Il Futuro dell'Unione | Slavoj Žižek | Europa2057, Roma 25 marzo 2026
Talk · Europa 2057 ·
2026-03-25 · 1:03:27 · 6,659 words
geopolitics-warideologyfascism-populismcapitalismcommunism-socialismecology-climatetechnology-ai-cyberspacerevolution-violencerace-antisemitismdemocracyreligion-theologyphilosophy-generalhistorysubjectivity
A talk on Europe's place in the dissolving liberal world order, organized around Trump's term 'civilizational erasure'. Žižek argues that the old global rules are being dismantled from above by the powers that imposed them (above all Trump's US), that Ukraine faces a forced choice between surrender-as-national-death and risky resistance, and that BRICS multiculturalism is a false universalism tolerating each regime's barbarism. He closes by reversing Marx: today the spectre haunting the world is Europe itself, and its emancipatory-universalist legacy (global coordination beyond the market, which he is willing to call communism) is what must be reinvented.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “communism”
The name he is willing to give to global coordination beyond the market, not Soviet central planning but transnational regulation that can intervene into the market.
His coined term ('what I like to call'): pragmatism that takes circumstances into account but stays faithful to a principled insight, Gualtieri as living proof.
as “interregnum / morbid phenomena”
Gramsci's crisis formula (the old dying, the new not yet born); Žižek extends 'morbid' to the endpoints of history itself, ecological collapse, AI, world war.
Gramsci's notion that ideological struggle is the struggle for hegemony; Žižek notes Trump grasped this and the left abandoned it.
Luxemburg's 'socialism or barbarism'; Žižek adds that both can hold at once, as Stalin showed.
Benjamin's image, revolutions as the passengers of the train of history activating the emergency brake; the model for today's leftist action.
as “the end of the world”
His usage: not a change of events within a situation but a change of the coordinates of the situation itself, the big Other breaks down.
as “big Other”
Lacan's big Other, the neutral frame of our understanding of a situation; in the joke God stands for it, and its breakdown is the true 'end of the world'.
Today's ideology is not a great cause but the injunction to ignore big causes and pursue modest private life; the era presents itself as beyond ideology.
Trump-team's term he adopts as the organizing frame: different powers (US, Russia, Israel) each enact a figure of civilizational self-destruction.
His reframing of the Trump-ian slogan: free speech means the right to offend, to utter whatever pops into one's mind, the opposite of the European democratic tradition.
Kharichev's Putin-ideological construct of the self-sacrificing Russian for whom life matters less than higher values.
The left's fidelity; opposed to false globalist multiculturalism and specified as a universalism of struggle.
as “universalism of struggle”
His counter to false globalism: universalism that takes sides against injustices anywhere, not a tolerant coexistence of civilizational barbarisms.
as “false multiculturalism (BRICS multiculturalism)”
The BRICS model as peaceful coexistence of civilizations that means 'you oppress there, we oppress here', global capitalism plus local fascism.
as “emancipatory universalism”
The European legacy to be resuscitated through heresy, not a return to the pre-68 welfare state.
as “the spectre is Europe”
His reversal of the Communist Manifesto: today the spectre haunting the entire world is Europe itself; all powers ally against it.
Sloterdijk's term for the basic social-democratic values (healthcare, education, rights) that underlie European enlightenment regardless of party.
Via Badiou's reading of Socrates: philosophy's function is to undermine automatic trust in existing ideology, a positive value for Žižek.
Althusser's thesis that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects; Žižek reverses it, today ideology interpellates us as indifferent private individuals.
Stories he reaches for 4
Holocaust architect Heydrich wrote in 1936 distinguishing Zionist Jews (to be supported in moving to Palestine) from assimilationist Jews (unwanted); Balfour and Breivik said the same, anti-Semites supporting Israel to rid Europe of Jews.
“We don't want assimilationist Jews, but if they move there they are a great nation, we will have wonderful relations with them, we will support them”
Right after taking Afghanistan, the Taliban made peace with China: you do what you want with women there, we do what we want with Uyghurs here, the BRICS logic of mutual non-interference in barbarism.
“you do with women what you want there, we do with Uyghurs Muslim what we do there, it doesn't matter.”
Personal: in a low-level Central Committee post in Yugoslav self-management socialism, taking the official ideology seriously marked you as a potential dissident; belonging required private distance from the system.
