🔴 If You want Peace, prepare for Europe | LIVE STREAMING | ENGLISH
Talk · Europa 2057 ·
2026-03-25 · 1:55:48 · 11,172 words
with Cathy Newman
geopolitics-warfascism-populismideologycapitalismcommunism-socialismdemocracyecology-climatetechnology-ai-cyberspacerace-antisemitismrevolution-violencehistoryphilosophy-generalreligion-theologyliberalism-political-correctness
A Berggruen Institute event in Rome (the building where the Treaties of Rome were signed) on Europe's future in a destabilizing world, with introductions by mayor Roberto Gualtieri and Lorenzo Marsili. Žižek's keynote argues that the major powers, Trump's US, Putin's Russia, Netanyahu's Israel, and the BRICS bloc, each enact a 'civilizational erasure', and that only a reinvented, emancipatory, universalist Europe can supply the global coordination (which he is willing to call 'communism') needed to face ecological collapse, AI, and war. He reads Gramsci, Havel, Lacan, Benjamin and Marx, defends Ukraine's forced choice between life and freedom, and the event closes with a video link from Ukrainian human-rights lawyer Alexandra Matviichuk on dignity and resistance.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
His name for a politics that takes circumstances into account yet always keeps basic principled insights in view, the virtue he attributes to Gualtieri against the false wisdom of pure pragmatism.
as “interregnum / morbid phenomena”
Gramsci's formula ('the old is dying and the new cannot be born') that Žižek re-reads: the true morbid phenomena are not the stuck transition but the catastrophic endpoints our history is heading toward.
as “big Other”
Lacan's neutral frame of shared understanding: for Žižek the 'end of the world' is precisely the breakdown of this frame, figured as God turning around and crying.
as “the end of the world (as change of coordinates)”
His definition: the end of the world changes not just local events within a situation but the very coordinates of the situation itself, the frame (big Other) in which events are measured breaks down.
Gramsci's term for the ideological struggle Žižek says Trump and the American right now understand better than the left, the struggle for cultural common sense.
A term taken from Trump's 'National Security Strategy' document that Žižek adopts and generalizes as the common frame of US, Russian and Israeli politics, Europe's erasure by others and Israel's self-erasure.
as “castration”
Lacanian figure he spots in populist rhetoric: Trumpians frame the threat to 'our masculine vitality and enjoyment' as emasculation/feminization by weak others.
as “enjoyment (jouissance)”
Lacanian register invoked to decode Trumpian 'freedom of speech': it means the right to enjoyment, the right to offend and utter whatever pops into one's mind, the opposite of the democratic right to criticize power.
Term coined by Putin ideologist Kharichev for the supposedly self-sacrificing Russian who values things higher than mere existence, the ideological avatar of Russian civilizational erasure.
Lacanian structure Žižek applies to Ukraine: the choice between life (surrender) and freedom (resistance) is forced because both options imply death, surrender means disappearance as a nation.
as “universalism of struggle”
His counter to both false UNESCO-style globalism and BRICS multiculturalism: a universalism that takes a stand against injustice everywhere rather than politely tolerating each civilization's horrors.
His inversion of the Communist Manifesto: today the spectre that all the old and new powers join to exorcise is Europe itself, the only remaining bearer of emancipatory potential.
Sloterdijk's term for the basic European welfare legacy, universal healthcare, free education, basic rights, that survives changes of government and is Europe's real contribution to defend.
Althusser's notion that ideology hails individuals into subjects, here reversed: today ideology interpellates us NOT as subjects of a cause but as private individuals told to mind our daily life.
as “communism as global coordination beyond the market”
His reclaimed name for the transnational coordination (regulating, not abolishing, the market) that ecology and AI require, explicitly detached from any Soviet Central-Committee model.
Stories he reaches for 4
From Balfour (who wanted Jews to leave Europe) through Heydrich's 1936 text distinguishing Zionist from assimilationist Jews, to Breivik, a consistent line of antisemites supports Jews moving to Israel so they stop bothering Europe, a logic that culminates today in pro-Israel antisemitism.
“no, we don't want assimilationist Jews but if they move there they're a great nation, we will have wonderful relations with them”
Luxemburg's alternative 'socialism or barbarism' is given a Žižekian twist: it can be both at the same time, as we learned from Stalin, the transition itself producing barbarism.
“the future will be socialism or barbarism. Well, it can be both at the same time as we learned from Stalin, no?”
When unemployed he held a low-level post writing notes in the Communist Party central committee, and discovered that taking the official ideology seriously made one suspect of being a dissident, to belong to the system one had to keep a private distance toward it.
“if you were member of the communist party and took the official ideology seriously you were in danger, because you were suspected of being potentially a dissident.”
A shopkeeper puts a 'Workers of the world unite' sign in his window every morning; he doesn't believe it and neither does anyone else, but the system persists through mass participation in rituals privately known to be false.
“Every morning this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: 'Workers of the world unite'. He doesn't believe it, no one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble.”
Works invoked 7
Communist Manifesto book
Its opening spectre is inverted: today the spectre haunting the whole world is Europe itself, exorcised by a holy alliance of Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Orbán and others.
Havel's greengrocer models how ideology persists through rituals no one believes, used to measure the difference between late-communist and present-day 'sign-taking-down'.
Prison Notebooks book
Gramsci's interregnum / morbid-phenomena formula opens the talk and is re-read so that the morbidity is the catastrophe our history is heading toward.
Eliot's line that at moments the only choice is between heresy and non-belief is enlisted for the radical reinvention of Europe.
Badiou's claim that since Socrates philosophy's function is to corrupt the youth is adopted as a positive value, despite not fully agreeing with Badiou.
The 33-page White House document introducing 'civilizational erasure' as the frame for Europe's supposed self-destruction, adopted by Žižek only to be turned against its authors.
Die Presse caricature other
A Viennese newspaper caricature of two Nazis complaining that justified antisemitism is misused for cheap critique of Israel, deployed to crystallize the antisemitic-Zionist paradox.
People invoked 37
Alexander Kharichev negative
Top Putin ideologist of 'Homo Putinus' and the Russian people's supposedly self-sacrificing nature.
Roberto Gualtieri positive
Praised as an 'old communist', a bright historian and Gramsci theorist; a living proof that theory helps politics, the embodiment of 'principled pragmatism'.
Steve Bannon negative
Called maybe the most interesting Trumpian ideologist; his line that immigrants and big companies are foreign forces occupying American soil.
Jacques Lacan positive
The 'big Other' frames his reading of the end of the world as the collapse of the shared coordinates of public life.
Louis Althusser positive
Interpellation is turned around (via Jodi Dean): today ideology interpellates us as private individuals, not as subjects of a cause.
Jodi Dean positive
Credits her reversal of Althusser, ideology no longer addresses us as subjects.
Arthur Balfour negative
Anti-Semitic; wanted Jews to go to Palestine in order to get rid of the Jews in Europe, the start of a line that continues through Heydrich and Breivik.
Mark Carney negative
Praises his reference to Havel's greengrocer but disagrees with extending the analogy, our liberal-democratic 'sign' was not taken down by dissidents but by the big powers themselves.
Sabine Hossenfelder positive
Uses her alien-civilization thought experiment to argue market economies cannot provide the global coordination we need.
Donald Trump negative
The central antagonist; his civilizational-erasure politics is a dark comedy, his vulgarity is barbarizing the US, yet Žižek says the left should learn from his refusal to chase the center and his drawing of a radical line of distinction.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Quotes him on the spiritual catastrophe for Judaism, Greater Israel as the worship of anti-Jewish values; a Zionist acquaintance he respects.
Anton Alikhanov negative
Governor of Kaliningrad (ex-Königsberg) who absurdly traces the war in Ukraine back to Kant's godlessness.
Lorenzo Marsili positive
Follows his call to proclaim the independence of a united Europe and to recover the courage of becoming protagonists of our own history.
Alain Badiou positive
Borrows his claim that since Socrates philosophy's function is to corrupt the youth, a positive value, while noting he does not fully agree with Badiou.
Elon Musk negative
Dismissive jab that the colonization of Mars is far less important than the European task of this generation.
Bruno Latour positive
Closes on his line that Europe is alone but only Europe can save us.
Bernie Sanders positive
Endorses his call for a moratorium on AI data centers as a moment to think.
Václav Havel positive
The greengrocer anecdote from The Power of the Powerless models how ideology survives through rituals no one believes; he disagrees only with Carney's extension of it to today.
T. S. Eliot positive
Cites his 'heresy or non-belief' as the choice now needed to keep the European spirit alive, a conservative enlisted for a radical reinvention.
Trump told him Ukraine should accept losses because Russia has 'better cards', the Thrasymachan logic of the stronger.
Dmitry Peskov negative
His admission that international law no longer exists de facto, Žižek adds that Russia did the same with its attack on Ukraine.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Called the 'greater peacemaker' (ironically); Israel's drive to dominate the Middle East is its own civilizational erasure; belongs with Trump and Putin in a Hague cell.
Anders Behring Breivik negative
The Norwegian mass murderer who held that Jews are a danger in Europe and the US but should be fully supported in Israel, the same antisemitic-Zionist logic.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Borrows his term 'objective social democracy' for the basic European welfare legacy, healthcare, education, rights, worth defending.
Friedrich Merz positive
Quotes approvingly his Davos line that a world where only power counts is a dangerous place for small, middle and ultimately great powers.
Viktor Orbán negative
Quoted celebrating the disintegration of the liberal world order, the same message as Carney and Merz in a different tone.
Nicolás Maduro negative
A criminal leader whose kidnapping by Trump is nonetheless terrifying in principle; ideally he would share a Hague cell with Putin, Netanyahu and Trump.
Reinhard Heydrich negative
His 1936 text distinguishes Zionist Jews (to be supported in Palestine) from assimilationist Jews (rejected), the same logic Žižek sees revived today.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cites the thesis that revolutions are the emergency brake, not the locomotive of world history.
Peter Thiel negative
Accused Europe of being the way of Antichrist, 'Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist'; demanded a large change in Europe's value system.
Pete Hegseth negative
Reads his 'not a fair fight / punching them while they are down' briefing as the voice of Trumpian brutality.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Her 'socialism or barbarism' is given a twist, it can be both at once, as Stalin showed.
Vladimir Putin negative
Eurasian traditional-values ideology, the 'Homo Putinus' self-sacrifice doctrine, the expanded nuclear doctrine, and Russian civilizational erasure directed at Europe and Ukraine.
Antonio Gramsci positive
Opens with the Prison Notebooks formula of interregnum and morbid phenomena; notes the American right now appropriates Gramsci and sometimes understands hegemony better than the left.
Plato positive
Cites Thrasymachus in the Republic, justice is the interest of the stronger, as the formula for Trump's dealings with Ukraine and Russia.
Karl Marx positive
Invokes the Communist Manifesto's spectre and Thesis 11 in order to invert both, the spectre is now Europe, the task is to interpret the world again.
Immanuel Kant positive
Defends Kant against the Russian governor who blames Kant's 'godlessness' for the war in Ukraine; the Western values under attack are Kantian.
What it argues
Europe as the spectre haunting the worldcivilizational erasure under Trump, Putin, Netanyahuthe end of the world as a collapse of coordinatespulling the emergency brake on historyBRICS false multiculturalism vs universalism of struggleUkraine's forced choice: life or freedom (both imply death)reinventing communism as global coordination beyond the market
Dialectical moves 12
“These endpoints of our history are the true morbid phenomena — the normal direction where our history moves left to itself is morbid.”
The morbidity is not the stuck transition but the destination itself: catastrophe is the default trajectory.
“Marx says revolutions are the locomotive of world history, but perhaps they are the passengers' attempt to activate the emergency brake.”
Following Benjamin: leftist action today is stopping the train heading toward catastrophe, not driving it forward.
“The true change is when God himself — the big Other, the neutral frame of our understanding — breaks down.”
The end of the world is the collapse of the frame that measures reality, not a local event within it.
“The spectre which is haunting the entire world is Europe itself.”
Inversion of the Communist Manifesto: Europe, not communism, is now the object of the world's holy alliance, because it still bears emancipatory potential.
“For the Trumpians freedom of speech means exactly the opposite from the European democratic tradition.”
The right claimed is the right to enjoyment, to offend, not the right to criticize power; the slogan inverts its meaning.
“The only big power which still follows market competition, good international capitalism, is China.”
The supposed communist rival is now the rule-follower of global capitalism, while the US breaks the rules, a paradoxical inversion.
“Occupiers sincerely always want peace, but peace defined in their terms.”
Demanding peace can mean capitulation to occupation; the peace-nik position inverts the real content of 'peace'.
“Ukraine's forced choice — life or freedom — has an additional twist: both choices imply death.”
Surrender is national death; resistance risks death, the forced choice contains no safe option, exposing the false alternative.
“Ideology no longer addresses us as subjects; we are interpellated as: don't care about any big causes, just worry about your modest daily life.”
The post-ideological call to private life is itself the current form of ideology, ideology's reversal of Althusser.
“It's like Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist — Peter Thiel accusing Europe.”
The Christian-right accuser occupies the very position he denounces, inverting the moral framing.
“Trump declares himself the greatest peacemaker in the history of humanity while waging war.”
The peacemaker rhetoric legitimates endless 'last battles' against enemies of peace, peace and war coincide.
“Trump says the greatest enemy of the United States is Europe.”
The hatred is diagnostic: Europe is hated precisely because it still carries an emancipatory potential the others lack.
