Well, good evening and thank you so much for coming. My name is Mirjana Tomic, I used to be a journalist and now I am the author and moderator of seminars on politics and media in Europe. And I'm so happy that for the fifth time we have Ivan Krastev to either finish or begin the year. Recently, Ivan said that Bulgaria has the highest number of fortune tellers per inhabitant. has the highest number of fortune tellers per inhabitant. So we are just following the tradition and we have among one of the best fortune tellers here. The topic today is Lessons from 2024 Outlook on 2025. Just a few words about Ivan Krastev. I will only say a few pieces of information. He's a political scientist, Bulgarian, chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He's the author of numerous books translated into different languages and quoted very often, at least in Vienna, as a reference. He is a founder of different think tanks and he is a regular columnist of Financial Times, previously also of the New York Times. Ivan is regularly invited by presidents and policy makers just to hear his opinion. So his views are not only the views of research but also of those who make decisions for us. I don't know if it is good or bad that you know them all, if it makes you more optimistic or less optimistic. Our format today is actually quite simple. For about 30 minutes I'll talk to Ivan and then you will be all invited to ask questions. In a very recent podcast that you did, Ivan, with Josje Monk, you said that we talk about the future but interpreting the past. And I would like you to tell us what are your lessons about a very recent past, about 2024. The year is still not over. I don't know what will happen in the next 27 days, because from this morning to this afternoon, we learned about the coup in Korea. But I just want to mention a few things. We had a lot of elections this year and every election was a surprise, because we didn't really like the results of the elections. So we knew that Trump would win, but we didn't expect a landslide. We did not expect the left to win in France. We didn't expect this far right candidate to win in Romania. And we always blame somebody else. It is the Russian propaganda, or it is TikTok, or it is the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton said, or we don't know the people. What is your reading of, and the most important is, we are happy when these people who win the elections actually are not forming the governments, like in Austria. So what is your reading of the lessons of 2024? Until today, it may change by the end of the year. First, thank you for the invitation. There is something very pretentious in the format, just to tell you that I'm aware of this. Secondly, most of the people here I know, and most of them are colleagues. So they're fortune tellers themselves. So in a certain way, this is a kind of an assembly of fortune tellers. And I have a collection of jokes about fortune tellers and the one that I have not used yet is about somebody who went to visit one of these fortune tellers rings on the door and then just the fortune teller said who is it and the person went back I'm saying this because in a certain way where I do believe you're right is we're not so much surprised but even when we can predict results we are not sure anymore what it means and from this point of view even this conversation for me is much more comparing intuitions than anything else 2024 was an important year it was obvious to be like this. You have almost half of the population of the world voting. There was really important elections. And also, you have two important wars going on, which was also very much there. And we knew that they were going to influence each other. And there was a trend. And the trend was the Cubans, almost in most of the places, they have been losing. And from this point of view, who is winning was very much who was not in power before. In the United Kingdom, the left came. In the United States, basically, it was Trump. Those countries, of course, like Mexico and India, but particularly Mexico, where basically the party of power did very well. But the most general feeling is, and this is because kind of this type of a conversation is about type of a generalization for which you're going to be killed in any self-respective political science department. But the general feeling is that we are seeing a great political rupture. The general feeling is that we are seeing a great political rupture. And my starting point is, when you see a great political rupture, the only way is to try to see, is there any type of experience that you can mobilize in order to understand what is going on? And for somebody coming from where I'm coming in our generation, I do believe we see something that resembles for me what we experienced in 1989. There was a big kind of a cycle closure. It's not about one place or the other. And the most difficult for us to basically comprehend is that in order to see it like a big political rupture, and particularly if you have a kind of a liberal convictions, it means that you should put yourself in the shoes of the ex-communist elite in 1989. Because they were not comprehending what was going on. And I remember it very well. I had a very brilliant professor in political philosophy, very decent man, who was kind of reform minded within the Communist Party and there was this moment in which he stopped understanding. And he stopped understanding not because of a moral issue and he never was a power and so on because his experience was not helping him and I'm just going to give you two or three examples why I do believe that we come to this story. I was listening very much about people saying how it is possible somebody like Donald Trump, billionaire kind of somebody totally born in privilege to be the leader of an anti-establishment revolution. But listen, how it was possible Boris Yeltsin, the member of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party to be the leader of the anti-communist revolution. One of the characteristics of a big political rupture is that they always performed it by unimaginable coalitions. And the second thing that in my view is very important is don't ask the question, why did people vote for Trump? This is not going to tell you anything about what Trump will do. Because the big political ruptures are kind of a black check. In a certain way, the mandate is that something dramatic is going to check, and you're not asking people for what they voted. By the way, different people voted for totally different things. But you believe that you have a mandate for a big change. And this is when you say why we're not comprehending is that in order to comprehend, first you should really dramatically transform your own historical experience. You should change the perspective in the way that is politically painful. But secondly, what you're going to understand is simply that it is a big political rupture. You're not going to understand neither the direction. The only thing that is going to understand is simply that it is a big political rupture. You're not going to understand neither the direction. The only thing that is going to stay is the pace. And this is the only thing that I'm really convinced in 2024 was important. This is like having the button of fast forward being put. Things will start to happen very fast. They were happening quite fast in 2024, but now they're going to happen very fast. They were happening quite fast in 2024, but now they're going to happen very fast for reasons that we don't understand. You was quoting South Korean president asking for the martial law. By the way, asking for the martial law, accusing opposition, in a certain way, it comes to the moment where people had the feeling that they should do something radical. By the way, what Macron did with the elections, what different politicians are doing, because you have the feeling that you're not understanding anything anymore. And when you don't understand, you go radical because you basically believe to start a change and basically be destroyed of it. And my feeling is talking about the lessons of 2024. 