I studied literature and did a Ph.D. in linguistics.
I was very eager in learning about religion and philosophy,
so I guess actually the language and the culture
through religion is the door into society.
Since I had a German name and I was an altar boy
and all this stuff, I blended in and nobody realized
I was a bit darker by skin than all of the others,
because identity-wise I was one of them.
It is very interesting how these mechanisms work.
If you would send two or three migrants to my village,
which we had; we also had later Turkish and Arab refugees,
and also from Russia, Russian Germans,
since the numbers are small,
people react to that in a positive way,
because then you say, "Okay, it's just a few of them,
"but it's all us, this is the majority.
"Let's just integrate them and invite them
"to the village party."
Which happened.
But what happens today is you do not know
how many migrants are on their way, how many are coming,
and the right-wing movements exploit that.
They have no idea, no intention to educate people
about the good means of migration
and what it means for an economy;
and also what it means to be a good human person,
to take in people who flee a damn war.
- Journalists and academics,
how can they respond to remedy some of these problems
with false news and false information?
- If you quote the Bible, We give testimony to truth.
Here's the thing, today, it's under threat what a fact is.
Back in the days, until a few years ago,
the question was what a fact means.
This is paramount for liberal democracy
that you do not have one interpretation only.
So how we combat climate change is something different
than just to say, "Oh, it ain't gonna happen."
So I think there is a certain futility for societies
in that if you have vital debates about what facts mean.
But today we really have to reinforce or reinvigorate
just the love for facts, to just say,
"Okay, this is what we know; this is the data we have.
"What can we make out of it in terms of policy,
"but also in terms of business
"but also in terms of societal process?"
You also have to call a lie a lie.
That is also something I think that,
if you look into the strategies of Mr. Putin
or Mr. Erdogan or whatever,
you tire people with your version of reality,
and at some point they will not say,
"Oh, that's utterly false."
They will just say, "I don't care."
That is actually the strategy to calm
and silence the people and give them fatigue about it.
This is something we academics and journalists have to
kick in and say, "No, no, this is not going to happen."
- Alexander Gorlach, thank you so much.
- Thank you.
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