Latest / Thinking Class / #100 - Philip Cunliffe - Britain After Globalism: Demographics, Identity And The National Interest

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#100 - Philip Cunliffe - Britain After Globalism: Demographics, Identity And The National Interest · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam, and today I'm speaking to Philip Conliffe.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Philip is Associate Professor of International Relations at the University College London, where he researches and teaches on the topics of international order, multinational military intervention, and conflict management.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: He has 20 years of academic experience, having previously worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Kent and a temporary lecturer at the UK's Joint Services Command and Staff College.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Philip obtained his PhD in war studies from King's College London and has also worked as a contributor to the contributor to the Economist Intelligence Unit.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Philip is a prolific author and editor, having published eight books and numerous academic articles and chapters on many aspects of international politics and security.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: His recent books include Taking Control, Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit, authored with George Hoare, Lee Jones, and Peter Ramsey, and Philip is also the author of The National Interest, which has been published in 2025.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, Philip and I think out loud about the importance of politicians and citizenry alike thinking in terms of the national interest, how our political class came to be globally minded with a cosmopolitan ethic and neglectful of the national interest, why the rolling up of the American Empire will force other nations to think in terms of the national interest, whether liberalism and its assumptions undermine and subvert it, whether the conception of the British national interest will undergo change due to the massive demographic change of recent decades, and that is only accelerating, which will see Britain become less than 50% white British by 2050 on current projections.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Why Philip thinks that Britain has the political institutions to forge a new nation that sees people of immigrant heritage give up their diasporic connections and pledge fealty to Britain alone, and natives to give up their internationalist ideals, why John challenges the likelihood of success here, and how Philip came to begrudgingly see that academic freedom could only be protected by the state and not self-policed.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Classmates, I really hope you enjoy this conversation.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Philip really knows his stuff.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: He's got ideas, we had a spirited debate, and I think this is exactly how debate should be conducted.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: It was in uh good faith that we were able to articulate one another's thoughts and to challenge them and to put our counterpoint across in a respectful manner.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: This is the ethos of thinking class, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: As ever, like, subscribe, and follow the show on your podcast platform of choice and YouTube and enjoy the show, classmates.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Philip Keldenlift, welcome to Thinking Class.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, John.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Delighted to be here.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, delighted to have you in my ethereal realm here.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: I I know we were saying before we pressed record, we've followed one another for some time on Twitter, and I've certainly enjoyed your work in the various places that you write, like Unheard and The Critic.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh most recently your book about the national interest, which is what we're going to be talking about today, and I think very um prescient, which I hope the viewers and listeners will recognise when they realize uh just how um important the topic of the national interest is to politics in general uh and and how it's changed over time.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps before we get there, and people aren't just taking my word on who it is you are and what it is you do, perhaps we can start with a brief introduction as to what you and your works about Philip in the academic world and why you chose to write a book on the national interest.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh sure, yeah.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm an associate professor in international relations at the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction at UCL, University College London.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: I've been there since 2022, and before that I was at the University of Kent, um, based in mainly based in Canterbury, it's got a couple of campuses.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And um throughout my academic career, my focus has mainly been on thinking about um international relations theory and on thinking in particular about conflict management and under changing conditions, so particularly with the decline of American power and leadership, how that shapes and changes um the nature of conflict management, which is to say diplomacy, international intervention, mediation, and especially peacekeeping.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_01: So um my um my PhD was on um the changing dynamics of peacekeeping in global order.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So and that's taken me um, you know, I've covered a fair amount of terrain in that time, and that's taken me up to um thinking about in the aftermath of everything that's happened in the last couple of years, but especially since um the election of Donald Trump um and his second administration and his launch of these kind of multiple rounds of his trade war against the world essentially, um with new tariff barriers and trade disputes and so on, and all the ramifications of that in international order.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um this is all pushed to the forward, all of these um developments and everything running up to them is pushed to the forward, uh, thinking about the national interest and it's brought it kind of thrust it forward into my mind.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I suppose, you know, since the especially since the first Trump administration and even more so um Britain's vote to leave the European Union in 2016.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, perhaps before we get into definitions of the national interests and all the rest of it, so we can open the discussion up, picking up on some of the interesting points you made as to how you ended up thinking about this topic.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, as you say, with American power changing and its own uh priorities changing under Trump, which is effectively inverted, upended that rules-based international order as people have have talked about it for all those years since the the thir 1930s uh and 1940s.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um why is it that you thought, right, I'm gonna get into the national interest question?