Claims 30
asserts
The European Union offers the only existing model of transnational organization whose task is to guarantee a minimum of social and ecological welfare standards, and is therefore worth fighting for.Europe / EU
asserts
Trump's chaotic capricious policy is itself accelerating the decline of US global hegemony, not merely losing it to a rising China.US hegemony
reframes
Left to itself, the normal direction of our history runs toward catastrophe — ecological collapse, uncontrolled AI, global war — and these endpoints, not the stuck transition, are the true morbid phenomena.historical process / Gramsci's interregnum
reframes
After a 20th century of trying to change the world without understanding it, the task is now to interpret the world again — turning around Marx's Thesis 11.philosophy's task / Marx Thesis 11
asserts
Nationalism and patriotism are not a priori bad, and the left was wrong to leave them to the enemy.nationalism
asserts
After '68 the left retreated into art theory, ethics and political correctness and neglected the actual economic concerns of the working class — a void Trump exploited.the post-'68 left
asserts
China is today the only big power that still follows market competition and international capitalist rules, while Trump breaks those very rules with capricious tariffs.China and market rules
reframes
For Trumpians 'freedom of speech' means the exact opposite of the European democratic tradition — the right to offend others and utter publicly whatever pops into one's mind.freedom of speech
asserts
The extreme right attacks immigrants and sexual minorities not for their strength but for their supposed weakness, which is experienced as contagious and threatening to infect us all.right-wing populism
asserts
Ukraine faces a forced choice between life (surrender) and freedom (resistance) in which both options imply death, since surrender means disappearance as a nation.Ukraine's choice
reframes
It is the West, not Ukraine, that actually has the choice — to risk war by supporting Ukraine or to choose peaceful life by suffering the humiliation of betraying an ally.West / Ukraine attribution of choice
rejects
The peace-nik position treats Ukrainians as stupidly following NATO orders and forgets that occupiers always sincerely want peace, defined on their own terms.peace-niks
asserts
It is Russia, and only Russia (together with Israel), that constantly evokes the possible use of nuclear weapons.nuclear threat
asserts
Many of those who support Israel are more or less openly anti-Semitic — they want Jews to move there so as not to bother us here in Europe.antisemitism and Zionism
rejects
BRICS multiculturalism is a false peace of separate civilizations, each free to do what it wants internally — as the Taliban–China deal showed over women and Uyghurs.BRICS
asserts
Europe was the only big civilization to start a movement to abolish slavery, a fact forgotten in today's one-sided guilt — even though Muslim countries took a comparably large number of slaves.Europe and slavery
asserts
The struggle for the rights of Palestinians should be just another aspect of the struggle against antisemitism and against injustice anywhere.Palestine and antisemitism
reframes
The name for the global coordination beyond the market — regulating it, not abolishing it — that ecology and AI require is communism, freed from any Soviet model.communism
asserts
Europe should stop its masochistic eternal guilt and act, because all the concepts used in that self-guilt are themselves European concepts.European guilt
asserts
The spectre haunting the entire world today is Europe itself; all the old and new powers have entered a holy alliance against Eurocentrism.Europe as spectre
asserts
Europe is afraid of its own emancipatory potential — its weakness is not objective decline but this fear.Europe
asserts
Trump's arbitrary and excessive acts increasingly appear as a comedy — a dark comedy, but nonetheless a comedy.Trump
asserts
Putin, Netanyahu and Trump belong together with Maduro in a cell at the International Criminal Court in The Hague — they speak the same language.the strongmen
asserts
Israel under Netanyahu is itself caught in a process of its own civilizational erasure, heading toward an ethnic cleansing that would be a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism.Israel
asserts
We need a moratorium on artificial-intelligence data centers now, in order to think.AI
asserts
To keep the European spirit alive we must do a heresy — not return to the old welfare state but move a step further in reinventing Europe.reinventing Europe
reframes
Today ideology no longer interpellates us as subjects of a big cause but tells us to mind our modest daily life — the era that calls itself 'beyond ideology' is ideology's current form.ideology / post-ideology
asserts
Kant and the Western values he founded are wrongly blamed by Russian ideologists for the war in Ukraine, and Ukraine's resistance to Russia is an unexpected miracle to be supported by the West.Kant / Ukraine
asserts
The arbitrary kidnapping of a criminal leader like Maduro is in principle terrifying, regardless of what one thinks of the regime.Maduro / arbitrary state violence
asserts
The COVID crisis proved how many changes the capitalist system can go through without falling apart, disproving the market ideologists' claim that taxing the rich would collapse everything.capitalism's flexibility
Quotes 17
“The shortest definition of the end of the world is: it doesn't change only local events within a situation, it changes also the coordinates of the situation itself.”Slavoj Žižek · the end of the world as change of coordinates
“Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers of this train, namely the human race, to activate the emergency brake.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjamin's inversion of Marx
“the true change when God himself who stands here for what Jacques Lacan calls the big other, the neutral frame of our understanding of the situation, breaks down.”Slavoj Žižek · end of the world = breakdown of the big Other
“the spectre which is haunting the entire world is Europe itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Europe as the spectre (inverting Marx)
“the only big power which still follows markets competition, good international capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · China as the real rule-follower of capitalism
“Freedom of speech means the right to enjoyment, that is to say the right to offend others, to utter publicly whatever pops up in your mind.”Slavoj Žižek · Trumpian freedom of speech inverted
“If you resist against aggression and fight back you may lose. If you don't resist you've already lost.”Slavoj Žižek · the case for Ukrainian resistance
“They just want Jews to move there not to bother us here in Europe.”Slavoj Žižek · antisemitic support for Israel
“we are interpellated as: don't care about any big causes, just worry about your modest modest daily life and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology today interpellates us as private individuals
“the name that we have for this global coordination beyond market, not abolishing the market, just regulating the market, is communism.”Slavoj Žižek · communism reclaimed as regulated global coordination
“Europe itself is afraid of its emancipatory potential.”Slavoj Žižek · Europe's weakness is fear of itself
“L'Europe est seule, mais seule l'Europe peut nous sauver. Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can save us.”Slavoj Žižek · Latour's closing line on Europe
“A world where only power counts is a dangerous place.”Slavoj Žižek · Merz on the rule of power
“I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger.”Slavoj Žižek · Thrasymachus's formula for Trump
“there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief.”Slavoj Žižek · Eliot's frame for reinventing Europe
“the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth.”Slavoj Žižek · Badiou on philosophy's vocation
“Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel.”Slavoj Žižek · the antisemitism/Israel paradox
Transcript 31 turns
unknown
Good afternoon everyone and a very warm welcome. I would like to inform you that simultaneous interpretation is available for anybody requiring interpretation. So headsets are available outside the room and you can pick up a headset if required. My name is Patrizia Pozzo and I am part of the Berggruen Institute. For those who are not familiar with the Berggruen Institute, allow me to say that our role is that of developing and promoting ideas that can feed into a public debate on the major challenges of our times. I'd like to just mention a few: planetary geopolitics, democracy, rules, the economy. And in order to do this we turn to authoritative experts with different experience, background, and origin. We have headquarters in Beijing and the European headquarters are in Venice in Italy. It is certainly not a coincidence that we have chosen to hold this event today in this particular venue because in the Treaties of Rome were signed. And this is why we have chosen to hold this initiative, Europe with the aim of going beyond short-termism and trying to take a more forward-looking approach with a view to building a strong, authoritative, and peaceful Europe, a different Europe in other words. I will not add anything further other than express my sincere thanks to the Mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri. We really appreciate the fact that he has kindly joined us and of course is hosting this event. Over to you. Good evening and thank you so much. I'm delighted and honored to be able to host here in this venue, in the Sala della Protomoteca the Capital Hill, this event which focuses on fundamental topics. And of course we are privileged to be able to have with us Slavoj Žižek. It is a real pleasure and an honor for us to have him here and we look forward to his remarks as we look forward to the remarks by Alexandra Matviichuk and Lia Quartapelle. So allow me to thank the Berggruen Institute and Lorenzo Marsili for having chosen to organize this event and for having decided to send a very clear message. Obviously having as a keynote speaker Slavoj Žižek means that we will be looking at the way in which Europe can play a role in terms of peace, democracy, justice in a world that is increasingly complex and is characterized by stark contradictions that don't only concern the rest of the global scenario but also Europe itself. Given that we see the philosophical, as Slavoj Žižek would say, and political issues, we see the emergence of identitarian nationalism, a abstract technocratic globalist vision, religious fundamentalism and the use of war as a means of seeking a solution. Shifting away from a political approach, we're also faced with a climate crisis that as we know is threatening our very survival as a human species. There are many inequalities and technological developments that can give rise to very different outcomes, some are dystopian and human. There is the theory of eliminating language altogether and promoting neuron-to-neuron communication. Not to mention the use of artificial intelligence which can be managed exclusively on the basis of private interest and this can widen inequalities and therefore Europe is faced with considerable challenges within and with respect to the global scenario. Obviously we're pro-European and yet we look at Europe's weaknesses, insufficiencies, shortcomings which are certainly considerable. There is an existential threat due to Russia's aggression against Ukraine. We talk about a common defense but then when it comes to the multiannual financial framework we are unable to commit to the rollover of the next generation EU securities. So when it comes to COVID of course we know that we were able to tackle it and that shows that Europe can implement adequate policies. There are many other aspects of course that need to be considered. I would like to once again mention Žižek by saying that Europe amongst other things is also, let's say, a something which enables us to identify the limits and weaknesses of Europe whilst being pro-European. Perhaps what Europe needs is greater self-awareness of its identity and of its strengths even though there can be apparent contradictions. Obviously if there's a dichotomy vision of reality, inevitably, you know, people will say it's either a nation state or European federalism. We know that Europe is an original attempt to bring together national democracy and European democracy by means of extremely complex procedures and bodies that represent citizens directly and states with, let's say, a regressive proportionality in Parliament, normal proportionality in the Council, the Commission, the community method, functionalism, the weight of states and the weight of citizens that can be combined in different ways with limited competencies. Is this the full expression of democracy, of a people, that of peoples that can hold a referendum and it is not however, if you will, a supranational functionalist model that has been completed. I think that abstract federalism and nationalism err in failing to see that there is this experiment between national sovereignty and federalism which can potentially bring great benefits and this is something that we're not always necessarily aware of. Maybe future generations will be able to establish that. So I think that greater self-awareness and the ability to interpret the historical path that has led to this model of Europe and the effect of the imperfect but deep political, cultural, economic and social, let's say, interaction between national systems and European systems, and there's a sense of pride as well. I'm not saying complacency but there is a condition in place which I think enables us to improve Europe's ability to play a useful and positive role in our contemporary world. So taking stock of the current state of play is a condition to develop something for the future, something that doesn't exist as yet but can be brought into existence. There is also obviously a form of cosmopolitan globalism but this is not realistic even though many political cultures have been permeated by these models but there are many political, let's say, realities that fail to understand the real situation. And we also know that there's something to be said about the strength of European thinking and I'm really looking forward to our keynote speaker because of course he's certainly going to talk about this. Žižek has given us... he said there's no such thing as philosophy in Europe. I tend to disagree. The thing is that we've seen the emergence of philosophies that perhaps are not well-equipped to deal with the current state of things in our world, a liberal-dichotomy, technocratic rules-based approach as well as postmodernism, the idea that there's no such thing as reality, that everything is subjective. These are philosophies, European philosophies that is, which I believe undermine our ability to develop a truly European political approach. There's a cultural, philosophical, political, institutional effort that is required of us and therefore it's wonderful that it is possible to discuss these themes, not just and not only to decide whether we have to use Article paragraph or the flexibility clause to develop fiscal capacity. We have to look at the roots, the cultural and philosophical roots of Europe as it faces these challenges. Obviously
Good afternoon everyone and a very warm welcome. I would like to inform you that simultaneous interpretation is available for anybody requiring interpretation. So headsets are available outside the room and you can pick up a headset if required. My name is Patrizia Pozzo and I am part of the Berggruen Institute. For those who are not familiar with the Berggruen Institute, allow me to say that our role is that of developing and promoting ideas that can feed into a public debate on the major challenges of our times. I'd like to just mention a few: planetary geopolitics, democracy, rules, the economy. And in order to do this we turn to authoritative experts with different experience, background, and origin. We have headquarters in Beijing and the European headquarters are in Venice in Italy. It is certainly not a coincidence that we have chosen to hold this event today in this particular venue because in the Treaties of Rome were signed. And this is why we have chosen to hold this initiative, Europe with the aim of going beyond short-termism and trying to take a more forward-looking approach with a view to building a strong, authoritative, and peaceful Europe, a different Europe in other words. I will not add anything further other than express my sincere thanks to the Mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri. We really appreciate the fact that he has kindly joined us and of course is hosting this event. Over to you. Good evening and thank you so much. I'm delighted and honored to be able to host here in this venue, in the Sala della Protomoteca the Capital Hill, this event which focuses on fundamental topics. And of course we are privileged to be able to have with us Slavoj Žižek. It is a real pleasure and an honor for us to have him here and we look forward to his remarks as we look forward to the remarks by Alexandra Matviichuk and Lia Quartapelle. So allow me to thank the Berggruen Institute and Lorenzo Marsili for having chosen to organize this event and for having decided to send a very clear message. Obviously having as a keynote speaker Slavoj Žižek means that we will be looking at the way in which Europe can play a role in terms of peace, democracy, justice in a world that is increasingly complex and is characterized by stark contradictions that don't only concern the rest of the global scenario but also Europe itself. Given that we see the philosophical, as Slavoj Žižek would say, and political issues, we see the emergence of identitarian nationalism, a abstract technocratic globalist vision, religious fundamentalism and the use of war as a means of seeking a solution. Shifting away from a political approach, we're also faced with a climate crisis that as we know is threatening our very survival as a human species. There are many inequalities and technological developments that can give rise to very different outcomes, some are dystopian and human. There is the theory of eliminating language altogether and promoting neuron-to-neuron communication. Not to mention the use of artificial intelligence which can be managed exclusively on the basis of private interest and this can widen inequalities and therefore Europe is faced with considerable challenges within and with respect to the global scenario. Obviously we're pro-European and yet we look at Europe's weaknesses, insufficiencies, shortcomings which are certainly considerable. There is an existential threat due to Russia's aggression against Ukraine. We talk about a common defense but then when it comes to the multiannual financial framework we are unable to commit to the rollover of the next generation EU securities. So when it comes to COVID of course we know that we were able to tackle it and that shows that Europe can implement adequate policies. There are many other aspects of course that need to be considered. I would like to once again mention Žižek by saying that Europe amongst other things is also, let's say, a something which enables us to identify the limits and weaknesses of Europe whilst being pro-European. Perhaps what Europe needs is greater self-awareness of its identity and of its strengths even though there can be apparent contradictions. Obviously if there's a dichotomy vision of reality, inevitably, you know, people will say it's either a nation state or European federalism. We know that Europe is an original attempt to bring together national democracy and European democracy by means of extremely complex procedures and bodies that represent citizens directly and states with, let's say, a regressive proportionality in Parliament, normal proportionality in the Council, the Commission, the community method, functionalism, the weight of states and the weight of citizens that can be combined in different ways with limited competencies. Is this the full expression of democracy, of a people, that of peoples that can hold a referendum and it is not however, if you will, a supranational functionalist model that has been completed. I think that abstract federalism and nationalism err in failing to see that there is this experiment between national sovereignty and federalism which can potentially bring great benefits and this is something that we're not always necessarily aware of. Maybe future generations will be able to establish that. So I think that greater self-awareness and the ability to interpret the historical path that has led to this model of Europe and the effect of the imperfect but deep political, cultural, economic and social, let's say, interaction between national systems and European systems, and there's a sense of pride as well. I'm not saying complacency but there is a condition in place which I think enables us to improve Europe's ability to play a useful and positive role in our contemporary world. So taking stock of the current state of play is a condition to develop something for the future, something that doesn't exist as yet but can be brought into existence. There is also obviously a form of cosmopolitan globalism but this is not realistic even though many political cultures have been permeated by these models but there are many political, let's say, realities that fail to understand the real situation. And we also know that there's something to be said about the strength of European thinking and I'm really looking forward to our keynote speaker because of course he's certainly going to talk about this. Žižek has given us... he said there's no such thing as philosophy in Europe. I tend to disagree. The thing is that we've seen the emergence of philosophies that perhaps are not well-equipped to deal with the current state of things in our world, a liberal-dichotomy, technocratic rules-based approach as well as postmodernism, the idea that there's no such thing as reality, that everything is subjective. These are philosophies, European philosophies that is, which I believe undermine our ability to develop a truly European political approach. There's a cultural, philosophical, political, institutional effort that is required of us and therefore it's wonderful that it is possible to discuss these themes, not just and not only to decide whether we have to use Article paragraph or the flexibility clause to develop fiscal capacity. We have to look at the roots, the cultural and philosophical roots of Europe as it faces these challenges. Obviously
unknown
we know that the evolution of thinking
we know that the evolution of thinking
unknown
has led to many regressive useless forms of thinking that generate the exact opposite. They are let's say the genesis of Trumpism whereas maybe they started off in a different way. And there's also, and Slavoj Žižek is living proof of this, there's a cultural, democratic, civil and philosophical wealth which is an extraordinarily powerful asset that Europe has. And I hope I
has led to many regressive useless forms of thinking that generate the exact opposite. They are let's say the genesis of Trumpism whereas maybe they started off in a different way. And there's also, and Slavoj Žižek is living proof of this, there's a cultural, democratic, civil and philosophical wealth which is an extraordinarily powerful asset that Europe has. And I hope I
unknown
don't come
don't come
unknown
across as sounding, let's say, self-serving in any way but I think that this is the best our planet has to offer, this combination of political, social and civil rights. The challenge of defending them, safeguarding them at a national level and also supporting them at a European level, these are massive challenges.