2024 was quite fast forward, but with the changes in the US and other places, the pace dramatically is going to change. It's not going to go in one direction. When people said we're moving to the right or moving to the left, to where we're moving, we'll know in 10 years, going back and because you talk about past, this is the thing that stayed very strongly with me. Of course, because of this comparison that they made, I decided to look back in 1989. Do you know what? It's absolutely amazing. For us, 1989 was only the fall of the Berlin Wall. Look from now on back. Is it not that Tiananmen can turn to be more important than the fall of the Berlin Wall? The resilience of the Chinese Communist Party to keep power? On the other side, we remember 1989 as a kind of a liberal year. But this was also the year in which Milosevic made his famous speech in Kosovo. We are talking only about the great excursion of East Germans going to West Germany. But there was a big excursion of 300,000 Bulgarian Turks being expelled from Bulgaria going to Turkey. Probably this excursion, and the historian Paul Betz has written beautifully on this, can turn to be more important. And then I went into opinion polling, and in 2019, the Russian public was asked what was the most important thing that happened in 1989. And they have five options. They have Polish elections, they have Berlin Wall, they have Tiananmen. The 54% of them selected the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. And then two more things. 1989 for the political Islam was as important as for the liberals. Osama bin Laden believed that for the first time, Islamist movement has defeated a superpower, expelling Soviets from Afghanistan. 1989 was the year a guy called Elon Musk left South Africa, and probably his experience very much shaped the fact that he wants to go to Mars, because probably no place to go. I'm saying all this because when you go back, you start to see things that you're not seeing before. And my major story is we are very much focused on Trump. It could be that something not less important is happening in other places. And one of the things that we can try to do is really try to see these things, at least try to basically feel it happening, because this thing of course is going to be connected also with the Trump coming and the end of the America as a liberal empire. But otherwise, there are going to be many 2025s. It's not going to be just one. In the way now we learned that 1989 was not just what we saw in the center of Berlin. When you speak about this radical change and the rupture, which way do you think this rupture can go? Because in many ways, we feel we are going in some areas backwards. Women's rights, democracy, do people still believe in democracy or anything goes or the politicians nowadays do not understand what voters really care about? It can go in different directions in different places. There was this famous story for a, it was a children's book, about some lord who jumped on his horse and started riding in all directions at the same time. The problem with a change like this is that we see the directions either because we have a very strong ideological view and we are seeing what we want to see, or because basically when we talk in our circles, for sure, there is a major problem, not only with the women's rights and others, there was a certain type of a backlash. Part of it, and you're going to come to something that I'm totally preoccupied with currently, is that many of these things is also happening because of our changes that have been there and we start seeing them suddenly. For example, between 1965 and 2015, fertility rate in the world went down two times. Now majority of the people in the world live in a kind of society which the fertility rate, the birth rate is below the reproduction level. Why I'm saying all this, this was always there, the specialists knew this, this was projections, but suddenly this fact start to mean many things. By the way, I don't know is it good or bad. Depending how you see it, for climate and others, probably having less people is not bad. But imagine for the first time that you have this society which starts to look childless, and you start to ask why the women do not want to have kids. They have cats. Yeah, they have cats. No, no, but this is, G.T. Vance looks as kind of insane, but he was touching on something that suddenly makes at least a certain part of the population very nervous because what we are doing, is it a collective suicide? Why we're not reproducing? And listen, this is dramatic. And I'm just going to give you one figure about South Korea in order to understand that it is dramatic. In South Korea, they have a reproduction rate which is under 1%. Obviously, something is dramatically wrong with the South Korean marriage and so on, but as a result of it, if they're not going to change the trend and if they're not going to be immigration, they're going to lose half of its population in the next 20 years. So now imagine the economic, political, and security implications. This is a country where kind of the biggest military divide which remained from the Cold War is still there. Can you imagine that you're a leader in a country and you know that basically in 20 years you're going to lose half of your population? I'm saying this because when you go and start seeing this, you start to see totally different reasons why governments are doing what they're doing. One of the things that they have been doing recently was rereading some of the speeches of President Putin very much focused on the problem of demography of population. And he had a total fixation, by the way, absolutely legitimate on this. Russia was a country that was starting to have demographic problems going back to the 1970s, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union was really dramatic. The birth rates went down 39%. 17 million people, basically, Russia lost after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Part of it is way of life, alcoholism, and so on and so on. But why I'm saying this, suddenly, before the war started, Russian presidents start to repeat one and the same things, particularly when he talks in front of children, and totally without being asked. He was all the time saying that there are not enough Russians in the world, that Mendeleev predicted that in the year 2000 there are going to be 500 million Russians, and that if Russia is not going to increase its population, it's never going to be able to defend its civilization. I'm telling you because you're talking about political science. My only methodology in political science is try to understand something that looks illogical, and probably this is going to help you to understand. This abduction of kids, which started on the day one of the war, particularly orphans, the decisions basically to allow Russian families to adopt kids in weeks was for me the most surprising things, and you're never going to understand it. If you're not going to understand it for him, this was about seeing... Do you think this was planned in advance? Listen's. Do you think this was planned in advance? Listen, how do you know what was planned in advance? In a certain way, probably historians will go there, but I can see this being done and done and done to the extent that in 2023, there was a meeting of the Russian World Congress, and the talk again was about 500 million Russians. And I do believe this is important. So everybody's kind of quoting Brzezinski who said that without Ukraine, Russia is not an empire. For Putin, without Ukrainians, Russians is not Russia. And from this point of view, treating them as a kind of a bewitched Russians, and this is coming from one of his advisors, suddenly it is not about land. It's about people. It's about population. And this is kind of a totally different story. Why I'm saying this? Because we're going to have other countries which are going to face with this identity crisis because people, populations are declining and we don't know why. It is declining in rich countries and in poor countries, in democracies