“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.”
From Havel's Power of the Powerless: a shopkeeper puts a 'workers of the world unite' sign in his window he doesn't believe, and the system persists through this mass ritual participation in known falsehood.
“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 8
Communist Manifesto book
Source of the 'spectre haunting Europe' line that Žižek reverses: today the spectre haunting the world is Europe itself.
Havel's greengrocer parable, used (then dialectically revised) to analyse how a system persists through ritual participation in known falsehood.
Prison Notebooks book
Gramsci's interregnum formula ('the old is dying and the new cannot be born') is the talk's opening frame.
Eliot's line, the choice between heresy and non-belief, is used to license reinventing Europe rather than nostalgic return.
Theses on Feuerbach essay
Marx's 'interpret/change the world' thesis is reversed, after a century of changing without understanding, interpretation is the urgent task again.
Badiou's opening claim that philosophy corrupts the youth is endorsed as the undermining of automatic trust in existing ideology.
White House document introducing 'civilizational erasure' as Europe's prospect; Rubio's Christianity-and-heritage gloss is quoted with alarm.
Die Presse journal
Viennese daily that ran the caricature of two Nazi-looking Austrians complaining that justified anti-Semitism was being misused to criticize Israel.
People invoked 36
Alexander Kharichev negative
Top Putin ideologist who formulated 'Homo Putinus', the supposedly self-sacrificing Russian for whom life means less than higher values.
Roberto Gualtieri positive
Introducer; praised as a historian/theorist of Gramsci who proves principled pragmatism is possible in politics.
Co-host; had just returned from China and raised the emergency-brake idea and Europe's plight.
Steve Bannon negative
Called 'maybe the most interesting of Trump-ian ideologists'; frames immigrants and big companies as foreign forces occupying the American soul, 'we are at a war here'.
Louis Althusser positive
Source of the interpellation thesis that Žižek, following Jodi Dean, reverses for the present.
Jodi Dean positive
American friend who proposed turning around Althusser's interpellation thesis, today ideology interpellates us as private individuals, not subjects of a cause.
Arthur Balfour negative
Anti-Semite; the Balfour Declaration is read as wanting Jews to go to Palestine to be rid of them in Europe.
Mark Carney negative
Canadian PM invoked Havel's greengrocer to call for taking the sign down; Žižek disagrees, today's sign was taken down by the big powers themselves, not dissidents.
Sabine Hossenfelder positive
Popularizer of quantum physics and social commentator; her alien-observer thought experiment motivates the call for global coordination beyond the market.
Donald Trump negative
Behaves like a 'master of the world', breaks market rules, accelerates US decline, applies Thrasymachan justice at home and abroad; but the left should learn his radical line of distinction.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
An acquaintance, still a Zionist, whose quote on the spiritual catastrophe facing Judaism is deployed as the strongest indictment of Israel's path.
Anton Alikhanov negative
Governor of Kaliningrad (ex-Königsberg) who blamed Kant for the godlessness that supposedly led to the war in Ukraine.
Alain Badiou positive
Begins True Life with the claim that from Socrates on philosophy corrupts the youth, a positive value Žižek shares, though he doesn't fully agree with Badiou.
Marco Rubio negative
Elaborated 'civilizational erasure' as Europe abandoning Christianity and shared heritage.
Bruno Latour positive
Closing authority: 'L'Europe est seule, mais seule l'Europe peut nous sauver', Europe is alone, but Europe alone can save us.
Bernie Sanders positive
Quoted: 'we need a moratorium on artificial intelligence data centers now', to make time to think.
Václav Havel positive
The greengrocer parable from The Power of the Powerless is used (then dialectically revised) to think how systems persist through participated-in falsehood.
T. S. Eliot positive
A 'great conservative' whose line, the choice between heresy and non-belief, licenses reinventing Europe rather than returning to the old welfare state.
Told by Trump to accept losses because Russia has 'better cards'; framed as not a NATO puppet but as facing Ukraine's forced choice.
Dmitry Peskov negative
Kremlin press spokesman admitting international law 'no longer exists' de facto, used to indict Russia's own conduct in Ukraine.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Trump's 'true master' and 'even a greater peacemaker'; Israel under him is itself undergoing civilizational erasure.