across as sounding, let's say, self-serving in any way but I think that this is the best our planet has to offer, this combination of political, social and civil rights. The challenge of defending them, safeguarding them at a national level and also supporting them at a European level, these are massive challenges.
unknown
But
But
unknown
possibly we're also helped by the idea that when we were faced with apparently unsurmountable challenges we managed to find the resources to overcome
possibly we're also helped by the idea that when we were faced with apparently unsurmountable challenges we managed to find the resources to overcome
unknown
them. I
them. I
unknown
had the fortune and responsibility of experiencing this moment, I was Minister of the Economy
had the fortune and responsibility of experiencing this moment, I was Minister of the Economy
unknown
during COVID and Europe had to face
during COVID and Europe had to face
unknown
something that was totally unexpected and it had to develop instruments that were against the let's say underlying thinking. It was taboo, million securities and bonds issued to support the
something that was totally unexpected and it had to develop instruments that were against the let's say underlying thinking. It was taboo, million securities and bonds issued to support the
Cathy Newman
expanse
expanse
unknown
of billion, sorry says the speaker, to purchase
of billion, sorry says the speaker, to purchase
Cathy Newman
bonds and allow let's say some leeway to national states, centralized vaccine procurement, going beyond state aid, issuing common debt instruments, allowing for expansionary fiscal policies and to try and avoid the effect of the crisis of produced by the populist right. During COVID, when tackling the COVID emergency we managed to do things that were unthinkable only weeks beforehand. And so that is evidence of the strength, of the resilience, of the flexibility that we have. Perhaps we've not seen anything quite like this. Maybe because of a different political composition of these very complex, let's say, equilibria, we have failed to respond in an equally effective, powerful way. I don't want to come across as being superficial but I tend to look beyond the drawbacks and problems and believe that there is potential. We have to be aware and self-aware and we shouldn't be a determinist theological, I would not even dare go down that road certainly not in the presence of Slavoj Žižek. I believe that Europe can find solutions that have to be both internal and external at the same time because it is impossible to reform and improve the way we are, the way we operate unless we look beyond our borders and that is obvious. We can never be self-sufficient. Europe is intrinsically linked to a balanced world order. We'll have to wait and see what the midterm elections in the US will bring us and we have to look towards China and see what happens there. We don't hold our fate in our hands but it's a world of civilization, justice and democracy with great benefits for European citizens and I think it's important to consider that it matters and it has to be defended and therefore this is the way of tackling Europe's huge, let's say, weaknesses and shortcomings and confident that this event will enable us to give us some cultural and political insights that can help us understand how to tackle what appear to be unsurmountable contradictions but indeed are creative opportunities for us to ensure that the quality and strength of our extraordinary experience of peace and civilization, rights and democracy can prevail. Thank you and I wish you a successful meeting. Many thanks, thanks to our Mayor Mr. Gualtieri who gave us quite a bit of thoughts to consider and share with us his own thoughts. Many of the words were exactly what led us to imagine and to start conceiving today's initiative, but now coming to the point I believe that we should now pass the floor to Lorenzo Marsili, author of a number of essays published by Laterza and also director of the Berggruen Institute Europe. Okay. We are here today to just say something very simple, that is to say Europe is the only way, only possible way to allow our world to be a world of living things and not of dead things. Today we will hear more about this, about this initiative, the cultural political network known as Europe which goes back to the 100th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome that were signed here in And here we are today reminding you that Europe is the continent of the future. We obviously went through the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and all of this is what set us in the fourth or in the limelight of the world. But today we are looking at our future prospects and we are fearing that, we are paralyzed by that perspective. And right today history's coming back and it's once again accelerating and it seems to be what the angel of Benjamin was doing with his back toward the past and obviously looking towards a future towards which he is dragged. But nowadays more and more, more than the Silicon Valley artificial intelligence laboratories and of the one of the Shenzhen China, it is here in Europe that we can find the greatest living innovative political laboratory worldwide. This is something we've forgotten but that today's events remind us of because we see the world being the witness of war of men fighting man, a world which is heading towards and spinning towards catastrophe. The project of European unification is resting upon three simple words: never again a war. This is something that should be in today's agenda, it should be normal. The world is telling us something that we've already experienced, it tells us about the past of this continent. Our past, our history, what identifies us as Europeans, let's never forget that it's a past history of barbarian events and of crimes. We know that we've went twice almost we were almost engulfed by disaster and out of that experience we learned something important, such as nationalism and the logic of power will lead us only towards death and entail death. And it is with this understanding, with this acceptance of our guilt and crimes, past crimes, we could then imagine a new history. In these very rooms in and in all of the years that separate us from that very important date is something that we should always remember. This is why we should look at Europe with some hope and with the eyes not just our eyes but the eyes of the world. It should be the same in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and I do recall the words of a dear friend of mine, a Chinese friend, who once turned towards me and he said: you the European live already in the future, our us the Chinese belong to the past and live in the past. Which is usually exactly the opposite of what we normally hear. And it is so very simple because the present of China and of the United States and of the Middle East more and more is looking like the past history of Europe. It looks more and more like a world which is departed into blocks which is sort of governed by the logic of power until when it will crash against a wall. And that is past history to us and nowadays we want to be the citizens of the future, we want to bypass and go past that destructive logic. So the words of our Chinese friends, all of you Europeans are citizens of the future entail and encompass the whole program of our future. So we want to be a beacon, we want to be the ones that are going to allow for the switch towards a new world. So those three words, never war again, should be the northern star, the polar star of the actions that are at a planetary level. So we are at a crossroads. It is extremely clear that we may choose to stay divided and to be a declining continent, we may choose that we will deliver to our children a destiny which is going to be the serving tables or renting rooms or be the citizens of a burning world. Or maybe we could know that we should fight the logic of power and we have to turn into a power, and in order to say no to that logic we have to become power and strength and might. And the great Hegelian philosopher knows what I mean, but what I intend to say and stress here is that for too long all of us Europeans were afraid of force and instead today the world needs the European force and power. Now we need a Europe which not only needs to get together to protect and safeguard its own economic and safety and security interests but to allow for the human species to survive before it goes right heading against that wall. Now we need to pull on hard on the brakes to avoid catastrophe and in order to do that we need strength and might and force. So today's considerations, the conversations that are going to be held today and the political work that is going to be led forward by Europe is aiming at recovering a future which is totally different from our present history. Europe stands as permanent revolution. We need to recover the courage and the ambition of becoming the protagonists of our own history and becoming into sort of someone who can once again be brought back to life and back to life from its own ashes and we need not just to reinvent ourselves, we need no ashes to reinvent ourselves. This is a highly ambitious task. It is something very important, much more important than the colonization of Mars which is the agenda of Elon Musk, but it's our own task, the one of our generation. So once again thank you for being here tonight, thank you for helping us staying here with us and help us turning this world into something different from a dramatic crisis, but something better, something into a place where it's worthwhile having children and once again being truly Europeans. I did mention at the beginning that the Institute was working with some very important people and highly authoritative philosophers. Now here I am more than happy to invite here to the podium one of the most important philosophers, Slavoj Žižek. It is a great honor for me to be introduced here today by Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor. As an old communist I would say, you know communism, KGB, secret service, I follow his work for years and you should be happy to have him. Why? A precise reason. Because, you know, there is some pragmatic wisdom which is so false. The idea that for politicians it's better just to be pragmatic, not to be too bright, not to know too much philosophy, it just confuses you and so on. He is a living proof that you can be a good historian, theory specialist in Gramsci and so on, and it doesn't hurt your politics. It helps it. Yes, in politics we need pragmatism and so on, but we need what I like to call principled pragmatism. Yes, in the way you operate you take into account circumstances and so on, but you do this always with a view on how to remain faithful to basic principled insights. So it's an honor for me to be here. Now, let me begin.