and authoritarian regimes. This is like with democracy in the 1990s. It was spreading, and it goes against the theory. The theory before was that you need a certain level of economic development, you need a certain level of education, and suddenly it goes everywhere. Why Nepal has such low birth rates? Why Finland, the country with very good social policies? And the most important is governments cannot react because economic policies does not help. They tried. Everybody is trying. And here comes the Russian leader who basically said, this is a cultural war. The West is childless. And because they fear our vitality, they won't make us childless. And this is why they're asking us to become without kids, gays. By the way, the Russian government just six months ago criminalized any type of promotion of a child-free life. So you should understand how deep it is. This demographic anxiety is deep, and it goes very much about the role of women. Why not? Why they don't want kids? Then comes also the story, if they're not going to be kids, how are you thinking about the future? What about the intergenerational contract? And then comes, of course, the great replacement theory. If it is not our kids, it's going to be others' kids. And what kind of contract you can have. I'm saying all this because probably political leaders are not going to talk in these terms. But all of this anxiety is about the world that you don't understand anymore. And you should react. And you should do something. And when you start doing something, the world start changing not only for you, but for everybody else. Well, let's return. Well, there are two things I would like to understand. And that is, why do you think that populist, far right populist parties are more and more popular? Do you think that they are the ones who reflect what the population thinks and the liberals do not? Or there is another reason? And then they are not in power because there is a firewall. Or there is some sort of a wall. Do you think this can undermine the trust in democracy? I vote, but the ones I voted for are not going to govern. Even the story with democracy is a slightly more complex story, because everybody claims that there is a crisis of democracy. But the major crisis of democracy is when the other party is winning. In the state of Pennsylvania, the majority of the people who basically answered positively the question that American democracy is under threat voted for Donald Trump. So in a polarized society, democracy is not a process. One of the weaknesses of the liberal position is that liberal position very much bet it on the impartial institutions for good reasons. Big courts, big central banks, but this is like going on a football game and cheering for the arbiter. There is no emotion on this. You should have a team. And the moment you have a team, any time when you're losing is unfair and anything is against you. I'm saying this because my major argument is why the liberal position was much weaker. Because liberalism, and Michael Ignatieff is here, so probably if you want the answer, you should ask him, not me. But it was also historically rooted in the special fears, which were historically produced. By the way, classical liberalism comes in two forms. Either before revolution, there's a kind of a reformist liberalism, or after revolution where basically is reaction and try to put constraint to unrestrained power. And of course there was this fear of unrestrained power. It was this fear of the fascist regime. This was this fear of the communist regimes. And this is why in 1990s, the level of self-constraint, for example, in European societies was very much there. But it was based not simply on institutions, it was based on institutions rooted in a certain experience. And the people who had this experience, kind of fading away, it is not easily institutionally to transfer all of this experience. And suddenly, people start to go for a change, and they said, I want a radical change. Why the far right is there? There's some reasons why it's far right and not far left. But basically, this is a vote for change. And when, with one of the questions people are asking, what is going to be the world of 2024? I don't know what is the world of 2024. I have a guess what to be the world of 2024. I don't know what is the world of 2024. I have a guess what could be the world of 2025. And it is not my idea. I was talking to a friend of mine, a wise Pakistani lady, who said that when she's walking around the world, she was very much fascinated by the word feral. Probably I'll not pronounce it well. Like a faraoh cat. It is a cat that used to live with people, and after that basically ended up on the street and became real wild. And by the way, this is very savage creatures. Very territorial, they have been living with humans. So we're coming out of a quite consensual type of politics, and the institutions are becoming pheral. In a certain way, this is also Donald Trump. But it's not only Donald Trump. When you say Donald Trump, yesterday, Joe Biden decided to pardon his son. The moment he did it, he is part of the Trump constituency. Because this is it. part of the Trump constituency. Because this is it. I can understand it, and I don't want to face his dilemma, what I'm going to do in a situation like his. But this idea that there is a major divide inclined, that basically we're never going to do what they're doing, this is what people understand not very much happening. And on the far right there is something important. This is the issue of identity. And people had the feeling that two things are happening on the level of identity. Not simply that the identities are changing, but they are changing very easy. And I remember this again in the 1990s. Listen, suddenly in a country with very big communist parties and so on, people are changing their views. And to be honest, most of the people are doing this very sincere because probably, deeply in their hearts, they never liked the regime. But then others said, but if it's so easy, what kind of an identity is this? And the old Bulgarian transition have been this kind of obsession with the idea, who are the true anti-communists? You never can prove it in a way, because it was very easy. And when I talk about changing of identity, I don't mean political. It's about sexual. It's about cultural identity. Coming and being Austrian suddenly became very easy. And I do believe this easiness is scary, because when you look back historically, particularly with a big kind of assimilation migration story, there are always two very different fears. One is that those foreigners who come, they're never going to be like us. That there is a kind of a border which they are never going to go, they're never going to be like us, that there is a kind of a border which they are never going to go, they're never going to be totally assimilated. But 1930s and Nazi anti-Semitism was driven by a different fear, that they can become like us. And if they can become like us, who are we? If everybody can become Bulgarian, what it means to be Bulgarian? This kind of a fear of universal nature. And I thought as a result of it, there comes people who basically start and saying, no, it's not just a cultural change. It's biological. They're kind of a true Bulgarians, others. And today I was seeing some data. Do you know that in Austria, as a percent of the population, you have more foreign-born population than in Canada? da v Avstriji je vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vseeno vse the real migrant societies, Americans, Canadians, and so on. And suddenly, you see a different reality. And this is not Luxembourg, 50% of the population foreign born. And here comes also my metaphors of migration, because before, the idea was that people can move in space, but they cannot move in time. And this is why, by the way, the first book on time traveler is 19th century, the end of 19th century. Suddenly now, every movement of space is becoming also a movement in time. People coming, for example, to the West having the feeling that you're moving to the future. And all these voters