Anders Behring Breivik negative
Norwegian mass murderer who said Jews are a danger in Europe/the US but should be fully supported in Israel.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Not a left-winger but usefully names 'objective social democracy' as the basic feature of European enlightenment.
Viktor Orbán negative
Says the same as Carney/Scholz with a different tone; his 'path of peace and security' is mocked as hypocrisy.
Nicolás Maduro negative
A 'criminal leader' whose kidnapping by Trump is nonetheless terrifying as a precedent; ideally he would share a Hague cell with Putin, Netanyahu and Trump.
Reinhard Heydrich negative
Holocaust architect whose 1936 text supported Zionist Jews moving to Palestine and rejected assimilationist Jews, the line from Balfour to Breivik.
Quoted from Davos: 'a world where only power counts is a dangerous place'.
Walter Benjamin positive
Revolutions as the emergency brake of world history, the model for today's leftist action.
Peter Thiel negative
Accused Europe of being Antichrist; Žižek's reversal, 'Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist', and demanded Europe drop open borders and climate politics.
Pete Hegseth negative
US Secretary of War; his 'they are toast' / 'punching them while they're down' briefing is quoted as the rhetoric of brute power.
Cited for 'socialism or barbarism', with the twist that both can hold at once, as Stalin showed.
Vladimir Putin negative
New nuclear doctrine; Eurasian-ideology legitimation; Homo Putinus self-sacrifice; evokes nuclear weapons to coerce.
Antonio Gramsci positive
The Prison Notebooks interregnum quote frames the whole talk; he notes the American right has even appropriated Gramsci and grasped hegemony better than the left.
Via Thrasymachus in the Republic: 'justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger', the doctrine Žižek says grounds Trump's stance.
Karl Marx positive
Cited for the Thesis on Feuerbach (which Žižek reverses) and the Communist Manifesto spectre (which he redirects at Europe).
Immanuel Kant positive
Defended against Alikhanov; treated as the father of Western liberal values (freedom, rule of law, the EU idea).
What it argues
Civilizational erasure as the new geopolitical conditionEurope as the spectre haunting the world and the site of emancipatory universalismTrump's 'master of the world' geopolitics and the collapse of international lawUkraine's forced choice between surrender-as-death and resistanceBRICS false multiculturalism versus universalism of struggleThe end of the world as suspension of the coordinates of meaningReversing Marx: from changing the world to interpreting it again
Dialectical moves 12
“today the spectre which is haunting the entire world is Europe itself”
Reverses Marx's Communist Manifesto: Europe, not communism, is now the feared emancipatory spectre.
“freedom of speech means exactly the opposite from the European democratic tradition”
The right's slogan inverts free speech: from protecting critical truth to licensing public offense.
“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”
Reverses Althusser: today's ideology is the injunction to be a private individual, not a subject of a cause.
“in the 20th century we tried to change the world without really understanding it; now it's also the time to interpret it again”
Reverses Marx's Thesis on Feuerbach, interpretation is the urgent task again.
“the true change when God himself who stands for the big other breaks down”
The end of the world is not a change within the situation but the suspension of the coordinates of the situation itself.
“peace-niks forget that occupiers sincerely always want peace, but peace defined in their terms”
The demand for peace colludes with the occupier's peace; the reversal exposes peace as occupation.
“if you resist against aggression and fight back you may lose. If you don't resist you've already lost”
The forced choice: non-resistance is itself a loss, so resistance is rational even at risk of defeat.
“the grocery sign was not taken down by some dissidents but by big powers themselves”
Reverses Havel/Carney: the liberal order is dismantled from above by those it no longer serves, not from below.
“many among those who support Israel are openly, more or less openly anti-Semitic”
The paradox: support for Israel can be the very form anti-Semitism takes.
“the only big power which still follows market competition is China”
Reversal: the capitalist West now breaks market rules while authoritarian China upholds them.
“the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief”
Via Eliot: to keep the European spirit alive one must do heresy, not return to the old welfare-state belief.
“Europe is alone, but Europe alone can save us”
Via Latour: Europe's isolation is the condition of its world-historical salvific role.