bonds and allow let's say some leeway to national states, centralized vaccine procurement, going beyond state aid, issuing common debt instruments, allowing for expansionary fiscal policies and to try and avoid the effect of the crisis of produced by the populist right. During COVID, when tackling the COVID emergency we managed to do things that were unthinkable only weeks beforehand. And so that is evidence of the strength, of the resilience, of the flexibility that we have. Perhaps we've not seen anything quite like this. Maybe because of a different political composition of these very complex, let's say, equilibria, we have failed to respond in an equally effective, powerful way. I don't want to come across as being superficial but I tend to look beyond the drawbacks and problems and believe that there is potential. We have to be aware and self-aware and we shouldn't be a determinist theological, I would not even dare go down that road certainly not in the presence of Slavoj Žižek. I believe that Europe can find solutions that have to be both internal and external at the same time because it is impossible to reform and improve the way we are, the way we operate unless we look beyond our borders and that is obvious. We can never be self-sufficient. Europe is intrinsically linked to a balanced world order. We'll have to wait and see what the midterm elections in the US will bring us and we have to look towards China and see what happens there. We don't hold our fate in our hands but it's a world of civilization, justice and democracy with great benefits for European citizens and I think it's important to consider that it matters and it has to be defended and therefore this is the way of tackling Europe's huge, let's say, weaknesses and shortcomings and confident that this event will enable us to give us some cultural and political insights that can help us understand how to tackle what appear to be unsurmountable contradictions but indeed are creative opportunities for us to ensure that the quality and strength of our extraordinary experience of peace and civilization, rights and democracy can prevail. Thank you and I wish you a successful meeting. Many thanks, thanks to our Mayor Mr. Gualtieri who gave us quite a bit of thoughts to consider and share with us his own thoughts. Many of the words were exactly what led us to imagine and to start conceiving today's initiative, but now coming to the point I believe that we should now pass the floor to Lorenzo Marsili, author of a number of essays published by Laterza and also director of the Berggruen Institute Europe. Okay. We are here today to just say something very simple, that is to say Europe is the only way, only possible way to allow our world to be a world of living things and not of dead things. Today we will hear more about this, about this initiative, the cultural political network known as Europe which goes back to the 100th anniversary of the Treaties of Rome that were signed here in And here we are today reminding you that Europe is the continent of the future. We obviously went through the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution and all of this is what set us in the fourth or in the limelight of the world. But today we are looking at our future prospects and we are fearing that, we are paralyzed by that perspective. And right today history's coming back and it's once again accelerating and it seems to be what the angel of Benjamin was doing with his back toward the past and obviously looking towards a future towards which he is dragged. But nowadays more and more, more than the Silicon Valley artificial intelligence laboratories and of the one of the Shenzhen China, it is here in Europe that we can find the greatest living innovative political laboratory worldwide. This is something we've forgotten but that today's events remind us of because we see the world being the witness of war of men fighting man, a world which is heading towards and spinning towards catastrophe. The project of European unification is resting upon three simple words: never again a war. This is something that should be in today's agenda, it should be normal. The world is telling us something that we've already experienced, it tells us about the past of this continent. Our past, our history, what identifies us as Europeans, let's never forget that it's a past history of barbarian events and of crimes. We know that we've went twice almost we were almost engulfed by disaster and out of that experience we learned something important, such as nationalism and the logic of power will lead us only towards death and entail death. And it is with this understanding, with this acceptance of our guilt and crimes, past crimes, we could then imagine a new history. In these very rooms in and in all of the years that separate us from that very important date is something that we should always remember. This is why we should look at Europe with some hope and with the eyes not just our eyes but the eyes of the world. It should be the same in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and I do recall the words of a dear friend of mine, a Chinese friend, who once turned towards me and he said: you the European live already in the future, our us the Chinese belong to the past and live in the past. Which is usually exactly the opposite of what we normally hear. And it is so very simple because the present of China and of the United States and of the Middle East more and more is looking like the past history of Europe. It looks more and more like a world which is departed into blocks which is sort of governed by the logic of power until when it will crash against a wall. And that is past history to us and nowadays we want to be the citizens of the future, we want to bypass and go past that destructive logic. So the words of our Chinese friends, all of you Europeans are citizens of the future entail and encompass the whole program of our future. So we want to be a beacon, we want to be the ones that are going to allow for the switch towards a new world. So those three words, never war again, should be the northern star, the polar star of the actions that are at a planetary level. So we are at a crossroads. It is extremely clear that we may choose to stay divided and to be a declining continent, we may choose that we will deliver to our children a destiny which is going to be the serving tables or renting rooms or be the citizens of a burning world. Or maybe we could know that we should fight the logic of power and we have to turn into a power, and in order to say no to that logic we have to become power and strength and might. And the great Hegelian philosopher knows what I mean, but what I intend to say and stress here is that for too long all of us Europeans were afraid of force and instead today the world needs the European force and power. Now we need a Europe which not only needs to get together to protect and safeguard its own economic and safety and security interests but to allow for the human species to survive before it goes right heading against that wall. Now we need to pull on hard on the brakes to avoid catastrophe and in order to do that we need strength and might and force. So today's considerations, the conversations that are going to be held today and the political work that is going to be led forward by Europe is aiming at recovering a future which is totally different from our present history. Europe stands as permanent revolution. We need to recover the courage and the ambition of becoming the protagonists of our own history and becoming into sort of someone who can once again be brought back to life and back to life from its own ashes and we need not just to reinvent ourselves, we need no ashes to reinvent ourselves. This is a highly ambitious task. It is something very important, much more important than the colonization of Mars which is the agenda of Elon Musk, but it's our own task, the one of our generation. So once again thank you for being here tonight, thank you for helping us staying here with us and help us turning this world into something different from a dramatic crisis, but something better, something into a place where it's worthwhile having children and once again being truly Europeans. I did mention at the beginning that the Institute was working with some very important people and highly authoritative philosophers. Now here I am more than happy to invite here to the podium one of the most important philosophers, Slavoj Žižek. It is a great honor for me to be introduced here today by Roberto Gualtieri, the mayor. As an old communist I would say, you know communism, KGB, secret service, I follow his work for years and you should be happy to have him. Why? A precise reason. Because, you know, there is some pragmatic wisdom which is so false. The idea that for politicians it's better just to be pragmatic, not to be too bright, not to know too much philosophy, it just confuses you and so on. He is a living proof that you can be a good historian, theory specialist in Gramsci and so on, and it doesn't hurt your politics. It helps it. Yes, in politics we need pragmatism and so on, but we need what I like to call principled pragmatism. Yes, in the way you operate you take into account circumstances and so on, but you do this always with a view on how to remain faithful to basic principled insights. So it's an honor for me to be here. Now, let me begin.
unknown
Hope it will not be too boring. The Treaty of Rome was signed in March in this very building. Where are we with European Union today, years later? Since we are in Italy, I would like to begin with Antonio Gramsci's remark from his Prison Notebooks: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid phenomena, fenomeni morbosi, appear. Everybody from the right to the left uses this claim to characterize our situation. It's incredible how Gramsci was now even appropriated, are you aware of this, by the American right. There are some Trumpians, this is the lowest of the lowest, who refer to Gramsci. And they sometimes understand Gramsci better than we, because a Trump, whatever he is, understood that, as Gramsci would have put it, that ideological struggle is the struggle for hegemony. We have ideological elements like, as you Gualtieri said, for example nationalism, patriotism, they are not a priori bad. Why leave this topic to
Hope it will not be too boring. The Treaty of Rome was signed in March in this very building. Where are we with European Union today, years later? Since we are in Italy, I would like to begin with Antonio Gramsci's remark from his Prison Notebooks: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid phenomena, fenomeni morbosi, appear. Everybody from the right to the left uses this claim to characterize our situation. It's incredible how Gramsci was now even appropriated, are you aware of this, by the American right. There are some Trumpians, this is the lowest of the lowest, who refer to Gramsci. And they sometimes understand Gramsci better than we, because a Trump, whatever he is, understood that, as Gramsci would have put it, that ideological struggle is the struggle for hegemony. We have ideological elements like, as you Gualtieri said, for example nationalism, patriotism, they are not a priori bad. Why leave this topic to
Cathy Newman
the enemy? And Trump went here to the end. In their cultural madness, for the left after '68, politics becomes art theory, ethics, political correctness and so on, but they totally neglected concerns, actual economic concerns of the working class and so on. And Trump used this. Trump presents himself as the one who against cultural corporate elites speaks for the ordinary people. Maybe we should learn something from Trump here. Also at another level. Sorry if I will speak a little bit longer but I have many things to say. Also, you know what we should learn from Trump? He is a nightmare as you will see I will talk about it. That you know American Democrats ruined
the enemy? And Trump went here to the end. In their cultural madness, for the left after '68, politics becomes art theory, ethics, political correctness and so on, but they totally neglected concerns, actual economic concerns of the working class and so on. And Trump used this. Trump presents himself as the one who against cultural corporate elites speaks for the ordinary people. Maybe we should learn something from Trump here. Also at another level. Sorry if I will speak a little bit longer but I have many things to say. Also, you know what we should learn from Trump? He is a nightmare as you will see I will talk about it. That you know American Democrats ruined
unknown
everything
everything
Cathy Newman
that one can ruin because they were obsessed with this idea of not to lose center vote. Let's not go too much to the left, we will lose central votes. Somebody whom I met just once but he deeply impressed me, he is like me and less than me, Signor Gualtieri, he is an old white man, we know what this means to have him. But he is very bright. He said, no, our main concern should not be the undecided middle class, but those who vote for Trump and will be sooner or later disappointed by Trump. We should target and... what does this mean? The lesson of Trump is: don't be afraid to move to your side, to clearly state your position. Trump did this. He won majority by drawing radical line of distinction, not this "we must satisfy everybody". The left should learn this. So, let me go on. It's quite shocking how everybody refers to this Gramsci's sentence, of course reading it in a different way. For the left liberals, the morbid phenomenon is the right of new populist fascism. And for the new right, it is the excess of woke culture, open gates to immigrants, support of transsexuality and so on. But I think we should make a step further here, if you permit me this small critical remark. I think maybe Gramsci still thinks too much within the classic Marxist frame of transition from capitalism to socialism. But we learned in the 20th century many things about this transition. For example Rosa Luxemburg, you know, she said the future will be socialism or barbarism. Well, it can be both at the same time as we learned from Stalin, no? So, let me go on. So, the usual reading of Gramsci is that morbid phenomena arise when this transition from capitalism to whatever comes after gets stuck. And here we the left didn't do our proper job. We are just looking for excuses, you know. Like, for example, one of the popular theories is that, yeah, there still... it still holds this logic of from capitalism to socialism, just unfortunately revolution happens in the wrong place, in a primitive Asian Russia. But I think that our experience in the last hundred years compels us to change this frame. The normal process of our history, as Lorenzo indicated, runs towards different form of a final catastrophe, a self-destruction through ecological collapse, uncontrolled reign of artificial intelligence and global wars. These endpoints of our history are the true morbid phenomena. So it's not just "oh it went wrong", no, the basic direction where our history moves left to itself is morbid. In such a predicament, we should, again Lorenzo already mentioned it, we should pull the emergency brake on our historical process. Or, to quote Walter Benjamin: Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history, but perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers of this train, namely the human race, to activate the emergency brake. The modest leftist actions today are attempts, sometimes desperate attempts, to stop the destruction of our environment, to control the explosive development of artificial intelligence, to prevent a new world war. Along these lines, Bernie Sanders said in a podcast on March this year: "We need a moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers now." And we need such a moratorium why? To think. Maybe the time has come to turn around Marx's Thesis You know, philosophers have only interpreted the world, now the task is to change it. In what if in the 20th century we tried to change the world without really understanding it, now it's also the time to interpret it again. The shortest definition of the end of the world is: it doesn't change only local events within a situation, it changes also the coordinates of the situation itself. Let me paraphrase to explain this here an old joke from German Democratic Republic. I will use it often, I will now propose a new version. Von der Leyen, Putin and Trump meet God, God, Dio. And each is allowed to ask God one question. Von der Leyen begins: Tell me what will happen to European Union in the next decade. God answers: It will fall apart as a union and become a popular spot for tourists under a Russian
that one can ruin because they were obsessed with this idea of not to lose center vote. Let's not go too much to the left, we will lose central votes. Somebody whom I met just once but he deeply impressed me, he is like me and less than me, Signor Gualtieri, he is an old white man, we know what this means to have him. But he is very bright. He said, no, our main concern should not be the undecided middle class, but those who vote for Trump and will be sooner or later disappointed by Trump. We should target and... what does this mean? The lesson of Trump is: don't be afraid to move to your side, to clearly state your position. Trump did this. He won majority by drawing radical line of distinction, not this "we must satisfy everybody". The left should learn this. So, let me go on. It's quite shocking how everybody refers to this Gramsci's sentence, of course reading it in a different way. For the left liberals, the morbid phenomenon is the right of new populist fascism. And for the new right, it is the excess of woke culture, open gates to immigrants, support of transsexuality and so on. But I think we should make a step further here, if you permit me this small critical remark. I think maybe Gramsci still thinks too much within the classic Marxist frame of transition from capitalism to socialism. But we learned in the 20th century many things about this transition. For example Rosa Luxemburg, you know, she said the future will be socialism or barbarism. Well, it can be both at the same time as we learned from Stalin, no? So, let me go on. So, the usual reading of Gramsci is that morbid phenomena arise when this transition from capitalism to whatever comes after gets stuck. And here we the left didn't do our proper job. We are just looking for excuses, you know. Like, for example, one of the popular theories is that, yeah, there still... it still holds this logic of from capitalism to socialism, just unfortunately revolution happens in the wrong place, in a primitive Asian Russia. But I think that our experience in the last hundred years compels us to change this frame. The normal process of our history, as Lorenzo indicated, runs towards different form of a final catastrophe, a self-destruction through ecological collapse, uncontrolled reign of artificial intelligence and global wars. These endpoints of our history are the true morbid phenomena. So it's not just "oh it went wrong", no, the basic direction where our history moves left to itself is morbid. In such a predicament, we should, again Lorenzo already mentioned it, we should pull the emergency brake on our historical process. Or, to quote Walter Benjamin: Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history, but perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers of this train, namely the human race, to activate the emergency brake. The modest leftist actions today are attempts, sometimes desperate attempts, to stop the destruction of our environment, to control the explosive development of artificial intelligence, to prevent a new world war. Along these lines, Bernie Sanders said in a podcast on March this year: "We need a moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers now." And we need such a moratorium why? To think. Maybe the time has come to turn around Marx's Thesis You know, philosophers have only interpreted the world, now the task is to change it. In what if in the 20th century we tried to change the world without really understanding it, now it's also the time to interpret it again. The shortest definition of the end of the world is: it doesn't change only local events within a situation, it changes also the coordinates of the situation itself. Let me paraphrase to explain this here an old joke from German Democratic Republic. I will use it often, I will now propose a new version. Von der Leyen, Putin and Trump meet God, God, Dio. And each is allowed to ask God one question. Von der Leyen begins: Tell me what will happen to European Union in the next decade. God answers: It will fall apart as a union and become a popular spot for tourists under a Russian