voting for the far right, they believe that the only way to travel back in time is with the ballot. And I believe this kind of a mixture also, this makes some of these parties. And also, they speak the language that people understand exactly because they don't speak institutional language. Part of the problem when you say why we're totally surprised, because on the language on which we speak, we cannot say anything simple. And when everything is very complex, you're always very much surprised by the simplicity of the election day. Because the election day ended up very simply. One is winning and the other is losing. It's very complex, but at the end of the day, one is winning and the other is losing. It's very complex, but at the end of the day, one is winning and the other is losing, and there is a major consequences out of it. When you mention complexity, it reminds me of the fact that one topic that is more and more present among media people is news avoidance. And at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia this year, there were quite a few debates and panels about news avoidance. And one of the arguments that was presented in different studies is that people find news too complex to understand or that the news do not affect their lives. They don't see how they can combine the two. So this complexity is also a problem of media, how to present certain news, especially because the reality is complex. But let's move before I ask the audience to start a discussion or rather questions. Let me ask you about the war in Ukraine. What have we learned and what can we expect in 2025? I see certain changes in how media covers the war. And sometimes I'm not sure who is the one who leads, media or politicians. What do I mean by that? Well, for example, two years ago, certain things were not politically correct to say about Ukraine. Now everything seems politically correct. Now you can talk about corruption. You can talk about people who are deserting. You can talk about the lack of press freedom. Just to mention a few things. For the first time, it is mentioned that Russia may win. So how should normal voters understand this? On the one hand, we have the European Commission that just went to Ukraine saying, well, we shall support Ukraine as long as it takes. Does Europe have the means to support Ukraine? Is it only a verbal thing or there is reality? The word war is mentioned more and more often by European politicians. Who is going to go to that war? Is anyone going to go and fight? Or one thing is what we hear in public discourse, and another thing was being discussed behind closed doors. Let's start with the fact that the war is a very different reality. I was always thinking about Europe, because the biggest kind of problem of Europe is the success of European project. The success of European project was making the war unthinkable in Europe. And it was a success. It was simply unthinkable. I mean, unthinkable for different reasons, for different people. There was a film that I believe that I have seen, but my wife told me that she has told me the film, so probably she is right. But in this film, there is a person who, his major experience is he's a gardener, and he spends most of the time watching television. So when in real life he was attacked by gangsters, he didn't know what to do. He simply took the remote control and tried to change the channel. And to be honest, this was kind of a reaction of Europeans to many of the problems because all these kind of wars and things, it was not our world. We knew that it existed. By the way, Europeans politicians are not people who don't know anything about this. And then comes it. And you say about the journalists, why they were saying this and that. Listen, if you go to Ukraine and you see people dying, and you know these people personally, and Tim is here, other people that have been there, and you know that for them, your article is going to make a difference. You try also, you don't stay neutral in the way you go to places that you go. You try to help them and to know that on the other side, there is a propaganda machine which is basically telling the story of success. So you have a moral pressure that is not coming from or your editor, just for being there and having experience. And this is real, by the way, this is not simple. Because it is easy for us to make an analysis here. I'm going to say this, I do believe that there is a problem and there's going to be a major problem with Ukraine also is the coverage of it but go and see the people and their life has changed and two-thirds of the Ukrainians do not live where they have been living on the first day of the war. We are missing the scale of what is happening on the level of the personal life. We are we are talking about a war as if there is something like any war this is a big war I'm just going to give you the latest data and a colleague of ours here basically probably is responsible for 80% of what I know I'm embellished but for the moment the idea is that both sides, if you try people who have been killed, heavily wounded, or desertering and so on, we're talking about 700,000 people on our side. Listen, this is big. This is big. And as a result of it everything has changed and all these people that have been like you so this is why when you start covering the first thing that you try to cover is to try to cover the surprise and we all felt very much guilty because not only President Putin but all European leaders and European intelligence and American agencies believe that this is going to end up in six weeks. And here is part of the problem. You try to overcompensate. And we went to the other direction. We start writing as if people can be in three years in a war and they are not going to be affected by this, that you're going to have the same level of unity that you have on the day one. No, Ukrainian society is at the moment divided society. There is a tensions between those who volunteered and went to serve and those who tried to buy themselves not to serve, between those who are in the country and those who are out, and this is going to be even more difficult. The 60%, according to the latest polling, do not want President Zelensky to run on the elections. And this is a political reality. But just going from one picture to the other also does not help you to understand exactly what is happening. And when I say exactly what is happening is, Russia at the moment, as it looks like, is winning, but this is not the war that they started. And in the way you cannot understand why he started it without seeing the abducted kids, you're never going to understand which is this war if you're not going to ask the question, what 10,000 North Koreans are doing in Kursk? And just to give you the idea of the surreality of the situation, I saw somewhere, somebody has been quoting it, we're living in a world in which a Soviet Sioux military plane is attacking Kursk in the Russia-Ukrainian war, and the target is the North Koreans. Put it just 30 years ago, all this does not make any sense. And it does not make any sense because when the war started, Putin wanted this to be a local conflict, the special operations like Crimea, nobody should be involved, this is not your business. This is a kind of old family affair of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, get out. And suddenly, he's internationalizing the conflict. But Ivan, is Europe ready for what is happening now or Europe is just navigating, reacting to reality? When you're saying Europe, exactly whom you're saying? European Union. But European Union is certain organization that has certain budgets and so on. They are member states, they are populations. So let's tell the most obvious, which you know better than me. The world does not look in the same way if you're living in Poland or the Baltic Republic and if you're working in Spain or Portugal. Simply, it's totally different. And we know this and all of this is Europe. Secondly, when it comes and when it starts, when you say is it ready or not ready, my second question is ready for what? Because also the other thing