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Is it because ultimately Trump's actions and just the changing influence of America over the over the last couple of decades is is now forcing countries to start thinking on their own two feet instead of relying upon a rules-based international order to um get their cues from with regards to the actions that states ought to take.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um very much along the lines you indicated that the it's it's not just Trump.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's important stressing that I mean Trump himself is um his populist campaigning in the United States against the globalist compact, you know, accused American elites of having abandoned the national interest effectively in America in preference for global leadership and prioritizing the needs of others over the needs of American citizens.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that, you know, that was consistent um in his campaigning, in his administration, and also the basis on which he won a second term.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So all of that, though, is to say that reflects underlying changes in the distribution of power.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: So um the populist insurrections that we see, of which Trump is the most prominent example, those are reverberations of um deep tectonic shifts in international order, and most dramatically the industrialization of power and the industrial, sorry, the industrialization of China and the shift in power towards East Asia.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: So Trump's policies are expressions of that, and they are forcing other countries to consider um their role in international order in a way, like you say, that they didn't have to before.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: It was could be taken for granted.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so part of the um story of the last 50 years, um, like you say, people talk about the rules-based order, but I think that's a way of disguising um more problematic developments that took place in the in that period.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And what I describe in terms of the shift from the nation-state to the member state over the course, roughly beginning over the middle of the last century.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's to say, so a shift from a political organization or political apparatus, the state that was organized and legitimated and authorized by the people that it claimed to represent, the nation, um, being slowly transformed into a member state, which is to say a state that was defined and authorized by the international networks into which into which it was embedded and integrated.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_01: So states became more defined by their horizontal relationships of international organization, transnational authority, international law, more than their relationship, a vertical relationship that used to exist with their own societies, their own people.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that's obviously as one, you know, as uh a listener or viewer might expect, that also came with an attenuation of the democracy within those nation states in the Western world.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because those states uh disembedded themselves from their own society, they also, those links between their own society and the governing classes, governing elites, and various institutions have ruled, those links um became thinner, weaker, and in some cases snapped entirely.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we've inherited a situation where we have member states that are now being forced to confront a national interest in circumstances in which they fail to represent the nations that they supposedly stand for and are still legally accountable to, even if not politically responsible to.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we have this situation.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, we have uh Trump is certainly thrusting these questions upon all of the countries throughout the world, but thus far we see very little evidence of these countries actually rising to the challenge.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Britain is a very important uh bellwether of this.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's precisely because Britain extracted itself from the European Union back in 2020.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, we have a precocious role in the breakdown of um the of global of globalization and unipolarity.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: We played, we had the honor, I think, in fact, of playing an important role in that process.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, in many ways, we're still a member state rather than a nation state.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: We still have a governing elite and political institutions that are more defined by their orientation outwards than their orientation towards the British people, the British nation.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I suppose you can see evidence w whether it's in that um now infamous Keir Starmer quote about feeling more at home in Davos than Westminster.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I suppose you can see it in the attempt's the wrong word.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, the avoidance of um utilising the new found or the refound, uh rediscovered sovereignty that Brexit had delivered.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we keep on going back to the EU to try to come up with new rules that we can comply with, so we can just have something handed to us and say this is what you need to do.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um would you agree that we are effectively currently governed by a political elite that is trying to avoid political decision making?
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh or would you say that's a cynical take?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, not cynical at all.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think they entirely are.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's very, you know, it's just obvious that um having extracted themselves from the mesh in Brussels, that they find it tremendously difficult to establish a solid basis of rule, to coordinate policies, to come up with internally coherent platforms.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's all because they're simply not, they don't have the linkages with the their own population in a way that would effectively channel or concentrate popular will and allow it to be expressed through the institutions of government.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not only the fact the Labour Party is so weak as a as a political organization.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's true of all of Britain's political parties.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: They're all, whether they're new or old, they're all weak and attenuated in different ways.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the mass parties of yesteryear are long gone.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um but in addition to that, they, you know, the state, the member state, uh divests itself of power.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: It um devolves power downwards to provincial assemblies.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It outsources power to Brussels in the case of European member states or to independent central banks in the case of um the UK, as well as a host of kind of parastatal organizations.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: And so it also doesn't have the actual power to effect particular changes in order to meet popular demands and popular expectations.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we're also dealing with states that willingly restricted themselves by way of avoiding popular accountability.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um that, you know, that is the member state, the state that's integrated into these rigid frameworks that encase them from the outside.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_01: So no, I think they're failing very much like you say.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: We have a political elite that finds it um is used to taking instructions and orders from the outside, is oriented outwardly, and so it's finding it tremendously difficult when they don't have those orders coming in, or they're mixed and confusing, as in the case when you have the leader of the so-called free world saying, you know, you guys are on your own, or you know, we're going to cut deals in our own interest.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to be on the basis of America kind of leading you and um sorting out your problems for you, which has been the pattern for the last 30 to 40 years.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I just add one more thing, which is to say, you know, it's I don't, it's not just the European Union.