Slavoj Žižek
domination. Von der Leyen turns around and starts to cry. Then
domination. Von der Leyen turns around and starts to cry. Then
Cathy Newman
Putin asks: Oh great, so what will happen to my beloved Russia? God says: It will be a
Putin asks: Oh great, so what will happen to my beloved Russia? God says: It will be a
Slavoj Žižek
Chinese colony. Putin turns around and starts to cry. Finally Trump asks: And what will be the fate of the US, United States, after a decade of my rule? You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. This is, this is the true change when God himself who stands here for what Jacques Lacan calls the big other, the neutral frame of our understanding of the situation, breaks down. Our basic coordinates of measuring the quality of public life are suspended and have to be re-thought. The end of the world is today a topic. Here I agree with both Gualtieri and Lorenzo. It's very suspicious to say as a critical thought "oh it's the end of the world". Yeah, but all sides in today's political struggle are saying this. Remember many commentators praised Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, when in his speech in Davos he referred to Václav Havel's essay from "The Power of the Powerless", in which Havel asks a simple question: How did the communist system sustain itself? His answer began, Havel's, with a greengrocer. Every morning this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world unite". He doesn't believe it, no one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Those who know my work must remember that for me, and this is my big experience, sorry if you have some illusions about Yugoslav self-management socialism. You know it wasn't only that the system functioned even if people didn't believe in it. I'm telling you this from my personal experience. When I was unemployed I had for two years a very low-level post in central committee just writing notes of some meeting. And I discovered that if you were member of the communist party and took the official ideology seriously you were in danger, because you were suspected of being potentially a dissident, you know. To be part of the system you had to have private distance towards it. But I think Carney makes here, here I disagree with Carney, a weird comparison. In the same way as in Havel's story the greengrocer decides to take the sign down, we should decide to take our sign down, to openly renounce the old world order. Now but I think there is a big difference between Havel's story and today's situation. Our grocery sign, liberal democracy and so on, was not taken down by some dissidents who opposed the system. It was taken down by big powers themselves, especially the United States, which no longer find it useful to follow the system they imposed some decades ago. Free market competition and other international rules were okay for them as long as they guaranteed their privilege. Now they are renouncing it because they became aware that in a new situation these rules can undermine their hegemony. What do I mean by this? With all the critique of China, Kina, the place that Lorenzo just returned from, you know that if you look at the international role of China today, and I'm very critical of it otherwise, it's the only big power which still follows markets competition, good international capitalism. Look what Trump is doing, he's breaking all the rules of market competition with his, with his capricious tariffs and so on, you know. Although I think you Roberto mentioned this possibility, there is a good lesson, you now where do I see some good thing. Think about another thing. With all the mess that Trump is doing is introducing, we should learn something. That it's not true that today's system capitalism is fixed, that you cannot do anything. This was for me also a good lesson of COVID. I remember a half a year before COVID market ideologists claimed: "oh we cannot raise the taxes for the rich, uh, the whole system will collapse". Then we had COVID, you know what it cost in economy. What I liked about COVID, not just for a private reasons, it was golden year for me, I was able to be at home, no friends were bothering me, I read and wrote, but it's that it was another proof how many changes the system can go through without falling... without falling apart. So let's go on. But Merz said the same thing in Davos, Merz the German Chancellor. I quote Merz: "A world where only power counts is a dangerous place. First for small states, then for the middle powers and ultimately for the great ones. Our greatest strength remains the ability to build partnership and alliances and so on." Then, now if you think but Merz is not so bad, let me go to the really bad guy. Now the latest news, I read it today, it was discovered in Hungary, the big complex plot, secret police and so on, totally illegal, criminal to undermine opposition. Okay. Viktor Orbán wrote that the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro ordered by Trump is a further proof proof of the collapse of our geopolitical model. The quote: "The first days of this year reminded us that the liberal world order is disintegrating. The new world is only just beginning to take shape, and the years to come will be even more unstable, unpredictable and dangerous," Orbán said, while reaffirming his government's commitment to the path of peace and security. Haha. So the first thing to notice here is that when Orbán says "this bargain no longer works for the new superpowers" and he said that Europe finds itself in a different position, he is saying with a different tone the same thing as Carney and Merz. But I think the term that best encapsulates this "end of the world" is the one introduced by Trump and his team. I was shocked by it. Civilizational Erasure. In a crucial but it's best by us, 33-page document, "National Security Strategy of the United States", quietly released by White House, it is written that Europe's economic problems, that Europe has economic problems but it, this document insisted that they are eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. Marco Rubio elaborated this erasure. For him Europe is abandoning the values that include, I quote, "embracing Christianity and a shared cultural heritage". I explode when I read this because, you know, you had here in Rome a couple last week I think and I still smell the sulfur of the devil in the air. Uh, who was he called that my god... who was here? Peter Thiel. He was here, no? And he precisely accused Europe the world way of Antichrist, you know. It's very funny, you know it's like Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist. Then he said Europe is, should abandon open borders, should drop climate crisis politics and then he says "The United States needs a reformed Europe, not just details of defense budgets but a large change in the continent's value system." I say, okay, what does he mean by this? What do Trumpian populists oppose to European self-destruction? They systematically take recourse to the rhetorical figure of castration in a primitive sense of emasculation or feminization. What pervades their discourse is the threat to our masculine vitality and enjoyment. This threat emanates for Trumpians from others, immigrant, sexual minority, who are themselves perceived as weak and impotent. The paradox is that these others are attacked by populists not because of their strength, but because of their supposed weakness and helplessness. In this logic their weakness is contagious and threatens to infect us, sorry, threatens to infect us all. This paradox explains the way the extreme right appropriates the term "Freedom of Speech". They often talk about freedom of speech. But read it closely. What do they mean? They mean exactly the opposite from the European democratic tradition. For us, freedom of speech means the protection of critical voices, the right of citizens to publicly speak the truth and criticize those in power. For the Trumpians, freedom of speech means the right to enjoyment, that is to say the right to offend others, to utter publicly whatever pops up in your mind. For them if you speak in an extremely vulgar way and Trump is here breaking all the limits. You know when the ex-boss of FBI died a couple of days ago, you know what Trump said publicly: "Oh I'm how glad I am that this person dropped dead." So, what does this amount to in political discourse? Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, you know this, no longer defense now they have War Ministry, said on a press briefing about Iranians, just listen to it: "They (Iranians) are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not to shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, which is exactly how it should be." Along the same lines, on a week ago, Trump said that the United States may carry out more strikes on Iran's Khark Island oil export hub, and he said "just for fun". He was referring to an act which may trigger a new world war. My point is that the United States global hegemony is now gradually dissolving, and Trump attempts to behave like a master of the world intervening anywhere he wants from Venezuela to Iran. And this his arbitrary and excessive acts more and more appear as a comedy, a dark comedy but nonetheless a comedy. And I'm here quite open. The US hegemony was not always a bad thing. It did help to maintain peace in Europe in the Cold War years. This hegemony is now declining, not just because of the rise of other superpowers like China, but Trump himself with his chaotic policy is accelerating the US decline. Trump, now comes a crucial insight for me, Trump extends this logic of brutal war, you just smash the enemy, display your power, brutal violence not covered by the legal system, also to the United States themselves. Those who protest against his regime are foreign invaders who should be met by direct military force. You know like ICE, I-C-E, he uses them as a half-illegal army to squash enemies. And their ideology is open. Steve Bannon, maybe the most interesting of Trumpian ideologists, he said: "immigrants and big companies, they are foreign forces occupying American soul. We are we are at a war here." Now, Trump's stance is grounded in the notion of justice articulated already in Plato's Republic by Thrasymachus, who says: "I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger." This is how Trump coordinates negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. As he told Zelenskyy, Ukraine should accept losses because Russia has better cards. No wonder Russia immediately endorsed Trump's vision and practice. Commenting on the ongoing events in the Middle East, Dmitry Peskov, the press representative of Kremlin, said: "nothing like this has ever happened in human history." When his interviewer points out that weapons were not as powerful in the past, Peskov replied: "we weren't alive then so it seems that it's the end of the world now. Sadly we have all lost what we call international law. To be honest I don't even know how to call on anyone to adhere to the norms and principles of international law. It no longer exists. It exists de jure but de facto it no longer exists. What kind of law will replace international law, it's unlikely anyone can tell at this point." The only thing I would add is that Russia did the same with the attack on Ukraine. So I think it's the supreme irony that Trump declares himself to be the greatest peacemaker in the history of humanity. And as we know, I'm more and more to this idea we need global radical peace because it's always part of this that "yeah but to achieve this we should have the last radical battle to kill all the enemies of peace". And Trump repeats again and again that for example US is not at war with Iran, together with Israel it is just liberating the people of Iran. In the same way as Israel liberated Gaza. Trump is here just following his true master Netanyahu who is even a greater peacemaker. I think that what is happening now is clear: Israel decided that they simply want to dominate the entire Middle East. And the Russian civilizational erasure, where Putin legitimizes his power with Eurasian ideology, opposing to Western individualist liberalism the traditional values of family life, giving priority to the community over individual interests, and the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the state. Along these lines Alexander Kharichev, a top Putin ideologist, formulated the basic feature of what he calls Homo Putinus, the supposedly self-sacrificing nature of the Russian people. Quote: "For us life itself seems to mean much less than it does for a Westerner. We believe this things are... there are things more important than mere existence, that in essence is the foundation of any faith." We should also notice, it really shocked me, how even Russian state bureaucrats elevate the animosity towards Europe to an almost metaphysical level. You know what really shocked me, two three months ago, Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian enclave Kaliningrad, ex-Königsberg where Immanuel Kant lived, recently said that Kant, who spent his entire life there, has a direct connection to the war in Ukraine. How? According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy whose godlessness and lack of higher values began with Kant, which created the socio-cultural situation that led among other things to the First World War. So for Alikhanov, Kant is the father of almost everything in the West including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism and even the idea of the European Union. And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia for him. Ukraine I think achieved an unexpected miracle in resisting Russia for a long time. In such a predicament we have to accept that we are entering a global emergency state. We are at war and only the Western commitment can give Ukraine a chance. Our answer to the much repeated argument against Ukrainian existence: Ukraine doesn't have a chance to win against Russia, should be: yes, true, which is why we should help Ukraine. Recall the old pro-resistance motto: If you resist against aggression and fight back you may lose. If you don't resist you've already lost. According to European peace-niks, the majority of Ukrainians want peace but the NATO controls Zelenskyy and his corrupted circle pushing them to continue a proxy war of NATO against Russia. This stance treats Ukrainians as incredibly stupid. They have chosen war against peaceful existence slavishly following NATO orders. Today Ukraine is not confronting a choice between a calm life, that's my position, of small satisfaction and taking a risk which may well end in catastrophe. Yes, Ukraine is confronted with a forced choice: life or freedom. Freedom or freedom. However, this choice has an additional twist. Both choices imply death. If in the present situation you choose life, surrender, you choose death, disappearance as a nation as Russia repeatedly made it clear. If Ukraine wants to return to calm daily life it needs to take the risk of pursuing resistance. If it wants to avoid war it faces with great certainty another form of death, disappearance as a nation. It is the West, I think, which has the choice wrongly attributed to Ukraine: risking a war, this is our choice, by supporting Ukraine or choosing peaceful life by suffering a humiliation of betraying our ally. But as many critical analysts are pointing out, even the Western European choice of peace does not really guarantee a long-term peace. If Russia gets Ukraine it will in all probability not stop there but pursue its expansion towards the West. Peace-niks forget that occupiers sincerely always want peace, but peace defined in their terms. Does Russia want peace in Ukraine? Of course it wants peace of their total occupation. Even in World War II, I claim that it was obvious that after occupying France in Germany wanted peace in France, of course to exploit it in peacefully. As for the danger of nuclear war, we often hear this, don't provoke Russians too much. Remember that it is Russia and only Russia which evokes a possible use of nuclear weapons. A year or so ago, Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine which expands the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out. Basically Putin's new dogma is: if a country which is in military conflict with Russia is supported by other countries which have nuclear weapons, then we have the right to bomb this the first country again with nuclear weapons. And don't forget that Israel also constantly evokes a possible use of nuclear weapons. This is why unfortunately I think Israel itself under Netanyahu is caught in the process of its own civilizational erasure. Or I will quote here my acquaintance, he is a Zionist still but it's wonderful what he says, Yuval Noah Harari. Quote, very important quote: "Judaism has survived, it has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now, we can still prevent it, is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the expulsion of two million maybe more Palestinians. From there the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the two millennia." Now I wanted to draw your attention, because I'm really not anti-semitic, quite on the contrary, how the idea of returning to the Holy Land is from the beginning very ambiguous. Usually apart from... at the end of 19th century, the well-known book and so on, we mention Balfour Declaration. Read it, not the declaration about Balfour. Balfour was anti-semitic. Why did he want Jews to go there? To get rid of the Jews here. Balfour begins a line which goes on with, this always annoys people, I'm interrupted in Germany when I close, when I quote him, Reinhard Heydrich. You know the guy, Holocaust. He wrote in '36 an incredible text where he says there are two types of Jews: there are there are Zionist Jews who move to who want to move to Palestine and there are assimilationist Jews. And he said no, we don't want assimilationist Jews but if they move there they're a great nation, we will have wonderful relations with them, we will support them and so on. Also you remember Breivik, the crazy Norwegian guy who shot on an island close to Oslo eighty young leftists, he says the same. He says Jews are a danger in Europe and United States, but there in Israel we should fully support them. So the attitude that predominates is... I always remember some ten years ago in the Vienna, Viennese daily newspaper *Die Presse*, there was a wonderful caricature of two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians and one of them has a newspaper in his hand and says to his friend because this newspaper criticized Israeli politics: "Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel." That's what we are having now. We are in a crazy situation where many among those who support Israel are openly, more or less openly anti-semitic. They just want Jews to move there not to bother us here in Europe. There are two lessons to be drawn from