Claims 27
asserts
The left should learn from Trump's willingness to draw a radical line of distinction and clearly state its position, rather than chasing the undecided middle.left electoral strategy
asserts
The normal direction of our history left to itself is morbid — ecological collapse, uncontrolled AI and global war are the true morbid phenomena, not merely a stuck transition to socialism.Gramsci's interregnum and historical direction
reframes
The real problem is not that the transition from capitalism to socialism got stuck, but that the ordinary run of history tends toward self-destruction.classical Marxist transition theory
asserts
Today's model leftist actions are attempts to stop environmental destruction, control AI and prevent world war — pulling the emergency brake on history.contemporary left action
reframes
After a 20th century of trying to change the world without understanding it, the task is now again to interpret it.Marx's Thesis on Feuerbach
asserts
The liberal-democratic order was taken down not by dissidents but by the big powers themselves, who no longer find its rules useful for their hegemony.collapse of the liberal world order
asserts
China is now the only big power that still follows market competition and international capitalist rules, while Trump breaks them with capricious tariffs.China and the global market order
asserts
Trump's geopolitics is grounded in Thrasymachus's doctrine that justice is the interest of the stronger.Trump's geopolitical ethic
asserts
US global hegemony is dissolving and Trump's chaotic policy accelerates the US decline.US hegemony
asserts
Trump extends the logic of brutal war to the United States itself, treating domestic protesters as foreign invaders to be met by military force.Trump's domestic politics
asserts
Russia itself destroyed international law by attacking Ukraine, so its laments over the loss of international law are hypocritical.Russia and international law
reframes
The choice normally attributed to Ukraine (war vs peace) is really the West's choice: risk war by supporting Ukraine, or peaceful life through betraying an ally.Ukraine and Western responsibility
asserts
Occupiers always sincerely want peace, but peace on their terms — so the peace-niks' demand for peace naively serves the occupier.peace-niks and Ukraine
asserts
If Russia takes Ukraine it will in all probability push further west, so a Western 'peace' does not guarantee long-term peace.Russian expansion
asserts
Many of those who support Israel are openly anti-Semitic: they want Jews to move to Israel so as not to bother Europe.anti-Semitism and Zionism
rejects
BRICS multiculturalism is a false universalism that tolerates each civilization's internal barbarism in exchange for mutual non-interference.BRICS
asserts
Every leftist movement should remain faithful to a universalism of struggle, not the false globalism that tolerates oppression elsewhere.universalism
asserts
Europe, despite its crimes, was the only major civilization to launch a movement to abolish slavery and carries an emancipatory tradition worth resuscitating.Europe's legacy
asserts
Today the spectre haunting the entire world is Europe itself; all powers have entered a holy alliance against Euro-centrism.Europe's global role
asserts
The name for the global coordination beyond the market needed to confront ecology and AI is communism.communism as global coordination
asserts
The European Union is worth fighting for as the only model of transnational organization that guarantees a minimum of social and ecological welfare standards.the EU
asserts
Today ideology no longer interpellates us as subjects of a great cause but addresses us as private individuals pursuing modest daily life.ideology today
asserts
Trump-ian freedom of speech means the right to enjoyment — to offend others and utter whatever pops into one's mind — the opposite of the European democratic tradition.freedom of speech
asserts
Trump-ian populists pervasively use the rhetoric of castration/emasculation, attacking others perceived as weak because their weakness is contagious.right-wing rhetoric of masculinity
asserts
Israel under Netanyahu is itself caught in a process of civilizational erasure, risking a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism.Israel
asserts
Europe should stop its masochistic eternal guilt and act on its emancipatory potential, declaring the independence of a united Europe.Europe's self-assertion
asserts
Arresting criminal leaders is fine in principle, but it should begin with Putin, Netanyahu and Trump sharing a cell with Maduro at the Hague.international justice
Quotes 13
“today the spectre which is haunting the entire world is Europe itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Europe as the new spectre
“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 coordinate change
“the name that we have for this global coordination beyond market—not abolishing the market, just regulating the market—is communism.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as global coordination
“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”Slavoj Žižek · reversed interpellation
“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 · Trump-ian inversion of free speech
“peace-niks forget that occupiers sincerely always want peace, but peace defined in their terms.”Slavoj Žižek · the occupier's peace
“if you resist against aggression and fight back you may lose. If you don't resist you've already lost.”Slavoj Žižek · the forced choice of resistance
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-Semitism as support for Israel
“in the 20th century we tried to change the world without really understanding it? Now it's also the time to interpret it again.”Slavoj Žižek · reversing Marx's thesis
“Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can save us.”Slavoj Žižek · Latour's closing formula
“our universalism should be universalism of struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · universalism of struggle
“corrupting youth means undermine the automatic trust into the existing ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · philosophy's vocation
“Under Trump United States are becoming a barbaric country, vulgarity is incredible in public life.”Slavoj Žižek · American barbarism
Transcript 2 turns
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Slavoj Žižek