that was changing, when it started, the idea was that nuclear is not possible. Suddenly, you're not sure. You're not sure, because the problem with the war is that you go on the level of escalation, which starts to have a logic of its own. Why the Russian president is using ballistic missiles, attacking something which is, listen, these missiles are for totally different purposes. They should not be used for these purposes. But because you try to show the dominance of escalation, you try to go that there is no red line that you cannot cross. And when you're asking me what to expect, I do believe that most probably we're going to see negotiations cease fire. Are we going to have settlement? I don't believe it. Because when you talk peaceful land, it starts with the assumption that this war is about land. And my feeling is it's not about land. And because it is not about land, one of the major stories, how you're defining victory and how you're defining basically defeat. I'm one of the people who believe that the West was wrong, claiming that it's up to Ukraine to generally say what is victory and defeat for very simple reasons. Ukrainians can decide what they're going to defy as their victory and their defeat. But this is not only the war about Ukraine. And recovering all the territory and so on and so on created a situation in which the negotiations are more difficult. True. By the way, the Ukrainian opinion is also moving. Because talking about demography, the biggest problem for Ukrainian leaders, regardless who is going to be, Zeluzhny or Zelensky. By the way, one of the reasons Zelaluzhnyi is so much respected is he was caring about people. And he should care about people because there is a country which is even in a worse demographic situation than Russia, and this country is Ukraine. In 1991, there was 52 million people living on the territory of Ukraine. When the war started, there was around 40 million. Now in the territory that basically is controlled by the Ukrainian government, they're between 25 and 27. And keep in mind, if this war goes for a long time, the likelihood of people who are now here or in other places to go back is decreasing. There are specialists on migration here, and this is a well-known story. Secondly, young people. And I said this yesterday on this, Americans are telling to the Ukrainians start to mobilize 18-year-olds. We don't have the right to say this. Listen, we really do not have the right to say this because the demographic, this is such a small cohort. Any of these 18-year-olds killed means probably also two kids not born. And Ukrainians know why they're not mobilizing them. But of course, the military are right. And I was talking to a general who said something which for me as a civilian person was a shock. He said, the average age of the Ukrainian army, and this was when the counteroffensive started, is around 45 years. He said, you cannot have a counteroffensive with such an old army. He said, you cannot have a counteroffensive with such an old army. He said, old people are not brave enough. Listen, it's so simple. Old people are not so brave enough to have this counteroffensive. And I'm saying all this because you're going to have something, and then the question is what you're maximizing. And for me, the maximizing is how, for me, is going to work that it's not a Russia's total victory first that you should have any crane in which people will be ready to go back not all of them those who want but also this should be a place where money are ready to go this could be a place where people believe that they can plan for a long term and does it mean this or that arrangement now we're talking about European troops as peacekeepers and so on do you know how long arrangement? Now we're talking about European troops as peacekeepers and so on. Do you know how long is the border we're talking about? Thousands of kilometers. Do you know what it means to monitor, even not to protect the border of this? Do you know how much people you're talking about on the South North Korean border, which is kind of. And this is, in my view, and I want to end up on this because when you watch television, when you go media, we are reading about Gaza and we are reading about Ukraine. And both wars are awful, by the way, incredibly amount of people being killed. But also you should try to imagine that the problem is totally different. On one, the problem is it's a very small place, which makes it so difficult. I mean Gaza, so small. the problem is totally different. On one, the problem is it's a very small place, which make it so difficult. I mean, Gaza, so small. And also, demography is also, by the way, a huge factor for what you're seeing. The other, because it is a very big place, it is so different. And you have, in these two wars, both through the demographic factor and through the scale factor, part of the problems which I'm afraid we're going to see in other places too. And this is why when you look at these wars, which are so different in almost every... By the way, in both, you have nuclear powers being involved. This is the other story. Israel is a nuclear power. And from this point of view, this type of a story to try to understand what you are seeing, not the war of the past but the war of the future I told you this is something that we should talk about because people are talking about what is happening in Ukraine as if this is a kind of the war from yesterday the same way like they talk about the Balkans what happened in the Balkans 1990s, it was totally irrelevant for anybody else. Listen, people who followed Balkans in the 1990s know more about the world of today than those that have been following Central and Eastern Europe. Well as I followed and I was in the war in the Balkans I can also say that after the war, the period after the war is as difficult as the war, and sometimes even more difficult. My last question is, when does 2025 start, Ivan, does it start in the 1st of January or the 20th of January when Trump will swear presidency? When does it start, politically speaking? Politically speaking, it started on November 5th, on the night of the election. But secondly, using this kind of metaphorical language, it is also 2025 started, but also kind of a long 20th century ended. Because Hobsbawm has this beautiful story about the short 20th century ended. Because Hobsbawm has this beautiful story about the short 20th century, which started 1914 and ended 1989. But there was also the long 20th century, which was the three wars, the first, the second, and the Cold War. And this was a century defined by certain experiences, by certain ideological identities, and so on. And if you look at Trump, he's not part of this century. I'm not saying this is a negative or positive, but he's not part of this century because he perceives American, for example, hegemon in the last 35 years, as America being the loser and not the winner. He basically is never going to refer to the experience either of the communist period or even of the war effort of the Americans during the World War II as something that has shaped his experience. So as a result of it, I do believe that certain type of things ends when the defining experience of this period suddenly became irrelevant. When the key, the magic words of this period suddenly became irrelevant. When the key, the magic words of this period disappeared, for example, Democrats, not particularly geniusly in my view, started to use the words fascist for Trump. It was a dead word, it didn't work. It didn't mobilize, it didn't scare. The same time Russian president used the word denazification when he started the war. And do you know what happened? In the first week of the the word denazification when he started the war. And do you know what happened? In the first week of the war, denazification was the most searched word on the Russian Google. People didn't know what he was talking about. I mean, Russian people. I mean, this was the Russian Google. So I'm saying this because when the magic words are done, and when certain experience are not a referential anymore, you cannot understand