this. First one is that... sorry, getting confused a little bit, yes... So we do have a clash of civilizations. But this is my problem with BRICS. The idea of BRICS is peaceful coexistence of civilizations which de facto means: you do there what you want, we do here what we want. For example the model of this was immediately after Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they immediately made peace with China. The deal was: you do with women what you want there, we do with Uyghurs, Muslims, what we do there, it doesn't matter. So the world of BRICS, this false multicultural world, is a kind of a peaceful coexistence of different ways of life where, and this is what Signor Gualtieri pointed out, this is the false nationalism which is also internationalist but only at the level of world market. This combination of global capitalism with violent fundamentalist fascism. For example, Putin a couple of months ago, you know, said when Russia was the first international country to formally establish diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. And Trump said Afghanistan is a great ally in our struggle against Western terrorism. The result was what? Did you read, I think, a month or two ago, finally they published in Taliban their legal criminal code. And everybody knows these two incredible facts: if you beat a woman, also breaking her bones and so on, it's a crime, you get days of freedom. If you, a couple of pages later, if you use two cocks, I mean father of the chicken, not the vulgar way, two of these or two animals to fight each other you get two months of prison. No? You almost kill a woman two weeks, but you know in BRICS world we will live in a strange way where, okay, we have feminism, they have homophobia, they treat women the way they do and so on, and okay, it's peaceful coordination, sorry, peaceful coordination. But I think that this betrays the the basic fact that every leftist movement should remain faithful to what? Universalism. Not as you Signor Sindaco correctly pointed out, not this false globalism which I hate, it reminds us of those when I was young now UNESCO books, different civilizations, no critique every civilization was represented and so on. No, our universalism should be universalism of struggle. There are horrible things happening in our part of the world. As both of you said, don't forget that Europe also gave birth to to to Nazism and so on and so on, to slavery. Although I'm an evil guy, with slavery I have some problems. You will accuse me of right-winger. Why in today's atmosphere where if you criticize Islam you are immediately proclaimed Islamophobic, why don't we get the numbers? I spoke with a Muslim friend of mine who told me this. If I say slavery you'll mean Atlantic, yes West Africa, Western, especially British, kidnapping people there taking them as slaves to the United States. Yes, and they agree the number is around nine million. But you know that at the same time the Muslim countries took slightly larger number to Arab countries? And whatever you say against the West, you both said all bad things about West, but I'm sorry, already in and then gradually more... ah, am I talking too long? Sorry, was was your, sorry Signora, was your body language cut him off or whatever? I will finish soon, sorry. What I'm saying is that nonetheless, you see, there is a tradition of emancipation in all civilizations from Neolithic on there were slaves. Europe nonetheless was the only big civilization which started a movement to abolish slavery. Let's not forget that. So again my idea is: let's link all the... for me and for my many good Jewish friends like Harari, struggle for the right of Palestinians should be just another aspect of the struggle against anti-semitism here, another aspect of struggles against injustices anywhere else and so on. I think that if we go into this BRICS multiculturalism, you torture people we do it our own way, we are lost. Our position based on European legacy should be should be should be universalism. That's why I think Europe matters. I am no friend of Iran, but the way Trump proceeds now, kidnapping Maduro killing Iranian leaders, I find this in principle whatever you think about Iranian regime something terrifying. So my position: I have nothing against arresting, I believe it, a criminal leader like Maduro. But you know in an ideal world we should begin by arresting Putin, Netanyahu, Trump and together with Maduro they should all share the same cell in the International Crime Tribunal in Hague, and I'm sure they will speak because they speak the same language, they will talk twice as... But let's go on to nonetheless conclude. We need kind of a... the best legacy of European modern age thought, we need emancipatory universalism. Where to begin? Now, to conclude, I think what I just described are different figures of civilizational erasure. Not we in Europe. Under Trump, United States are becoming a barbaric country, vulgarity is incredible in public life. Russia has its own barbarism, uh, in the Middle East both sides, not so much Palestinians as as Arabs, practically... So I want to draw your attention to this... some of us still remember the famous beginning of the Communist Manifesto: "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. All powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar and so on and so on." I think today the spectre which is haunting the entire world is Europe itself. All the powers of old Europe and around the world have entered into a holy alliance against Eurocentrism. Trump and Putin, Le Pen and Orbán, pro-immigrant anti-racists and protectors of traditional European values, Latin American progressives and Arab conservatives, they all hate Europe. Did you notice this how no matter how different they are? Trump is repeatedly saying, do we listen to Trump, that that that the greatest enemy of United States is not Russia or China, it's Europe. And what he means by this is precisely which Europe? The Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that in order to cope with the challenges of our moment we should move beyond the constraints of just nation-state. The idea that underlies United Europe got corrupted, half forgotten, but I think that this idea is still alive. You know what, did you notice this basic irrationality? Again and again we hear: end of the old order, Europe is over, Europe is dead. But okay, why don't they say Europe is dead, ignore it, let's go further. No, they are still obsessed by European danger. Precisely because they know, as was it one of you two, okay, said this that Europe still has this potential of emancipation, which I think we should resuscitate. And a friend of mine who is not even a left-winger put this nicely, Peter Sloterdijk. He said that the basic feature of European Enlightenment is what he calls "objective social democracy". Not just social democracy as one of the political parties, but basic social democratic values: universal healthcare, free education and so on, basic human rights which till now at least, no matter who was in power, they they were they were kept. And this is I think our choice today. I'm not saying we should simply return to old pre-'68 welfare state, ideal welfare state of Europe. No, that time is over. But I like to quote here another great conservative, Thomas Stearns Eliot, who remarked in his notes towards the definition of culture that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief. So I think to keep the European spirit alive, this self-critical spirit, we should we should as it were not begin from zero but we should do a heresy, move a step further reinventing Europe. In what way? I'm already concluding. Alain Badiou, with whom I don't fully agree, begins his book True Life, La Vraie Vie, with a provocative claim that from Socrates onward the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth. And he thinks this is a positive value. I also do. Corrupting youth means undermine the undermine the automatic trust into the existing ideology. This is important especially today where we live in an era which appears to be the era beyond ideology. They say, "oh ideology this is old time, today there are no causes, we just want to be happy individuals, you follow your idiosyncrasies." But here my American friend Jodi Dean, sorry to go for one second into theory, proposed to turn around Louis Althusser's well-known phrase "ideology interpellates," calls, addresses, subjects... individuals into subjects. I think today it's the exact opposite. Ideology no longer addresses us as subjects. It's not "forget your egotistic life, remember you are subject of communism, of nationalism, of a big cause." No, we are interpellated as: don't care about any big causes, just worry about your modest modest daily life and so on. This is the ideology today. And about... to move to to really conclude to Europe, I think to break out of this we should reinvent and we will if for no other reasons because of the crisis we are in, European legacy. Don't forget that Europe, United Europe is still an economic power. So what we need, I follow Lorenzo here, is kind of a proclaim proclaim the independence of United Europe. New power blocks are emerging all around the world, from... they are basically all just new versions of fascism and I think it's not that Europe is weak, Europe itself is afraid of its emancipatory potential. So I'm not saying we should be crazy, declare war of United States. No, we will annoy United States and Russia much more if we simply decide to act in a more not aggressive in the sense aggressive over others, but we should stop with this eternal guilt. You know we almost masochistically enjoy it. Like Europe: yes, slavery, colonization, the worst regime of all time. But are people who say this aware that all the concepts that we use in this self-guilt of Europe are European concepts? My... don't people get this? So again what should be our aim? Do some of you followed, I do because she is bright, although in no way a leftist, Sabine Hossenfelder, the great popularizer of quantum physics and now also social commentator. In a recent text she tries to imagine what some alien civilization if they were to observe the Earth, what their conclusion would have been. And her idea is this, that that they would say that humans ran into a problem whose solution required global coordination, but the only system they, we humans, have for global coordination are market economies. And market economies pro... uh, they simply don't work in this sense. So if you think how if you think how we desperately need mode of global transnational coordination to confront ecology. It doesn't matter if that country that country with does some measures. The crucial thing is the problem is global. Remember four years ago, they were... there was a heatwave in southwest Canada, northwest California, but they were very good ecologically. The whole... so we need global measures here. Artificial intelligence is the same. Without global measures if one country doesn't do it, another will do it and so on and so on. So again for me, you may disagree, the name that we have for this global coordination beyond market, not abolishing the market, just regulating the market, is communism. But forget about Soviet Union Central Committee. It simply means some kind of global coordination which does not just regulate market but knows how to intervene into it. So the European Union is worth fighting for because in spite of the misery of its actual existence in today's global capitalist world, European Union offers the only model of transnational organization which has the task to guarantee a minimum of social and ecological welfare standards. Yes, Europe is more and more alone in the new global BRICS world, dismissed as an old exhausted irrelevant continent playing a secondary role in today's geopolitical conflict. But as Bruno Latour recently before his death put it: L'Europe est seule, mais seule l'Europe peut nous sauver. Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can save us. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Slavoj Žižek. My name is Alessandro Valera and I'm also part of the Europa team. I am unfortunately the bearer of bad news as our guest is blocked in Frankfurt but she's kindly agreed to be with us on video. Many of you came to see Alexandra Matviichuk. She's together with her organization, the Center for Civil Liberties, the Nobel Prize winner of And she's about to connect from Frankfurt airport and to ask her a few questions because we only have minutes before her next flight. And please stay in the room or leave quietly because this is not finished yet. We have with me Lia Quartapelle, member of the Italian party and one of the most vocal voices in support of Ukraine since the invasion of Russia in and before. Lia will interview Alexandra and ask her a few questions on what the role of civil society and politics can be in our idea of Europe that goes beyond the European Union and has Ukraine at its heart and not at its periphery. Thank you Lia for being with us. Thank you very much. I'll cut everything that I prepared. Alexandra, we are very happy to to have you even if for five minutes or eight minutes. So I will jump straight into what really burns in this room. We spoke a lot about Europe, and when we say Europe we mean not only the Union of the but we mean Ukraine, we mean United Kingdom, we mean Norway, with a bit of fantasy we also mean Canada or other countries. Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, for its sovereignty, and it's fully aware of the cost of doing that. And you're doing this and we thank you with all our hearts for one reason, to be in Europe. So the question is: we are here in the same building where years ago was the Treaty of Rome was signed and it started this long history that we bear on our shoulders and we have in front of us. What kind of Europe is Ukraine thinking about joining? What Europe does Ukraine want to help build? years ago millions of people in Ukraine stood up their ways against pro-Russian authoritarian and corrupt government. They peacefully demonstrated just for a chance to build a country where the rights of everybody are protected, government is accountable, judiciary is independent, and police do not beat students who are peacefully demonstrating. And they paid the highest price just for this chance because police shot unarmed protesters in the center of Kyiv and people died under the flag of Ukraine and the flag of European Union. And then when Ukraine got our chance to do democratic transition in order to join to European Union, Russia invaded. Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the eastern regions of Ukraine because Putin is not afraid of NATO, so Putin is afraid of idea of freedom which can closer to Russian borders. And here we are in the 12th years of war and the first year of large-scale invasion. And we being Ukrainians, we are paying the highest price just for a chance to be turned to European civilized dimension. And I think the one of main lessons learned which we can teach to Europe today that we must protect our values. Only readiness to protect democratic values define the society with a future. Thank you Alexandra. I think we will keep this lesson in our hearts and I think we would if you were here we would have more time for more questions, but I think we have to leave you to go to your flight. So we thank you very much. Io penso solo una cosa... please, please, go ahead if you if you want to add something we we are ready to listen. I'm just I'm just afraid that you lose your flight. I'm so sorry that I'm not with you in beautiful Rome which I love with all my heart and stuck in this airport and I speak piece by piece, but what I want to say... I would like to share with you very important lessons learned from Ukraine. I'm a human rights lawyer. I'm documenting war crimes in this war that Russia has launched against Ukraine. And I have no tools how to stop Russian atrocities. And entire UN system can't stop it. But I know from my own experience that when you can't rely on the legal instruments, when you can't rely on international system of peace and security, you can still
Chinese colony. Putin turns around and starts to cry. Finally Trump asks: And what will be the fate of the US, United States, after a decade of my rule? You can guess the answer. God turns around and starts to cry. This is, this is the true change when God himself who stands here for what Jacques Lacan calls the big other, the neutral frame of our understanding of the situation, breaks down. Our basic coordinates of measuring the quality of public life are suspended and have to be re-thought. The end of the world is today a topic. Here I agree with both Gualtieri and Lorenzo. It's very suspicious to say as a critical thought "oh it's the end of the world". Yeah, but all sides in today's political struggle are saying this. Remember many commentators praised Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, when in his speech in Davos he referred to Václav Havel's essay from "The Power of the Powerless", in which Havel asks a simple question: How did the communist system sustain itself? His answer began, Havel's, with a greengrocer. Every morning this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world unite". He doesn't believe it, no one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Those who know my work must remember that for me, and this is my big experience, sorry if you have some illusions about Yugoslav self-management socialism. You know it wasn't only that the system functioned even if people didn't believe in it. I'm telling you this from my personal experience. When I was unemployed I had for two years a very low-level post in central committee just writing notes of some meeting. And I discovered that if you were member of the communist party and took the official ideology seriously you were in danger, because you were suspected of being potentially a dissident, you know. To be part of the system you had to have private distance towards it. But I think Carney makes here, here I disagree with Carney, a weird comparison. In the same way as in Havel's story the greengrocer decides to take the sign down, we should decide to take our sign down, to openly renounce the old world order. Now but I think there is a big difference between Havel's story and today's situation. Our grocery sign, liberal democracy and so on, was not taken down by some dissidents who opposed the system. It was taken down by big powers themselves, especially the United States, which no longer find it useful to follow the system they imposed some decades ago. Free market competition and other international rules were okay for them as long as they guaranteed their privilege. Now they are renouncing it because they became aware that in a new situation these rules can undermine their hegemony. What do I mean by this? With all the critique of China, Kina, the place that Lorenzo just returned from, you know that if you look at the international role of China today, and I'm very critical of it otherwise, it's the only big power which still follows markets competition, good international capitalism. Look what Trump is doing, he's breaking all the rules of market competition with his, with his capricious tariffs and so on, you know. Although I think you Roberto mentioned this possibility, there is a good lesson, you now where do I see some good thing. Think about another thing. With all the mess that Trump is doing is introducing, we should learn something. That it's not true that today's system capitalism is fixed, that you cannot do anything. This was for me also a good lesson of COVID. I remember a half a year before COVID market ideologists claimed: "oh we cannot raise the taxes for the rich, uh, the whole system will collapse". Then we had COVID, you know what it cost in economy. What I liked about