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um the embedded character of member statehood is also very evident in Britain in the form of Atlanticism, you know, so a reflex cringe to Washington.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so the diffic the difficulty Britain's political elite face, having withdrawn from Brussels, is compounded by the fact that they really struggle to carve out a sense of political purpose that's separate from that of Washington.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the member state is not something which is only the European Union, but it's also the United Nations, it's also NATO, it's also um simply the um instinctive Atlanticism of our governing classes.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So let's think about the arc of how the national interest has changed over time or has been dissolved.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So um I suppose what you've you've uh hinted at there is that what we've and I suppose is to paraphrase your book, in fact might almost be verbatim, is that um a transnational a political transnationalism and a cosmopolitan ethic is effectively where we're at in our political circles here in the West, with the exception of the US, which is just branched out on a different path.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so as you can imagine, if your view is transnational and you're about cosmopolitanism, you're probably not really thinking about the nation state, the national character, uh national interest per se, because you are likely to be, as you've pointed to, be outward focused rather than focusing on the inside.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: So uh maybe you could uh trot us through some of the key events and players over time, maybe even some spikes where the national interest has been something that has been understood and acted upon, but then how we got to this state of being ruled by a a transnational cosmopolitan ethic.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no, it it's uh and you know, happily it's and it's a great question.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: So um in Britain, I suppose we have the we're in the position in which one of the greatest or the most bold and um dramatic statements of national interest was ever uttered by one of our politicians, in fact, which is Lord Palmerston in 1848.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the um renowned British 19th century statesman, and he famously said in 1848, in the midst of all the tumult with the revolutions in Europe, um, and he was under pressure domestically about how far Britain should involve itself in all the turmoil in in uh the European continent, and he said, We have no, you know, we have no permanent allies, no permanent enemies, no permanent um friends.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: We own only our interests are eternal.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is often taken as the um archetypal statement of national interest.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Complete discretion, complete flexibility, no external metric, no external standard, no external regulator or authority will limit or contain what is necessary to seize advantages and to pursue the path which is necessary for maintaining national independence.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um but you get, you know, so you get from Viscount Palmerston saying that in the middle of the 19th century to a hundred years later, when we have a situation in which in with the rise of the member state, um, the replacement of the nation state by the member state, you end up with a situation which is the very much the reverse of that.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: You have states in the Western world, including Britain, that are defined by their um by permanent special relationships, such as the relationship with Washington, by enduring alliance structures that last for decades and are not just um you know pieces of paper.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Organizations like um the European Economic Community, the precursor to the European Union or NATO.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, these are large bureaucratic organizations that are deeply intertwined with um the functioning of domestic apparatuses with government ministries.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: These aren't simply arrangements of mutual convenience, you know, these are effectively outgrowths of domestic political structures where it's almost difficult to see where one begins and the other ends.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the process by which that happens in the book, I tell it in terms of the story of democratic enfranchisement.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the more democratic enfranchisement, the more popular will that you get concentrated in the nation-state, the more difficult this is for political elites, and the more they have to, they seek to retreat from the pressure that can be put on them at the national level.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's precisely in the post-war period in the 50s and 60s, roughly, that you see the idea of the nation um slowly eclipsed in political discourse, and it becomes replaced by the idea of the West or the free world.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: So these become the concepts that are the highest ideals of political order rather than the nation.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's in this period that the national interest slowly begins to fade, and you know, it's a process, it's not an immediate thing, but it's slowly the idea of distinctive national interests which are specific to different countries, and the expectation that Western countries will have different interests slowly begins to fade over this time.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: It becomes locked up in these permanent alliance structures, permanent friends, permanent enemies.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And by the time you get to the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the era of globalization, um, you know, the national interest has effectively faded from view.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: And at that point, the national interest simply becomes something which is the same as everybody else, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because of the era of globalization, the expectation is everybody's interests are the same, more trade, more open markets, more international integration, more privatization.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so there's no need to articulate a separate national interest because everyone's the, you know, all a rising tide lifts all boats, everyone's effectively the same.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: So the national in everyone's national interests are the same.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, any kind of political distinctiveness that might come in different countries is um uh redundant or marginal or so slender that it barely needs you know thinking about, and it will be, you know, kind of worn away in due course through the process of global integration in any case.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: So those would be, yeah, I think those would be three key staging posts in the in the history, would be the shift from the 19th century to the 20th century, um, the recoil from democratic enfranchisement and from popular accountability at the national level, um, the rise of globalization between the say the late 1980s and roughly the 2010s, and where we are at now, where you have um these uh member states that urgently need to carve out a new role for themselves in a world order that is no longer uh that is no longer fitted to the role that they had been accustomed to playing.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thinking about under what conditions a resurgence of thinking about the national interest might take root in.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: As you were talking now and you about how the national interest became subverted, I suppose, with the global integrated market, which then led down to the breaking down of barriers.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, there was lots of things to do with uh pluralism, free trade, egalitarianism, centralization, all the rest of a very Whigish worldview uh that prevailed all those years ago, which George Owers wrote about in a great book called The Rage of Party, showing how the Whig worldview.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: You won out and went to change the change the world is that that liberal conception of the national interest, which I suppose there are people part of the kind of failing regime which you just described, but that are trying to hold on to liberal conceptions of it.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: And they're talking about national renewal and and trying to use the national interest but in the terms that we've just described.