it through it, then we're in a new period. And this is, in my view, what we're seeing. Thank you. Well, I open the floor for questions. Please. One, two, but please introduce yourself, because we are filming. Thank you. I'm Stefan Lehner. I work for Carnegie Europe. I have a question concerning the demographic decline. The way you frame it is destabilizing, basically. You think Russia attacked Ukraine partly because of demographic angst. You also say that this demographic decline is a threat to identities, leads to the rise of nationalistic, aggressive politicians. But can't you say the reverse, too? I mean, you just said you can't make a counteroffensive with 45-year-old people. Maybe you can't do an offensive with 45-year-old people. If you look at, for instance, the Crusades, I think there's this analysis of the Crusades that it was basically an aggression of the younger sons of aristocracy who had absolutely no role in Europe and therefore had to go to kill people elsewhere. And if you look at the Balkans, you have, of course, still a lot of tensions. None of the big problems has really been resolved. But most of the people who might go to war are now in Switzerland or Germany or elsewhere. And I would think in the longer term, you would see probably more stability because of fewer people who still really have the energy to go to war. What do you say. No, thank you very, by the way, historically, normally there is a correlations between the younger population and prone for violence, be it for civil war, being for wars in general. And you're totally right. What is the problem with the population that I talk about? We do not have a relative collective experience. Because the last time this happened in Europe was 700 years ago. And it was the result of the Black Death. And as a result of it, it was not. What is interesting, and as I said, I'm not positive or negative, is it good or bad. But I know something. The most disturbing thing about this demographic anxiety is because you don't understand why. It's a cultural choices of billions of individuals. And they're making different choices. Some young people don't want to do it because of climate. Some of other things. By the way, one of the reasons could be that we're living long enough. And in a certain way, you're changing your perspective in life. I have a favorite quote on this from Woody Allen, who said, I want to live forever, but not in the hearts of the people, but in my apartment in Manhattan. Why I'm saying this? Because when you have this perspective, suddenly, and for me, this is what is disturbing, is you discover the mortality of nations. Because starting from the piano concerts to the nations this is how we are fighting our mortality you believe that if you're going to die for the nation the nation is going to remember you if you're going to create what Bach or Scriabin has written you're going to stay forever. And suddenly, it's not true anymore. And I do believe this is what really destabilized. It's not simply the number. Of course, the movement of people, the changing of ethnic character of societies. Because the story is why we are society together. By the way, economic differences is making it, again, how we know that we are society. What are the common experiences that we have, which was so typical for the modernity? And also this generational perspective. Michael Ignatieff has a really beautiful piece on this particularly generation to which he belongs and which was kind of a generation being born in peace and basically having all the economic advantages and others, I'm saying this because this is destabilizing. And then the war is an attempt to stabilize because what the South Korean guy believed when he declared the martial law is, you believe that through external threat, you can produce some national unity. And it is not proved. Nowhere, now external threat produce national unity unless, like in the case of Ukraine or Israel, you attack directly. When you attack directly, it's totally different. But Polat, does the war next door produce any type of a national unity? Does it change the level of cooperation between the government and opposition? So there are people here to answer. And in my view, this is a major change. But otherwise, I agree with you. It's not only positive or negative, but you cannot understand this. And this is destabilizing. Why this woman do not want to have kids? By the way, if you're a young man, why they don't want to have kids. And by the way, if you're a young man, why they don't want to have kids from me? Please. And then, no, no, first here. And please introduce yourself. Here, here. Yeah. Ivan, I thought you, to get back to Trump for a minute and to get back to your sense that the election of 2024 marks the end of an epoch that seems right to me and so I'm asking you to cast your mind forward and talk about what is likely to happen if Trump does what he says. Because if he does what he says, it's very hard to see how he makes America great again. That is, there's a contradiction between this desire for change, which you register, that is, the liberal elites are discredited, we need a change of elites, we need a change, we need to do something different. Trump comes in and then disappoints those expectations. Let's not be overconfident about that, but disappointment is really possible if you slap 25% tariffs on everybody, for example. You're heading for real trouble. So I'm asking you to anticipate what happens when a country votes for change and doesn't get change, gets chaos, or what they get is the spectacle of a new elite enriching themselves in grotesque, visible ways. Aren't we then looking at the ever further decay of the political system of the United States and another cycle of rebellion? I mean, where does this go? This is a great question, and as a Bulgarian, probably I can answer it better than Americans. Because this is the experience of many of the countries of what happened. And by the way, we are not comparing. It's totally different. There was a model in 1989. You believe that you know what you want. My idea is that this is a major change. Because regardless of how Trump is going to succeed or fail, we are never going to go back where we were. For me, this is... And here's the most interesting things about Biden's failure, let's put it like this. Biden bet it on normality. Biden said, listen, look at these people. Dan, Americans, we are not like this. They're crazy. We're going back. And he did things which are not trivial. He decided to mobilize things that historically has worked for the United States. He went with a huge spending, basically the Roosevelt type of a state. He tries to use the COVID as kind of an analog to the war to mobilize the idea of solidarity and so on. And the money was spent. And his economic results were not disasters, by the way. There was inflation. But you see the economic growth that now Trump is enjoying is very much built there. But it didn't work. Because in my view, Trump has got something that is a historical cycle in which America stopped to be in love with its own exceptionalism. And this is a major story, because Trump said why we should be better than others. We are fools. We all the time pretend that we are more moral and this and that. We don't need to be better than others. We simply need to be stronger than others. And from this point of view, the idea of greatness is totally divorced of any type of a moral meaning. And secondly, when he was talking to the American voters, his major argument was, I care only about you. Don't trust the other side, because they care about Ukrainians, they care about Palestinians, they care about everybody. When somebody cares about everybody, they don't care about you. And this exclusive nature of solidarity, by the way, not as racist as people normally are portraying. For him, this is the distinctions between citizens and non-citizens. We Americans, so how it's going to affect the world. By the way, it's going to affect it dramatically because, in my view, he's going to do things, but also he's going to do it very fast. Imagine that you're