COVID, not just for a private reasons, it was golden year for me, I was able to be at home, no friends were bothering me, I read and wrote, but it's that it was another proof how many changes the system can go through without falling... without falling apart. So let's go on. But Merz said the same thing in Davos, Merz the German Chancellor. I quote Merz: "A world where only power counts is a dangerous place. First for small states, then for the middle powers and ultimately for the great ones. Our greatest strength remains the ability to build partnership and alliances and so on." Then, now if you think but Merz is not so bad, let me go to the really bad guy. Now the latest news, I read it today, it was discovered in Hungary, the big complex plot, secret police and so on, totally illegal, criminal to undermine opposition. Okay. Viktor Orbán wrote that the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro ordered by Trump is a further proof proof of the collapse of our geopolitical model. The quote: "The first days of this year reminded us that the liberal world order is disintegrating. The new world is only just beginning to take shape, and the years to come will be even more unstable, unpredictable and dangerous," Orbán said, while reaffirming his government's commitment to the path of peace and security. Haha. So the first thing to notice here is that when Orbán says "this bargain no longer works for the new superpowers" and he said that Europe finds itself in a different position, he is saying with a different tone the same thing as Carney and Merz. But I think the term that best encapsulates this "end of the world" is the one introduced by Trump and his team. I was shocked by it. Civilizational Erasure. In a crucial but it's best by us, 33-page document, "National Security Strategy of the United States", quietly released by White House, it is written that Europe's economic problems, that Europe has economic problems but it, this document insisted that they are eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure. Marco Rubio elaborated this erasure. For him Europe is abandoning the values that include, I quote, "embracing Christianity and a shared cultural heritage". I explode when I read this because, you know, you had here in Rome a couple last week I think and I still smell the sulfur of the devil in the air. Uh, who was he called that my god... who was here? Peter Thiel. He was here, no? And he precisely accused Europe the world way of Antichrist, you know. It's very funny, you know it's like Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist. Then he said Europe is, should abandon open borders, should drop climate crisis politics and then he says "The United States needs a reformed Europe, not just details of defense budgets but a large change in the continent's value system." I say, okay, what does he mean by this? What do Trumpian populists oppose to European self-destruction? They systematically take recourse to the rhetorical figure of castration in a primitive sense of emasculation or feminization. What pervades their discourse is the threat to our masculine vitality and enjoyment. This threat emanates for Trumpians from others, immigrant, sexual minority, who are themselves perceived as weak and impotent. The paradox is that these others are attacked by populists not because of their strength, but because of their supposed weakness and helplessness. In this logic their weakness is contagious and threatens to infect us, sorry, threatens to infect us all. This paradox explains the way the extreme right appropriates the term "Freedom of Speech". They often talk about freedom of speech. But read it closely. What do they mean? They mean exactly the opposite from the European democratic tradition. For us, freedom of speech means the protection of critical voices, the right of citizens to publicly speak the truth and criticize those in power. For the Trumpians, freedom of speech means the right to enjoyment, that is to say the right to offend others, to utter publicly whatever pops up in your mind. For them if you speak in an extremely vulgar way and Trump is here breaking all the limits. You know when the ex-boss of FBI died a couple of days ago, you know what Trump said publicly: "Oh I'm how glad I am that this person dropped dead." So, what does this amount to in political discourse? Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of War, you know this, no longer defense now they have War Ministry, said on a press briefing about Iranians, just listen to it: "They (Iranians) are toast and they know it, or at least soon enough they will know it. And we have only just begun to hunt, dismantle, demoralize, destroy and defeat their capabilities. Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not to shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they are down, which is exactly how it should be." Along the same lines, on a week ago, Trump said that the United States may carry out more strikes on Iran's Khark Island oil export hub, and he said "just for fun". He was referring to an act which may trigger a new world war. My point is that the United States global hegemony is now gradually dissolving, and Trump attempts to behave like a master of the world intervening anywhere he wants from Venezuela to Iran. And this his arbitrary and excessive acts more and more appear as a comedy, a dark comedy but nonetheless a comedy. And I'm here quite open. The US hegemony was not always a bad thing. It did help to maintain peace in Europe in the Cold War years. This hegemony is now declining, not just because of the rise of other superpowers like China, but Trump himself with his chaotic policy is accelerating the US decline. Trump, now comes a crucial insight for me, Trump extends this logic of brutal war, you just smash the enemy, display your power, brutal violence not covered by the legal system, also to the United States themselves. Those who protest against his regime are foreign invaders who should be met by direct military force. You know like ICE, I-C-E, he uses them as a half-illegal army to squash enemies. And their ideology is open. Steve Bannon, maybe the most interesting of Trumpian ideologists, he said: "immigrants and big companies, they are foreign forces occupying American soul. We are we are at a war here." Now, Trump's stance is grounded in the notion of justice articulated already in Plato's Republic by Thrasymachus, who says: "I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger." This is how Trump coordinates negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. As he told Zelenskyy, Ukraine should accept losses because Russia has better cards. No wonder Russia immediately endorsed Trump's vision and practice. Commenting on the ongoing events in the Middle East, Dmitry Peskov, the press representative of Kremlin, said: "nothing like this has ever happened in human history." When his interviewer points out that weapons were not as powerful in the past, Peskov replied: "we weren't alive then so it seems that it's the end of the world now. Sadly we have all lost what we call international law. To be honest I don't even know how to call on anyone to adhere to the norms and principles of international law. It no longer exists. It exists de jure but de facto it no longer exists. What kind of law will replace international law, it's unlikely anyone can tell at this point." The only thing I would add is that Russia did the same with the attack on Ukraine. So I think it's the supreme irony that Trump declares himself to be the greatest peacemaker in the history of humanity. And as we know, I'm more and more to this idea we need global radical peace because it's always part of this that "yeah but to achieve this we should have the last radical battle to kill all the enemies of peace". And Trump repeats again and again that for example US is not at war with Iran, together with Israel it is just liberating the people of Iran. In the same way as Israel liberated Gaza. Trump is here just following his true master Netanyahu who is even a greater peacemaker. I think that what is happening now is clear: Israel decided that they simply want to dominate the entire Middle East. And the Russian civilizational erasure, where Putin legitimizes his power with Eurasian ideology, opposing to Western individualist liberalism the traditional values of family life, giving priority to the community over individual interests, and the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the state. Along these lines Alexander Kharichev, a top Putin ideologist, formulated the basic feature of what he calls Homo Putinus, the supposedly self-sacrificing nature of the Russian people. Quote: "For us life itself seems to mean much less than it does for a Westerner. We believe this things are... there are things more important than mere existence, that in essence is the foundation of any faith." We should also notice, it really shocked me, how even Russian state bureaucrats elevate the animosity towards Europe to an almost metaphysical level. You know what really shocked me, two three months ago, Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian enclave Kaliningrad, ex-Königsberg where Immanuel Kant lived, recently said that Kant, who spent his entire life there, has a direct connection to the war in Ukraine. How? According to Alikhanov, it was German philosophy whose godlessness and lack of higher values began with Kant, which created the socio-cultural situation that led among other things to the First World War. So for Alikhanov, Kant is the father of almost everything in the West including freedom, the idea of the rule of law, liberalism, rationalism and even the idea of the European Union. And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian resistance to Russia for him. Ukraine I think achieved an unexpected miracle in resisting Russia for a long time. In such a predicament we have to accept that we are entering a global emergency state. We are at war and only the Western commitment can give Ukraine a chance. Our answer to the much repeated argument against Ukrainian existence: Ukraine doesn't have a chance to win against Russia, should be: yes, true, which is why we should help Ukraine. Recall the old pro-resistance motto: If you resist against aggression and fight back you may lose. If you don't resist you've already lost. According to European peace-niks, the majority of Ukrainians want peace but the NATO controls Zelenskyy and his corrupted circle pushing them to continue a proxy war of NATO against Russia. This stance treats Ukrainians as incredibly stupid. They have chosen war against peaceful existence slavishly following NATO orders. Today Ukraine is not confronting a choice between a calm life, that's my position, of small satisfaction and taking a risk which may well end in catastrophe. Yes, Ukraine is confronted with a forced choice: life or freedom. Freedom or freedom. However, this choice has an additional twist. Both choices imply death. If in the present situation you choose life, surrender, you choose death, disappearance as a nation as Russia repeatedly made it clear. If Ukraine wants to return to calm daily life it needs to take the risk of pursuing resistance. If it wants to avoid war it faces with great certainty another form of death, disappearance as a nation. It is the West, I think, which has the choice wrongly attributed to Ukraine: risking a war, this is our choice, by supporting Ukraine or choosing peaceful life by suffering a humiliation of betraying our ally. But as many critical analysts are pointing out, even the Western European choice of peace does not really guarantee a long-term peace. If Russia gets Ukraine it will in all probability not stop there but pursue its expansion towards the West. Peace-niks forget that occupiers sincerely always want peace, but peace defined in their terms. Does Russia want peace in Ukraine? Of course it wants peace of their total occupation. Even in World War II, I claim that it was obvious that after occupying France in Germany wanted peace in France, of course to exploit it in peacefully. As for the danger of nuclear war, we often hear this, don't provoke Russians too much. Remember that it is Russia and only Russia which evokes a possible use of nuclear weapons. A year or so ago, Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine which expands the category of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear deterrence is carried out. Basically Putin's new dogma is: if a country which is in military conflict with Russia is supported by other countries which have nuclear weapons, then we have the right to bomb this the first country again with nuclear weapons. And don't forget that Israel also constantly evokes a possible use of nuclear weapons. This is why unfortunately I think Israel itself under Netanyahu is caught in the process of its own civilizational erasure. Or I will quote here my acquaintance, he is a Zionist still but it's wonderful what he says, Yuval Noah Harari. Quote, very important quote: "Judaism has survived, it has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now, we can still prevent it, is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the expulsion of two million maybe more Palestinians. From there the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the two millennia." Now I wanted to draw your attention, because I'm really not anti-semitic, quite on the contrary, how the idea of returning to the Holy Land is from the beginning very ambiguous. Usually apart from... at the end of 19th century, the well-known book and so on, we mention Balfour Declaration. Read it, not the declaration about Balfour. Balfour was anti-semitic. Why did he want Jews to go there? To get rid of the Jews here. Balfour begins a line which goes on with, this always annoys people, I'm interrupted in Germany when I close, when I quote him, Reinhard Heydrich. You know the guy, Holocaust. He wrote in '36 an incredible text where he says there are two types of Jews: there are there are Zionist Jews who move to who want to move to Palestine and there are assimilationist Jews. And he said no, we don't want assimilationist Jews but if they move there they're a great nation, we will have wonderful relations with them, we will support them and so on. Also you remember Breivik, the crazy Norwegian guy who shot on an island close to Oslo eighty young leftists, he says the same. He says Jews are a danger in Europe and United States, but there in Israel we should fully support them. So the attitude that predominates is... I always remember some ten years ago in the Vienna, Viennese daily newspaper *Die Presse*, there was a wonderful caricature of two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians and one of them has a newspaper in his hand and says to his friend because this newspaper criticized Israeli politics: "Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel." That's what we are having now. We are in a crazy situation where many among those who support Israel are openly, more or less openly anti-semitic. They just want Jews to move there not to bother us here in Europe. There are two lessons to be drawn from this. First one is that... sorry, getting confused a little bit, yes... So we do have a clash of civilizations. But this is my problem with BRICS. The idea of BRICS is peaceful coexistence of civilizations which de facto means: you do there what you want, we do here what we want. For example the model of this was immediately after Taliban took over in Afghanistan, they immediately made peace with China. The deal was: you do with women what you want there, we do with Uyghurs, Muslims, what we do there, it doesn't matter. So the world of BRICS, this false multicultural world, is a kind of a peaceful coexistence of different ways of life where, and this is what Signor Gualtieri pointed out, this is the false nationalism which is also internationalist but only at the level of world market. This combination of global capitalism with violent fundamentalist fascism. For example, Putin a couple of months ago, you know, said when Russia was the first international country to formally establish diplomatic relations with Afghanistan. And Trump said Afghanistan is a great ally in our struggle against Western terrorism. The result was what? Did you read, I think, a month or two ago, finally they published in Taliban their legal criminal code. And everybody knows these two incredible facts: if you beat a woman, also breaking her bones and so on, it's a crime, you get days of freedom. If you, a couple of pages later, if you use two cocks, I mean father of the chicken, not the vulgar way, two of these or two animals to fight each other you get two months of prison. No? You almost kill a woman two weeks, but you know in BRICS world we will live in a strange way where, okay, we have feminism, they have homophobia, they treat women the way they do and so on, and okay, it's peaceful coordination, sorry, peaceful coordination. But I think that this betrays the the basic fact that every leftist movement should remain faithful to what? Universalism. Not as you Signor Sindaco correctly pointed out, not this false globalism which I hate, it reminds us of those when I was young now UNESCO books, different civilizations, no critique every civilization was represented and so on. No, our universalism should be universalism of struggle. There are horrible things happening in our part of the world. As both of you said, don't forget that Europe also gave birth to to to Nazism and so on and so on, to slavery. Although I'm an evil guy, with slavery I have some problems. You will accuse me of right-winger. Why in today's atmosphere where if you criticize Islam you are immediately proclaimed Islamophobic, why don't we get the numbers? I spoke with a Muslim friend of mine who told me this. If I say slavery you'll mean Atlantic, yes West Africa, Western, especially British, kidnapping people there taking them as slaves to the United States. Yes, and they agree the number is around nine million. But you know that at the same time the Muslim countries took slightly larger number to Arab countries? And whatever you say against the West, you both said all bad things about West, but I'm sorry, already in and then gradually more... ah, am I talking too long? Sorry, was was your, sorry Signora, was your body language cut him off or whatever? I will finish soon, sorry. What I'm saying is that nonetheless, you see, there is a tradition of emancipation in all civilizations from Neolithic on there were slaves. Europe nonetheless was the only big civilization which started a movement to abolish slavery. Let's not forget that. So again my idea is: let's link all the... for me and for my many good Jewish friends like Harari, struggle for the right of Palestinians should be just another aspect of the struggle against anti-semitism here, another aspect of struggles against injustices anywhere else and so on. I think that if we go into this BRICS multiculturalism, you torture people we do it our own way, we are lost. Our position based on European legacy should be should be should be universalism. That's why I think Europe matters. I am no friend of Iran, but the way Trump proceeds now, kidnapping Maduro killing Iranian leaders, I find this in principle whatever you think about Iranian regime something terrifying. So my position: I have nothing against arresting, I believe it, a criminal leader like Maduro. But you know in an ideal world we should begin by arresting Putin, Netanyahu, Trump and together with Maduro they should all share the same cell in the International Crime Tribunal in Hague, and I'm sure they will speak because they speak the same language, they will talk twice as... But let's go on to nonetheless conclude. We need kind of a... the best legacy of European modern age thought, we need emancipatory universalism. Where to begin? Now, to