grande onore per me essere presentato, introdotto dal Roberto Gualtieri. Sorry, I have to go to English now, 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 just confuses you and so on. He is a living proof that you can be a good historian, theorist, 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 insight. So it's an honor for me to be here. Now let me begin, 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 Trump-ians—this is the lowest of the low—who refer to Gramsci. And they sometimes understand Gramsci better than we because 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 the enemy? And Trump went here to the end in their cultural madness for the left after 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 everything that one can ruin because they were obsessed with this idea of not to lose center votes. 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 today in the world. 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 a 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 yes there's still how it still holds this logic of from capitalism to socialism just unfortunately revolution happens in a 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 model 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, Gott, 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 decades. God answers it will fall apart as a union and become a popular spot for tourists under Russian domination. Von der Leyen turns around and starts to cry. Then Putin asks oh great so what will happen to my beloved Russia? God says it will be a 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 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 we have to be rethought. 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 asked 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 for, 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 is breaking all the rules of market competition with his capricious tariffs and so on. Although I think you Roberto mentioned this possibility there is a good lesson, you will 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 capitalist 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, the whole system will collapse. Then we had Covid, you know what it cost in economy. What I liked about Covid, not just for private reasons—it was golden era for me, I was able to be at home no friends bothering me, I read and wrote—but it's that it was another proof how many changes the system can go through without falling apart. So let's go on. But Scholz said the same thing in Davos, Scholz the German Chancellor—I quote Scholz: 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 Scholz 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 Nicolás Maduro ordered by Trump is a further true 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. Ha ha. 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 Euro finds itself in a different position, he is saying with a different tone the same thing as Carney and Scholz. 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 passed by us 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 insists 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. Who was here? My God, who was here? Peter Thiel. He was here, no? And he precisely accused Europe, the world today of Antichrist, you know. It's very funny you know it's like Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist. Then he said Europe 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 large change in the continent's value system. I say okay what does he mean by this? What do Trump-ian 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 Trump-ians from others—immigrants, 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 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 Trump-ians, 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 for 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're 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 Kharg Island oil export hub and he said just for fun. He was referring to an act which may trigger a new world war. The use, 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 Trump-ian ideologists, he said immigrants and big companies, they are foreign forces occupying American soul. We are at a war here. Now sorry, 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 have to 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, well 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 this line 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 by a forced choice. Life of 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—now I'll say something provocative—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 alliance 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 weapon. This is why unfortunately I think Israel itself under Netanyahu is caught in the process of its own civilizational erasure. Or I will quote 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 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. Heh heh. Read it, not 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 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 Zionist Jews who want to move to Palestine and they are assimilationist Jews. And he said no, we don't want assimilationist Jews, but if they move there they are 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 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 years ago in the Vienna, Viennese daily news 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 policy. He says 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 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 Muslim 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 noticed 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 one, two of these or two animals to fight each other you get two months of prison. No, you almost kill a woman two weeks, that... But you know in BRICS world we will live in a strange way where, you know, okay we have feminism, they have homophobia, they they treat women the way they do and so on, and okay it's peaceful coordination, sorry peaceful connection. 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 me 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 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 will immediately think 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 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 your sorry signora was your body language cut him off or whatever? No, I will finish soon sorry. No, 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 quite nicely. 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. In the Middle East both sides, not so much Palestinians as Arabs, practice 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 the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope of the Star 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 Euro-centrism. Trump and Putin, Le Pen and Orbán, pro-immigrant anti-racist 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 it's 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 world 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're 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 were 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 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 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 on 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 all 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 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 a subject of communism, of national, 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 a- to move 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 United Europe is still an economic power. So what we need—I follow Lorenzo here—is kind of a proclaim the independence of United Europe. New power blocks are emerging all around the world, 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-grit of Europe are European concepts? My don't people get this? So again what should be our aim? Do some of you follow—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 run 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 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 does some measures. The crucial thing is the problem is global. Remember four years ago, yeah yeah, there 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 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 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.