coming with these promised tariffs. I was seeing some calculations that have been done. For Europe, it means the loss of 1.8% of the GDP. For China, 2% of the GDP, but for Canada, 2.5%. It's big. But not simply it is big. But you start preventively doing things. You start basically reacting to this and that. On the other side, he's doing this story with tariffs, not understanding that he is also creating incentives for the Chinese that probably he does not want to create. Because if you're going to tell the Chinese we're not going to buy or we're going to buy on a very high price your products, they still have overcapacity and they should sell this somewhere. And secondly, if they want to get the American market, they should move even more of their production to places where the tariffs are lower. So suddenly you're creating a global political China. You're pushing Chinese to be much more interested also politically in other places. And for Europe, it's going to be, in my view, the most difficult for three reasons. One, we are a very slow animal. And this was part of our strengths, because when you're slow, you're not making many stupidities. It takes time, so you can make several, but not many. But at the same time, he's going to make the world push so hard to respond to his policies that in Europe, in my view, this is going to create a major fragmentation. And now everybody's focused on security. To be honest, I'm less afraid of this. Because European Union is organized in the way that if countries like Poland, Sweden, France, for example, decided to do something serious about Ukraine, this type of countries can start something on their own, and it's not going to be the whole of European Union, but European Union is going to welcome this type of initiative. But on trade, where we have a collective policy, what is going to happen is that everybody is going to push for exception. And then what was a common policy will stop to be a common policy. Because if I'm Hungarian and I'm producing these special things and I have a special relations with Trump, I'm going to say, can you just reduce the tariffs just on this? And this is going to say, can you just reduce the tariffs just on this? And this is going to create, in my view, this type of attentions that I am afraid are going to be very difficult to be done. And my last point, because probably this could be interesting not for most of you because you have read it, but it's also interesting to see to what extent Europe was preconditioned, both on a kind of a free trade vote and America as a liberal empire. Not on American power simply. Because, listen, American power is still there. Probably not as powerful as people believe because power is in the eyes of the consumer. But the story is that, and this is like Yugoslavia in a way was preconditioned on the Cold War status quo, on a certain type of a balance of powers that makes everybody interested of Yugoslavia to succeed in the way it was. So for Europe, finding its place in this new world is going to be more difficult for other countries, which otherwise are in a much more difficult situation, be it economically, be it politically. Thank you. Thomas? Thomas Seifert, European Voices. Ivan, you started off with a fortune teller, right? So I would like to go back to the beginning of your talk. And usually, you paid a fortune teller because right? So I would like to go back to the beginning of your talk. And usually you pay the fortune teller because he tells you nice things. I wouldn't pay him if he tells me I'm dead tomorrow. So let's go dark, right? And let's go there where things can really go wrong. We talked about Trump. Let's talk about a tactical nuclear weapon being used. Let's talk about Putin. Next he does is try Article 5 in I don't know Kaliningrad in Baltic states whatever it is and then a pretty obvious one North Korea mentioned also doesn't look great and I'm sorry to break it to you The bird flu doesn't really look nice at the moment. So this is another unknown unknown that can hit us So I'm wondering how do you deal with this? Let's say on a meta level that the fortune teller is not really a great fortune teller. He has a lot of, you know, dark messages to break to us. And there is only, I want to end it with a joke that Richard Powers, a great novelist, told recently in Munich. He said, you go to the doctor and you are really sick and you ask him, doc, Doc, am I dying? And the doc says, No, not yet. And of course, that's the only right answer, so I just invite you to go a little bit to the dark places more. Helmut Budig, Press Club Concordia. You already brought in China in your last answer. My question is, how does this rupture, or how will this rupture work on Taiwan? On the Taiwan issue, of course, not just Taiwan itself. First, on the story of the good news, bad news, and so on. They're going to be a near, exactly because of this kind of a pace, to be honest, you're not going to be able to distinguish the good news from the bad news. For example, what is happening in Syria? Is it the good news or bad news? No, but it's not a rhetorical question. And my story is that one of the things that I do believe is going to happen is that suddenly, certain things that were perceived as unthinkable are not unthinkable anymore. For example, nuclear. Now, people are talking very much about negotiating with President Putin and so on. And everybody is saying, I have been working with him before. We do not have a clue about who he is now. This is three years of a war. This is a major change. If you have negotiating with Stalin in 1940, do you believe that you know him in 1944? So from this point of view, you have a psychologically totally wrong assumptions because it is a different person. Listen, I have met him several times. I don't believe that person that I have met have anything to do with a person that have asked 700,000 people basically to be destroyed. This is a different time also horizon because the war is changing the idea of what is your mission as a political leader, how you want to be remembered you believe what worked and not and yet China is a very interesting story because before China Russia will perceive very differently because they have a very different time frame put in rightly believe that if he is not going to do something today, tomorrow is going to be more difficult for him. Russia was not a rising power for many reasons, economic and others, so his time horizon was very much kind of as good. Well, Chinese basically believed that for the last 300 years, something very strange happened, which means that the world was not China-centered. And then they believed that the world is coming back to where it always was. So they're going to wait. And when in his first visit to Moscow after the beginning of the war, Chinese president said, we are now witnessing changes that we have not seen in 100 years. I don't believe that the biggest problem in moment like this is to figure out with what kind of time people believe that they are living. While Vikram was playing, I was trying to remember a very famous novel of the 50s, a British novel, which was called Playing Under the Music of Time. I could be wrong with the title, but basically this is it. But suddenly all these people are living in different times. So Merkel famously said to Obama when she talked to Putin after Crimea, he's living in a different time. Okay, he's living in a different time. I don't know exactly where the Chinese live. Chinese can decide to do something about Taiwan because, honestly speaking, they know that Trump is somebody who likes trade wars. But he's not particularly interested in the military stuff. And plus, he does not trust the army. This is the other story. Because during his first term, the only type of institution and elite that stand against him, and he never managed to broke, was the military. So now it's not by accident that he's trying to send a strange guy there. And by the way, it looks strange, but this was the same in 1990s when the first government of the UDF was decided who to go, the major idea was let's send a person who cannot