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it makes me wonder whether it's even possible to have anything pertaining to the national interest under those conditions, and whether actually the only way you could really have anything with the national interest would be if you recognize that nations are a deep-rooted thing, that you know, people do make places, um, that uh culture is not an abstract thing, but it is the outgrowth of the practices of peoples over time, and that if you're going to treat anyone as commodities, whether it's a people already here, and you're going to effectively fill a country up with newcomers on an economic basis from all four corners of the world, and expect the national interest to somehow um be delivered upon if you even believe in it.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um I just wonder what you think might need to happen for politicians to start thinking about the national interest rather than um always moving towards that Whiggish view of global open markets and you know, we can just continue taking on people and have people moving around, you know, movement of labor all around the world uh without expecting our politics to change over time and thus the national interest to change with it.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't think there is any uh there is, you know, it's sometimes the national interest is mouthed, but it's not really it's not deeply felt, and it's certainly not an embedded part of political life.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And even in the cases of somebody like Trump, you know, it's a very poor um parody, I would say, almost of the national interest.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, America, obviously, because it's since, you know, it's the overwhelmingly the most powerful state in its hemisphere, it's insulated on both sides by our shannic defenses as well as still being the world's richest and most powerful state um despite its relative decline.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, it has this space and insulation with which it can experiment with kind of populist foreign policy of this of the style of Trump.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so most recently, kind of in the news, the it was indicated um, you know, the Canadians ran this advert where they were showing old reels of Ronald Reagan, the Republican president, criticizing tariffs by way of indicating that uh the Trump administration has drifted from its Republican roots and that the Canadians were better exponents of real American ideals than the Trump administration.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: And apparently Trump was so outraged by this that he slapped more tariffs on Canada, and now you know relations with Canada are now bitter again after having seemed to seem to have improved.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's not uh you know, that's not a um impressive kind of uh practice of the national interest uh that indicates somebody that if the national interest is something that's bound up with the personality of a single charismatic leader and it simply rests on his whims, uh that is not a meaningful national interest.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: So even what I'm saying, I suppose, is uh that even in the case of a country like America, where you seem to be having a return to something of a you know, kind of a reassertion of national interest, it's still limited and hemmed in important ways because it's so bound up with populist politics.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_01: So if we're going to have something more meaningful than just that, because I want I would like I think every country would like to avoid that kind of Trumpy vision of national interest politics, effectively personalist politics, then we need political structures, we need new political institutions, you need new forms of political representation, new forms of political accountability, and ultimately new nations.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is really, you know, the uh the story of the last 30 years is that process of um of effectively uh diluting nation states, of um integrating into global institutions was a way of weakening political accountability, weakening political identity in order to weaken political accountability, in order to dilute the power of majoritarian democracy, and in order to reduce people's expectations of what was legitimate to claim from their political leaders.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we need to recreate that.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And my hope is that we can do that with the national interest by in making it a part of public life.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: So something which isn't seen to be the property either of um foreign ministries or bureaucrats or or even charismatic leaders such as Trump, but something which everyone is entitled to discuss and talk about.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Something which people should feel like if they're thinking about what they want, you know, it's my my hope is as a result of um uh the book and um propagating this argument more widely, is that people frame their hopes and aspirations in terms of the national interest.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: And through that process, we can begin putting more pressure on national leaders to be accountable to their nations, to their peoples, and hopefully also help create a process by which we begin to crystallize a new national identity.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: If we, you know, if we think about all the things that anyone might want, whether as an individual or as a group or a community or, you know, kind of um a member of a professional association, if we begin thinking about those things in terms of the national interest, it forces us to relate to other people's needs and interests within the state, within the nation, and helps us, in principle, to start the process of knitting together a new national interest, which is based on um incorporating other people's views, based on accommodating other people's views, but also putting forward our own interests and making other people adjust to our demands and interests, a new a new popular politics built around the nation-state.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: But they'll have to be as a result of the fact that we've lost the old nation-states and we have the political structures of member states, we will need new nations and new political structures to come with them.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen any uh examples uh starting to develop for these uh the the framework for these new national structures as we watch the the the member state world, I suppose, start to to to crumble?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sadly very little.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's some performative, you know.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: So as I gave, there's one kind of striking populist example of it in the States, but that's the national interest as personal whim of uh, you know, Donald Trump.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: So that seems to be an insufficient model, an insufficient solution.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: We see some.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_00: Just for a moment, Philip, on the Trump point, it is a very interesting point you make about that ultimately it sometimes seems like the last person he spoke to has changed his mind for good or ill.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it does seem as though there are quite large parts of his administration who, like Vance, like people that have been brought on, you know, he was a substacker but has become, I think, quite a key part of uh policy.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_00: But uh NS Lyons, who's uh who's done a very good job of charting how um a lot of the things we talked about came into being, but how ultimately we're seeing a return of the strong gods and people want the national interest to be thought about.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it does feel like there's a disconnect between Trump's personal whims, and actually there seems to be quite a few people within his administration that want to actually deliver on that, but actually they have to just play the lip service in some way.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it'll be quite interesting to see how that develops should any of his administration remain behind in future terms.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um but anyway, yes, I I agree.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: I think having a national interest tied up in one person is uh unstable.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, so I mean what I would say is this about Trump with the um I don't so uh you know I know there's this line that he kind of follows the last thing, the last person he talked to.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: I never really bought that, you know, because if you look back from the 1980s, he's always been a tariff man.