grande onore per me essere presentato, introdotto dal Roberto Gualtieri. Sorry, I have to go to English now, 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 just confuses you and so on. He is a living proof that you can be a good historian, theorist, 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 insight. So it's an honor for me to be here. Now let me begin, 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 Trump-ians—this is the lowest of the low—who refer to Gramsci. And they sometimes understand Gramsci better than we because 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 the enemy? And Trump went here to the end in their cultural madness for the left after 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 everything that one can ruin because they were obsessed with this idea of not to lose center votes. 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 today in the world. 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 a 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 yes there's still how it still holds this logic of from capitalism to socialism just unfortunately revolution happens in a 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 model 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, Gott, 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 decades. God answers it will fall apart as a union and become a popular spot for tourists under Russian domination. Von der Leyen turns around and starts to cry. Then Putin asks oh great so what will happen to my beloved Russia? God says it will be a 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 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 we have to be rethought. 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 asked 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 for, 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 is breaking all the rules of market competition with his capricious tariffs and so on. Although I think you Roberto mentioned this possibility there is a good lesson, you will 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 capitalist 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, the whole system will collapse. Then we had Covid, you know what it cost in economy. What I liked about Covid, not just for private reasons—it was golden era for me, I was able to be at home no friends bothering me, I read and wrote—but it's that it was another proof how many changes the system can go through without falling apart. So let's go on. But Scholz said the same thing in Davos, Scholz the German Chancellor—I quote Scholz: 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 Scholz 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 Nicolás Maduro ordered by Trump is a further true 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. Ha ha. 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 Euro finds itself in a different position, he is saying with a different tone the same thing as Carney and Scholz. 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 passed by us 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 insists 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. Who was here? My God, who was here? Peter Thiel. He was here, no? And he precisely accused Europe, the world today of Antichrist, you know. It's very funny you know it's like Antichrist accuses the opponent of Antichrist. Then he said Europe 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 large change in the continent's value system. I say okay what does he mean by this? What do Trump-ian 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 Trump-ians from others—immigrants, 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 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 Trump-ians, 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 for 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're 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 Kharg Island oil export hub and he said just for fun. He was referring to an act which may trigger a new world war. The use, 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 Trump-ian ideologists, he said immigrants and big companies, they are foreign forces occupying American soul. We are at a war here. Now sorry, 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 have to 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, well 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 this line 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 by a forced choice. Life of 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—now I'll say something provocative—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 alliance 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 weapon. This is why unfortunately I think Israel itself under Netanyahu is caught in the process of its own civilizational erasure. Or I will quote 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 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. Heh heh. Read it, not 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 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 Zionist Jews who want to move to Palestine and they are assimilationist Jews. And he said no, we don't want assimilationist Jews, but if they move there they are 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 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 years ago in the Vienna, Viennese daily news 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 policy. He says 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 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 Muslim 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 noticed 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 one, two of these or two animals to fight each other you get two months of prison. No, you almost kill a woman two weeks, that... But you know in BRICS world we will live in a strange way where, you know, okay we have feminism, they have homophobia, they they treat women the way they do and so on, and okay it's peaceful coordination, sorry peaceful connection. 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 me 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 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 will immediately think 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 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 your sorry signora was your body language cut him off or whatever? No, I will finish soon sorry. No, 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 quite nicely. 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. In the Middle East both sides, not so much Palestinians as Arabs, practice 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 the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope of the Star 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 Euro-centrism. Trump and Putin, Le Pen and Orbán, pro-immigrant anti-racist 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 it's 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 world 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're 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 were 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 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 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 on 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 all 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 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 a subject of communism, of national, 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 a- to move 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 United Europe is still an economic power. So what we need—I follow Lorenzo here—is kind of a proclaim the independence of United Europe. New power blocks are emerging all around the world, 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-grit of Europe are European concepts? My don't people get this? So again what should be our aim? Do some of you follow—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 run 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 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 does some measures. The crucial thing is the problem is global. Remember four years ago, yeah yeah, there 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 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 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.