conclude, I think what I just described are different figures of civilizational erasure. Not we in Europe. Under Trump, United States are becoming a barbaric country, vulgarity is incredible in public life. Russia has its own barbarism, uh, in the Middle East both sides, not so much Palestinians as as Arabs, practically... So I want to draw your attention to this... some of us still remember the famous beginning of the Communist Manifesto: "A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. All powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar and so on and so on." I think today the spectre which is haunting the entire world is Europe itself. All the powers of old Europe and around the world have entered into a holy alliance against Eurocentrism. Trump and Putin, Le Pen and Orbán, pro-immigrant anti-racists and protectors of traditional European values, Latin American progressives and Arab conservatives, they all hate Europe. Did you notice this how no matter how different they are? Trump is repeatedly saying, do we listen to Trump, that that that the greatest enemy of United States is not Russia or China, it's Europe. And what he means by this is precisely which Europe? The Europe of transnational unity, the Europe vaguely aware that in order to cope with the challenges of our moment we should move beyond the constraints of just nation-state. The idea that underlies United Europe got corrupted, half forgotten, but I think that this idea is still alive. You know what, did you notice this basic irrationality? Again and again we hear: end of the old order, Europe is over, Europe is dead. But okay, why don't they say Europe is dead, ignore it, let's go further. No, they are still obsessed by European danger. Precisely because they know, as was it one of you two, okay, said this that Europe still has this potential of emancipation, which I think we should resuscitate. And a friend of mine who is not even a left-winger put this nicely, Peter Sloterdijk. He said that the basic feature of European Enlightenment is what he calls "objective social democracy". Not just social democracy as one of the political parties, but basic social democratic values: universal healthcare, free education and so on, basic human rights which till now at least, no matter who was in power, they they were they were kept. And this is I think our choice today. I'm not saying we should simply return to old pre-'68 welfare state, ideal welfare state of Europe. No, that time is over. But I like to quote here another great conservative, Thomas Stearns Eliot, who remarked in his notes towards the definition of culture that there are moments when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief. So I think to keep the European spirit alive, this self-critical spirit, we should we should as it were not begin from zero but we should do a heresy, move a step further reinventing Europe. In what way? I'm already concluding. Alain Badiou, with whom I don't fully agree, begins his book True Life, La Vraie Vie, with a provocative claim that from Socrates onward the function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth. And he thinks this is a positive value. I also do. Corrupting youth means undermine the undermine the automatic trust into the existing ideology. This is important especially today where we live in an era which appears to be the era beyond ideology. They say, "oh ideology this is old time, today there are no causes, we just want to be happy individuals, you follow your idiosyncrasies." But here my American friend Jodi Dean, sorry to go for one second into theory, proposed to turn around Louis Althusser's well-known phrase "ideology interpellates," calls, addresses, subjects... individuals into subjects. I think today it's the exact opposite. Ideology no longer addresses us as subjects. It's not "forget your egotistic life, remember you are subject of communism, of nationalism, of a big cause." No, we are interpellated as: don't care about any big causes, just worry about your modest modest daily life and so on. This is the ideology today. And about... to move to to really conclude to Europe, I think to break out of this we should reinvent and we will if for no other reasons because of the crisis we are in, European legacy. Don't forget that Europe, United Europe is still an economic power. So what we need, I follow Lorenzo here, is kind of a proclaim proclaim the independence of United Europe. New power blocks are emerging all around the world, from... they are basically all just new versions of fascism and I think it's not that Europe is weak, Europe itself is afraid of its emancipatory potential. So I'm not saying we should be crazy, declare war of United States. No, we will annoy United States and Russia much more if we simply decide to act in a more not aggressive in the sense aggressive over others, but we should stop with this eternal guilt. You know we almost masochistically enjoy it. Like Europe: yes, slavery, colonization, the worst regime of all time. But are people who say this aware that all the concepts that we use in this self-guilt of Europe are European concepts? My... don't people get this? So again what should be our aim? Do some of you followed, I do because she is bright, although in no way a leftist, Sabine Hossenfelder, the great popularizer of quantum physics and now also social commentator. In a recent text she tries to imagine what some alien civilization if they were to observe the Earth, what their conclusion would have been. And her idea is this, that that they would say that humans ran into a problem whose solution required global coordination, but the only system they, we humans, have for global coordination are market economies. And market economies pro... uh, they simply don't work in this sense. So if you think how if you think how we desperately need mode of global transnational coordination to confront ecology. It doesn't matter if that country that country with does some measures. The crucial thing is the problem is global. Remember four years ago, they were... there was a heatwave in southwest Canada, northwest California, but they were very good ecologically. The whole... so we need global measures here. Artificial intelligence is the same. Without global measures if one country doesn't do it, another will do it and so on and so on. So again for me, you may disagree, the name that we have for this global coordination beyond market, not abolishing the market, just regulating the market, is communism. But forget about Soviet Union Central Committee. It simply means some kind of global coordination which does not just regulate market but knows how to intervene into it. So the European Union is worth fighting for because in spite of the misery of its actual existence in today's global capitalist world, European Union offers the only model of transnational organization which has the task to guarantee a minimum of social and ecological welfare standards. Yes, Europe is more and more alone in the new global BRICS world, dismissed as an old exhausted irrelevant continent playing a secondary role in today's geopolitical conflict. But as Bruno Latour recently before his death put it: L'Europe est seule, mais seule l'Europe peut nous sauver. Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can save us. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Slavoj Žižek. My name is Alessandro Valera and I'm also part of the Europa team. I am unfortunately the bearer of bad news as our guest is blocked in Frankfurt but she's kindly agreed to be with us on video. Many of you came to see Alexandra Matviichuk. She's together with her organization, the Center for Civil Liberties, the Nobel Prize winner of And she's about to connect from Frankfurt airport and to ask her a few questions because we only have minutes before her next flight. And please stay in the room or leave quietly because this is not finished yet. We have with me Lia Quartapelle, member of the Italian party and one of the most vocal voices in support of Ukraine since the invasion of Russia in and before. Lia will interview Alexandra and ask her a few questions on what the role of civil society and politics can be in our idea of Europe that goes beyond the European Union and has Ukraine at its heart and not at its periphery. Thank you Lia for being with us. Thank you very much. I'll cut everything that I prepared. Alexandra, we are very happy to to have you even if for five minutes or eight minutes. So I will jump straight into what really burns in this room. We spoke a lot about Europe, and when we say Europe we mean not only the Union of the but we mean Ukraine, we mean United Kingdom, we mean Norway, with a bit of fantasy we also mean Canada or other countries. Ukraine is fighting for its freedom, for its sovereignty, and it's fully aware of the cost of doing that. And you're doing this and we thank you with all our hearts for one reason, to be in Europe. So the question is: we are here in the same building where years ago was the Treaty of Rome was signed and it started this long history that we bear on our shoulders and we have in front of us. What kind of Europe is Ukraine thinking about joining? What Europe does Ukraine want to help build? years ago millions of people in Ukraine stood up their ways against pro-Russian authoritarian and corrupt government. They peacefully demonstrated just for a chance to build a country where the rights of everybody are protected, government is accountable, judiciary is independent, and police do not beat students who are peacefully demonstrating. And they paid the highest price just for this chance because police shot unarmed protesters in the center of Kyiv and people died under the flag of Ukraine and the flag of European Union. And then when Ukraine got our chance to do democratic transition in order to join to European Union, Russia invaded. Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the eastern regions of Ukraine because Putin is not afraid of NATO, so Putin is afraid of idea of freedom which can closer to Russian borders. And here we are in the 12th years of war and the first year of large-scale invasion. And we being Ukrainians, we are paying the highest price just for a chance to be turned to European civilized dimension. And I think the one of main lessons learned which we can teach to Europe today that we must protect our values. Only readiness to protect democratic values define the society with a future. Thank you Alexandra. I think we will keep this lesson in our hearts and I think we would if you were here we would have more time for more questions, but I think we have to leave you to go to your flight. So we thank you very much. Io penso solo una cosa... please, please, go ahead if you if you want to add something we we are ready to listen. I'm just I'm just afraid that you lose your flight. I'm so sorry that I'm not with you in beautiful Rome which I love with all my heart and stuck in this airport and I speak piece by piece, but what I want to say... I would like to share with you very important lessons learned from Ukraine. I'm a human rights lawyer. I'm documenting war crimes in this war that Russia has launched against Ukraine. And I have no tools how to stop Russian atrocities. And entire UN system can't stop it. But I know from my own experience that when you can't rely on the legal instruments, when you can't rely on international system of peace and security, you can still
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rely on people. And this is our main lessons learned, because we get used to thinking through the categories of states and interstate organizations, but ordinary people have a much greater impact than they can even imagine. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Ordinary people can change history. And let me illustrate it with a story. I interviewed professor of philosophy, a scientist Ihor Kozlovskyy who spent days in Russian captivity. Before that I interviewed hundreds of people. They told me how they were beaten, raped, locked into wooden boxes, their fingers were cut, their nails were torn away, their nails were drilled, they were
rely on people. And this is our main lessons learned, because we get used to thinking through the categories of states and interstate organizations, but ordinary people have a much greater impact than they can even imagine. Ordinary people can do extraordinary things. Ordinary people can change history. And let me illustrate it with a story. I interviewed professor of philosophy, a scientist Ihor Kozlovskyy who spent days in Russian captivity. Before that I interviewed hundreds of people. They told me how they were beaten, raped, locked into wooden boxes, their fingers were cut, their nails were torn away, their nails were drilled, they were
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electrically shocked through their genitalia. One woman told me how her eye was dragged out with a spoon. So it was little that could surprise me after all these stories. But Professor Ihor Kozlovskyy mentioned a detail which was insignificant to the evidence base but this detail impressed me deeply. He described how he was kept in solitary confinement in tiny cell in basement with no window, no light, no fresh air. It was purely ventilated and it was difficult for him even to breath. He said sewage flows on the dirty
electrically shocked through their genitalia. One woman told me how her eye was dragged out with a spoon. So it was little that could surprise me after all these stories. But Professor Ihor Kozlovskyy mentioned a detail which was insignificant to the evidence base but this detail impressed me deeply. He described how he was kept in solitary confinement in tiny cell in basement with no window, no light, no fresh air. It was purely ventilated and it was difficult for him even to breath. He said sewage flows on the dirty
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floor and from the opening of the sewage rats pass crawling down. So this detail that impressed me deeply, this well-known professor in my country told how he gave lectures on philosophy to these rats just in order to hear a sound of a human voice, because he was kept and alone for months, months and months. And literally, Ihor Kozlovskyy was a
floor and from the opening of the sewage rats pass crawling down. So this detail that impressed me deeply, this well-known professor in my country told how he gave lectures on philosophy to these rats just in order to hear a sound of a human voice, because he was kept and alone for months, months and months. And literally, Ihor Kozlovskyy was a
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victim because he was abducted and illegally detained, kept in inhuman conditions. He was tortured so severely that he had to relearn how to walk again. But he told me that all his experience it's not a reason for him to treat himself and experience himself as a victim, because the foundation of our existence is dignity, not victimhood, and dignity is action. So I want to conclude: despite everything
victim because he was abducted and illegally detained, kept in inhuman conditions. He was tortured so severely that he had to relearn how to walk again. But he told me that all his experience it's not a reason for him to treat himself and experience himself as a victim, because the foundation of our existence is dignity, not victimhood, and dignity is action. So I want to conclude: despite everything
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that we are going on in Ukraine, the story of struggle for freedom it's a life-affirming story because these dramatic
that we are going on in Ukraine, the story of struggle for freedom it's a life-affirming story because these dramatic
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times trace hope, because when freedom is denied it's become powerfully break out through the every concrete individuals. And our future is not just unclear, it's also not pre-written. This means that we always have a chance to fight for future which we want for us and for our children. And generally we are not hostages of these circumstances. We are participants of this historical process and dignity provide us strength and courage to continue our fight even in unbearable conditions. And with hope, still have a hope. We just have to define the word hope properly. Hope it's not a confidence that everything will be decided. Hope it's a deep understanding that all our efforts have a huge meaning. Thank you. Thank you Alexandra. We started off with Lorenzo Marsili saying that Europe's past is the rest of the world present. I think that Ukraine's present will determine at least Europe's future but I think the rest of the world
times trace hope, because when freedom is denied it's become powerfully break out through the every concrete individuals. And our future is not just unclear, it's also not pre-written. This means that we always have a chance to fight for future which we want for us and for our children. And generally we are not hostages of these circumstances. We are participants of this historical process and dignity provide us strength and courage to continue our fight even in unbearable conditions. And with hope, still have a hope. We just have to define the word hope properly. Hope it's not a confidence that everything will be decided. Hope it's a deep understanding that all our efforts have a huge meaning. Thank you. Thank you Alexandra. We started off with Lorenzo Marsili saying that Europe's past is the rest of the world present. I think that Ukraine's present will determine at least Europe's future but I think the rest of the world
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future. And what you told us from the story of your professor to these last words in response to Professor Žižek really tell us one thing: Ukraine has to be at the center of our political action because in Ukraine we have the biggest threat to Europe but also we have Europe's biggest hope. And we really thank you, you, your organization and through you to all your people for what you're doing for all of us every day at an immense cost. Thank you very much, thank you. Thank you for support and very grateful. Thank you so much Alexandra and thank you Lia. I would like to thank Lia with the same words that I would have chosen to end this
future. And what you told us from the story of your professor to these last words in response to Professor Žižek really tell us one thing: Ukraine has to be at the center of our political action because in Ukraine we have the biggest threat to Europe but also we have Europe's biggest hope. And we really thank you, you, your organization and through you to all your people for what you're doing for all of us every day at an immense cost. Thank you very much, thank you. Thank you for support and very grateful. Thank you so much Alexandra and thank you Lia. I would like to thank Lia with the same words that I would have chosen to end this
Slavoj Žižek
event. Drinks will be served in the room next door. Two quick announcements: if you'd like to receive the Europa newsletter you can find all of the details on our website
event. Drinks will be served in the room next door. Two quick announcements: if you'd like to receive the Europa newsletter you can find all of the details on our website
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europa2057.eu. At the entrance there are some copies of our first two publications, please subscribe. Please join us for a drink next door. I
europa2057.eu. At the entrance there are some copies of our first two publications, please subscribe. Please join us for a drink next door. I
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would like to thank our guests and all of you for having joined us this evening. Thank you.
would like to thank our guests and all of you for having joined us this evening. Thank you.