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um and a lot of his political views seem to have m rel remained more or less the same since the late 1980s in terms of both in terms of rapprochement with Russia trying to end the threat of nuclear war.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_01: The only real difference is that he was most concerned with the um rise of Japan in the late 1980s, and now it's China rather than Japan.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: But it's still the question of uh protecting American industry and protecting American markets from foreign competitors.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's more that so much that he cultivates a person a political leadership which is based around his personal discretion.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, like is the example of his punishing Canada off the back of a stupid advert.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it seems to me like a real national interest and a real, you know, kind of a really responsible leader would have risen above something like that because obviously it's in America's national interest to keep the Canadians on board, and he would have drawn a line under it because it's something that wouldn't wouldn't um affect America's national interest, but it does affect his ego.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the larger question as to whether or not there are deeper elements within the MAGA coalition that might be the anchors for a deeper transformation and a new national interest, like, you know, like you say, we'll have to wait and see.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: I think the problem for them is that so much of that coalition is held together by Trump's personality alone, by his individual leadership, um, and that so much of the authority of the MAGA movement is vested in Trump himself as a leader.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what happens after that?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, whether or not he's able to pass the torch on to an appointed, anointed successor, and also how far that feeds into how far that feeds into American politics.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: The other element of that though also is if the national interest is seen to be something which is the property of the right, then we are no further ahead, really.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, because my hope is what we really need is that both left, right, and liberal center, the old political categories, that they see whatever they want, they see it in terms of something that is internal to the nation, and that the primary constituency and the primary vehicle for whatever changes they might want to see should be the nation, um the people within their states, rather than um, you know, electoral constituencies or uh the global conservative movement or the global left, or you know, I think that is part of the uh problem that we've inherited from the era of globalization.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I would certainly agree.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's no need for it to drop onto, although it has, the the rails of the culture war, which uh uh I think that's going to be the problem, right?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Is that um the political right um is is likely always going to be the one picking up the can on this because it thinks in terms of the nation.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas for as long as the left and increasingly the centre um wants to be focused on transnationalism uh in whichever form they want, is they're never going to move towards a national interest because what they've done is they've said it's a boogeyman that leads to bad things.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it leads to it leads to fascism.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and and I'm probably making a bit of a leap here, but Rory Stewart very recently was on a uh on a TV show where he said, you know, people are looking around um at all of these problems, and there are so many problems besetting the company, and unfortunately the solution they come up with looks a lot like fascism.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: But in reality, let's think about what he's referring to there, right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_00: You've got people who are saying, look, we've had more immigration every year since the Anglo-Saxon period.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we've got at least 200,000 um uh migrants, uh legal migrants that have arrived on boats over, I don't know, say five years or something that are now spread across the country and we see bad news stories every single day.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we have uh many of our cities are now minority majority, so we have white British in the minority.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: Again, it's not a race point, but it's a people are culture, and we do see political sectarianism arising out of uh diasporas that are recently arrived, uh the last 50, 60 years.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think there is anything pertaining to fascism for a bunch of people in the country to go, hang on, is any of this in our national interest?
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, should we start thinking about how to um dissolve those problems?
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_00: So, how is it that we either lead to integration or in the event that can't happen, how do we how do we get rid of that problem because uh the the national interest is not being served?
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: But if you have people in the center saying, anyone who raises an issue with the problems of a highly financialized state that has outsourced all of its industry uh and that is importing lots of people that are um either competing with um other welfare dependents or for uh handouts from the welfare state and the lower ends of the labour market, if you just say fascism, um that means that everyone on the left and centre just thinks any discussion of the national interest is bad.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so how do we get them back in the fold so they can do what you're talking about, Philip, which is come on, let's just have a sensible discussion about whether all those things mentioned by people who, by the way, probably were Labour voters at one point um can actually be seen as legitimate topics for the national interest and not behind some cordon sanitaire.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it's a great question.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think so I think this will be forced upon everyone to a greater or lesser degree, um, in as much as the transformation of global order means that people will have to look to domestic sources of legitimacy and authority to enact what they want.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this is the so I mean I, you know, I agree with a lot of what you said, but in terms of your challenge of how do you, you know, how can you expect the left and the liberals to um be included within a new political nation and to accept the fact that whatever they that their political aspirations need to be rooted through the nation rather than through transnational hopes and transnational and globalist institutions.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think that the that is forced upon us, all of us, including the left and the liberals, by the fact the Americans, the Americans are basically rolling up the empire, or at least withdrawing to, you know, withdrawing the American Empire to their own hemisphere.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: So and as much as Donald Trump has said that it's America first, and we're not, you know, dad isn't going to come to your room and tell you to tidy up or you're not going to get any pocket money, that is over.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that kind of in which we expect political order and political authority to be provided from the outside, that is over.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so the sooner that we all accept that, and especially the left and especially liberals, then we can start thinking about what kind of nation we want, and that we have to accept then certain kinds of compromises, certain kinds of um hard political realities for um all Western states, all of which, with the exception of the US, are middle powers, effectively, in terms of their economic weight and political weight in the global order.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: And they have the potential to be prosperous once again.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: They have the potential to be technologically dynamic, wealthy, um, and also bastions of liberty and democracy.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but that is contingent on them accepting a new role in the world and being willing to defend their interests rather than outsourcing it to America.