be co-opted by the ministry he is sent. So this guy basically is sent there because he hates the generals. And if you hate the generals, you don't start a war. And in my view, also the other thing that happened into the American elections and people didn't reflect it on was the major shift of the techno-utopians, all these Silicon Valley people. They were not Trump people in 2016. This was the Obama folks. They liked the Democrats. They were progressives. What happened, not with Musk only, and this idea that America is losing, that we're not innovative enough that we cannot save society as a whole and we should save only the best part of it all these people I don't know if you see how many of these people sided with Trump people who really culturally was very different but they're very different people so why and in my view this is why I'm afraid that this combination of technological change, which is going to be speed up because of artificial intelligence, this and that, demography is also pushing you on technological side. If you don't have soldiers, better try to imagine the war in which there are not people. And by the way, the robots don't have mothers, so it's easy to mobilize. And I do believe this is going to make it difficult so China could go. And it could go also because she wants to stay in history. And I'm not that we have friends with Michael who are China specialists, and they said till the end of his term, he wants to do the unification of China, because for him, this is a kind of historical task. And when these people start thinking about history with a capital H, and on the other side, we believe that everything is economy, we're wrong. I have spent, by the way, numerous hours discussing with people who are trying for years to convince me that everything that defines the politics of Putin is his bank account. And my only argument is that only underpaid assistant professor can really believe that the president of a nuclear power can be driven only by his bank account. He can be driven by all idiotic stories of, the very fact that basically you have this kind of a consumer, probably in the first five years when he was still around power and when he built this funny stories with a private strip club in your own apartment. But it's about totally different things. And in my view, impossibility of us to understand people or Musk, they said he's doing this because of his business. Really? $350 billion? And you believe that he's there in order to make it $360 billion? So there is so difficult for us to imagine people who are thinking in a totally different Turk. Some of them could be totally crazy, missionaries, but different. And this is the story. On one level, we don't understand because we believe that people are different, but on the other, we cannot imagine the people who are not this kind of a normal middle class, economy-centered understanding where history is always with small h. Well, speaking of small, oh, okay, one more question. Go ahead. Hi, Leszek Rzeszewski. So I think it would be fitting to perhaps end, or almost end, with the story from the Jonathan Halslack book, The History of the World After 1989. And he tells the story of talking to the foreign minister of South Korea. And he says that he imagines the South Korean minister, the economic and political relationships of the world as a sort of mountain. And he, the South Korea, and China are climbing up the mountain, and they see that the Westerners are having the picnic. And they're very anxious that the others want to reach out to the top and prevent them from reaching the top. So I think our self-image, especially of liberal intellectuals, is of being in the avant-garde revolutionaries, but we are indeed, to use your musical metaphor, perhaps the guys who are trying to press the button pause when the others are pressing fast forward. So my question to you is how our self image will have to change? Dramatically. Dramatically. And listen, this is, first of all we believe that we are very much loved. But this is normal. Listen, this is normal human story. You want to believe that people like you and do this and that and people probably from time to time also liked you. By the way, and after that, you start to be afraid that they like you. Because do you remember, we were so proud that people wanted to come to Europe. And basically, immigration was our soft power. And then you discover that what you really feel is your soft power, because they want to come to you. And then suddenly comes the war, and we are telling them it's time to defend the liberal order, and they said, liberal order? We are not reading science fiction. There is no order, and so on. And we're really kind of very much hurt. And we're saying, you don't have any solidarity. But on the other side, when they start killing Palestinians, Zelensky jumps and go to Netanyahu and said, if I only could do what you are doing, but I don't have the weapons, and so on. So from this point of view, every is particular. These people who are also moralizing on the West, they do not have a universalist perspective. Most of them are going to stay with their own kind of tribal or historical narratives. And this is why one of the things that is, in my view, changing is that not simply that we are going to try to see ourselves differently, but in this world, people are also going to attack the weakest. There is a lot of hypocrisy in many places in the world. I don't believe that Erdogan is less hypocritical than the Americans when he attacks here and there. But then suddenly, why everybody is attacking Europeans? Because we are moralizing, but we do not have the power. And now everybody is going to start using this. This is exactly like with the Biden and the pardon of his son. So Trump appointed all his relatives now on any position. The father of his son-in-law, who happened to be in prison for a while, is going to be the ambassador in Paris. But this is not a scandal because Trump said the family is the family. And then comes others who said, no, no, it's not about the family. It's about the universal values. But I'm going to pardon my son. And Europe is going to be slightly in this position that when we do what others do, it's a scandal. And this is going to be difficult for us to find the language. And this is why I do believe that Trump is very important, because he suddenly said to America, not being great again, we are normal. We're like everybody else. Don't pretend that we're something different. Be stronger. Get the positive trade balance. And this is what really matters. And this is, it's going to be difficult, but it happens in history all the time. And from this point of view, Vienna is a great place to have this conversation, because one of the things that really was, starts staying with me, is that we see this place so well, it's so beautiful, so calm. You remember in 1914 being the most culturally exciting place in the world. Do you know that in the 1920s, there was 1,000 people dying by hunger? At least this is in the history book, in the streets of Vienna. And we're not talking about very poor people, but suddenly the empire was cut, you didn't have enough food, and even the famous coffee shops, most of the people went there simply because they didn't have resources to warm up their houses because basically in a period of two, three, four years, everything changed dramatically. So on one level, you have this idea of the political big change, but we behave as if it has never happened before. And my story is, and this is the positive from the Fortune Tellers, listen, if we look at our life, this is amazing, and we said what kind of things are happening to us, so much history we can consume. Talk to our grandparents what has happened in their life, and they're going to say, come on. Thank you so much. Ivan, just one sentence. We have a lot of overtime, but for us with small age in history, what do you tell us for 2025? Just one sentence. How you tell us for 2025? Just one sentence. How should we prepare for 2025? Read history books with H. Thank you so much. Thank you. Gracias. Vielen Dank. Thank you.