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I I suppose if that hostility towards Trump can be turned to a, you know, their kind of um, you know, because at the moment I think a lot of people on the left they hate Trump as if they lived in America.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and British leftists hate Trump as if not my president is almost their slogan.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's true, he's not your president, you know, because he isn't he isn't the British Prime Minister.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: So this attitude of uh still thinking that we live in the free world and he's the leader of the free world, right?
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is that has to end.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then instead of thinking in terms of living in the free world where dad tells you what to do, and you can be an angry teenager or a obedient teenager, that is over.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you might you might have the hope of living in a free nation, right?
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_01: But it's something you have to build for yourself because nobody is going to do it for you.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose, I mean, this is, you know, you've uh you've put a you've put a significant challenge to me and I'm stretch I'm stretching here, but I hope at least, you know, that perhaps there is some hope in that anti-Trump hostility that it can be bent towards national purposes if people accept that there's nobody going to come in to sort their problems out for them.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: Neither Brussels nor Washington things have to be done domestically.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: But I, you know, and I would just to add to, I mean, I think that's also a serious problem for the right.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the instinctive Atlanticism, you know, if you look at, say, the politics of reform, um the foreign policies of reform, it seems to be, you know, very kind of uh deferential and um viscerally kind of connected to NATO.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so that Atlanticism and with it the cringe towards external political authority, I think, might be buried there.
• 40:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um but also I you know it requires more than just um restoration.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't have any uh I don't have any pat answers about culture, but I would think, I do think that I think culture will follow politics.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: So if we restore national political systems, national political institutions, I think culture will organize itself and flow in those channels and organize itself around these new institutions.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, without, and hopefully that's a more organic um way for that development to take place without requiring kind of heavy-handed state involvement in culture in order to try and uh engineer kind of particular uh particular outcomes.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think you're right.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think uh we can do lots of theorizing about potential scenarios in the future, but actually there are flashpoints um which are typically uh set and trained by those who actually have power and influence.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_00: And in this respect, America effectively being the global hegemon up until uh well and still is to it to a certain degree, uh, and certainly have its own sphere of influence, has, as you say, decided this isn't the game we're playing anymore.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're off to go and play our own game over here, sort yourselves out, is we can pretend that game's still being played for some time, but in the end, when you realize that either drawbridges are being pulled up or there's there are there is uh your balance of payments are uh are going up, and you realize, oh, hang on a second.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: I know we're 70 years into a project which has seen us deindustrialize or change the population rapidly and all the rest of it, but there are certain things we're gonna have to start undoing here if we're going to remain coherent or become coherent once more and have some sense of actually caring about the flourishing of our own people rather than abstract ideals of um international cooperation, which uh the opportunities to be able to engage in are being wrapped up uh as we speak.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um, I think what's interesting are that there are definitely some people within the left and the centre and the right that have already started to spot that this game is up.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think um one of them, and he's I think probably always ends up becoming people's favourite politician when they learn of him, William Cleuston of the SDP, you know, he's a a man who describes himself as a a left conservative and very much considers um uh party policy with regards to national interest.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I suppose you've got people working for the likes of Robert Jenrick, like Sam Bidwell, who uh on policy on various things is thinking about what the national interest is.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: And whilst you've mentioned reform, who um I know one of the big criticisms of Farage is ultimately he's like the final throw of whatever the previous system was in its early stages.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he's actually more of an establishment figure than you think he is.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's trying to get away from recent insanities, um, but he's still very much that kind of boomer liberal, is you um have people like Danny Kruger, who definitely is thinking about policy in the national interest.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, and and and one more point, I suppose, within Labour, even though it has been absolutely crowded out for well, since the rise of Blair, really, you've got the Blue Labour movement, Maurice Klassman, Paul Embury, these are all national interest guys.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: They they they come across the whole spectrum.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_00: But all of these people um have to s to one degree or another been um diminished or um at least kept to one side.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I think what we're seeing is the influence of these ideas growing and growing.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because the reality is starting to dawn on everyone that you can't actually avoid this for much longer.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I hope I certainly hope you're right.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I do take I do take some heart from some of the phenom you know, some of the individuals and phenomena that you've pointed to.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that is uh you know, some of that is heartening.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: I have my reservations about all of them um to one degree or another, um either in respect of specific specific uh political points of disagreement or uh my lack of belief or my uh well, my disbelief that they have the capacity to enact what they say.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I guess we'll wait and see.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: But what I the main thing I would add to it is that I it's really vital, I think, that it's not something which is restricted to uh certain political elites or tendencies.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really important, I think, that ordinary people begin to um put their political hopes in terms of the national interest, or whatever political aspirations they have in terms of the national interest.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: And that would be my plea, I suppose, to anyone listening or any viewers would be whatever they would like to see, whatever they hope for, that if they framed it in terms of the national interest, that it would be a that it would be a boost to their claims, but also a boost to what all of us, because we would all have a more productive political debate if we refracted our aspirations through, folded it through the idea or the prism of the national interest, because the nation is the jurisdiction within which we have the most scope for exercising political agency, you know.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: So this is kind of a chalet, because I'm as as we said at the beginning, I'm a university lecturer.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the big debate on campus is obviously Gaza, Israel.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and what I notice in those debates among students and academics is the national interest is never raised.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, so the people who are pro-Palestine, they never make the case in terms of the national interest for why we should support Palestine or Gaza.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's always made in terms of our obligations under humanitarian law to um prevent a moral atrocity of genocide, um, that we're uh, or indeed even in terms of sectarian terms of Islamic solidarity.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: On the other side, the people who um are pro-Israel, they make often their claims in cultural terms, you know, kind of defending an outpost of Western civilization, striking back against fanatical terrorism, or defending liberal democracy, um, and that uh we're allied with the Israelis and therefore we should carry on supporting them.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: And again, it's those are kind of autopilot style arguments.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: They're not arguments that are expressly framed in terms of the national interest.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope the national interest is not just something which is uh which we see something which is just for people, you know, like William Clewston or Robert Gendrick or Danny Krueger, um, however supportive or admiring we might be of their individual ideas, it's gotta be something if it's good if it's gonna win, and if we're going to collectively improve our stance as a nation, it's gotta be something which ordinary people run with.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh I don't think we can ever avoid getting into the talk of immigration, so I apologize in advance.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that there are some commentators.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: I I've I heard Lionel Lionel Shriver say recently she went to meet Peter Pogosian and they said, Look, let's have a conversation, but I I don't want to talk about immigration, and then they couldn't help it.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the reality is, is there's just so much of it.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh as in, there is a lot of immigration and has been for a long time, and um it is changed, it is changing the country.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh the reason why I bring it up is when we're talking about the national interest, clearly nations are rooted in people, in ideas, in cultural and political norms.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think what we can see, for example, if we look in what's happened in the last couple of weeks uh here in the United Kingdom, so in London recently, there was um a planned uh march by uh UKIP, the kind of rump of what remains of UKIP under a uh a new leader, Nick Ten Coney, uh, that was going to go through Tower Hamlets, which is a very heavily Bengali Muslim area.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: And effectively they were banned from doing it.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: And what you saw on the streets instead was you had anti-fascist protesters, so uh lots of people who would be aligned with the political left, I would say broadly white and middle class, and on the other side you had uh lots of masked up uh black hoodie wearing um Bengali Muslims waving Bangladeshi flags and talking about this being our area.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um now the reason why I bring this up is if you look at demographic projections for the country, uh I think it has recently been said that by 2050 the English will be a minority in England, so there'll be fewer than 50% English people, which is down from say 97% in 1960 or something.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_00: So a huge change.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: And if a nation is and it's its its future is going to be defined by its people, the whole thing, demographics of destiny, and you know that those Bengali Muslims at Tower Hamlets are going to have different political views, different cultural norms, all the rest of it, and you could apply that to any of the big diasperate areas, if we're moving towards a minority-majority future, um could could we argue that the national interest on that timeline is going to change depending on who's coming to power?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we have five Bro Gaussa independents in the parliament and they are talking about airports in Mirpur, or they're talking about cousin marriage, or they're talking about banning Israeli fans from Aston Villa games, we can see that that is distinctly different from whatever conception of the national interest we've had for Britain in the past.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose where do you see it again?
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've mentioned a whole bunch of people from probably the kind of typical places you'd expect in British politics, but actually none of them from the future demographics of the country.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_00: So what does the national interest look like under that scenario?
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: And could you make the argument that going in that direction is very much against the national interest?
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: I would say that the so certainly the um you know the social and demographic makeup of the country is changing.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um but that seems to me to be, but though, you know, the irrespective of um where migration was, um, Britain would be and look a very different place in 2050, regardless.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I suppose what I see as the challenge is what we need to do is to build a new nation, and that requires political integration.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_01: So nations are also the artifacts of um political structures and political institutions.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the closest really that Britain has had to a nation-state, and uh here I'm following the um historian David Edgerton, that's the era really between uh the interwar period, the 1920s, up until the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: And there you have the most compact era of Britain as a nation.
• 51:32
  SPEAKER_01: And before that, really the idea of um Britain is much more of a kind of a globalist imperial idea associated with free trade, associated with global Anglicanism and various Protestant denominations, associated with the empire.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so it's this much more it's this much more kind of diffuse identity.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I think identities have changed over time, but uh the idea of a nation and the idea of having a nation-state, that is something which appears and disappears at different points in Britain's history.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_01: And we have an opportunity, I think, to recreate it now, but it requires it requires a willingness to build a new nation, which is to say to incorporate, to cut away these diasporic and transnational identifications, you know, which are not which are not um not uh specific just to um Britain's ethnic um minorities or Bengali Muslims.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think the greatest proponents, in fact, of uh this kind of transnational identification is the white middle class left with Palestine or the Europe with their support for the European Union.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: So all of that has to be broken.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um all of that kind of transnational identification and diasporic politics, including political loyal diasporic political loyalties of um of various kind of migrant populations.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think all of that is it's legitimate to expect that within a functioning democracy that people's primary political identification and loyalty is with the nation where they reside.
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a process of political integration.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, notwithstanding the um cultural changes and demographic changes, and also, you know, like you, I was very um disturbed to see the confidence with which you had um these sinister, um sinister-looking marchers marching through the East End um denouncing Zionists in terms that would have made Oswald Moseley happy in from the 1930s, the same place where he was chased out of back in the 1930s.
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um we have, I think, uh three advantages which are political and which we need to make use of.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: And those are we have, and still just about have them in Britain.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_01: We have the old constitution, which is to say the common law as a system of legislation.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: We have parliamentary sovereignty and supremacy, the concentration of political power in um this omnicompetent legislature, and we also have a multinational union, uh the nation at least of a very successful and enduring national union, at least on this island, between the Welsh, the Scottish, and the English.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And those are three political advantages that so far have served as well.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it's not just, you know, they're hemmed in in various ways by our membership, continued membership of the ECHR, by the Human Rights Act, by the Supreme Court, the efforts to Americanize our national system.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_01: But notwithstanding that, we still have those three powerful engines of political integration and polit potentially political power, and we should use them in order to build a new kind of nation, a nation that will certainly look different and have uh people from different parts of the world, but that will create um something new, uh, a new people and a new nation.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: So those that seems to me to be um that we have advantages that our peers in Europe do not, um, by virtue of the fact of being outside of the European Union and those political institutions that I mentioned.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I would say um, and this in fact goes back to our earlier debate about liberalism, that nations are we need to they're primarily political.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think, you know, I leave it to others to talk about national culture.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I'm a political scientist, so perhaps by virtue of my um profession, I'm most interested in those questions.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: But it seems to me that if we think of the nation in political terms, then we have certain advantages and certain ways by which we can meet the challenges that you've outlined.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I hope so.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I would say I would I'd probably temper that with political integration.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: All of what you've described there sounds like it would be obviously a good thing.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think there would have to be some serious power behind it, because I suppose what you're talking about is whilst it might be easier for us to get our heads around, because being from a four, five hundred-year liberal project where things are certainly a bit more malleable, is we are talking about diasporic cultures who are from a very different background, who have their own um folk cultures, uh, their own religious cultures, culture comes downstream from religion, um, their own legal practices.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we also have the technological uh kind of advancements which have led to anyone being able to be connected to anyone anywhere on the planet and to sit and watch things all in their own language, all the rest of it, and to care about politics back home.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we're talking about the forging of a new nation and we're talking about people having to give up something, well, I think that a challenge you'll get from the political right is well, is this not just more of hard multiculturalism where so much has had to be given up by the host population up until now?
• 57:16
  SPEAKER_00: But then the other challenge you'll get is but some people are so rooted in their identity that effectively what we're calling upon here is, and this is me coming up with an analogy that might not be great, but if we think about Alfred the Great and the defeat of the Danes, and then the forging of or what went on to become England, which was okay, right, Saxon or Dane, forget about it.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're all English all under the same flag.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, what happened were the Danes depaganized, became Christian, and then stopped with getting all their pals over to loot and pillage and all the rest of it.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_00: So what chances do we think there are of the dios diaspora throughout the country actually going, do you know what?
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to live in South Hall and see it as a Hindu Indian area, or I'm I'm totally um comfortable being here in Tower Hamlets and just giving up all of those particular um um points because I guess the the the the advantage you say we have of being in a very uh on an island in which we've had the Scots, the Welsh and the English learn to live together, that did come with a lot of uh bloodshed over the years, a lot of political manoeuvring, and we're talking about 1500 years of learning to live together, and this is all you know, throw everyone into a pot and see how it goes.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: So um I I'm with you, Philip.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: I want I want those things to happen.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: I would like some kind of peace and I'd like us to learn to live in peace and prosperity like the British peoples did, but I'm just wondering how impossible or how likely that's going to be that people are gonna willingly slough off some of these things and forget about the those other elements.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because what are we gonna ask people to give up?
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um is the question, I suppose.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um you're you know, I I I agree with a lot of what you said.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I suppose the and the elf the example of Elfra the Great is Germane in as much as the uh despite uh you know, despite I think the some uh common misconceptions about um English political history, one of the strengths of English political history and it's a vitality that's still felt in, like I said, the common law and the supremacy of parliament, is just how deeply rooted a central state is in English history, and that stems right from that period of the formation of an early English state under Alfred the Great.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that capacity to use um centralized political authority as a way of integration, that seems to me to be deeply rooted, and that gives me, you know, some that gives me some kind of measure of hope.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not, and I take your points about the challenges that would be put to me, to the case I've put forward, I'm not advocating a hard multiculturalism.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_01: So if we understand multiculturalism um politically, it's a very conscious rather than culturally, you know.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_01: I don't mean multiculturalism in terms of having a menu of different um styles of cuisine, you know, for your tape, for your delivery order, you know, I mean everybody likes that.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not I'm not talking about kind of social multiculturalism.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: But multiculturalism in political terms was very specifically an effort to dilute the power of electoral majoritarianism.
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: And to that extent, you know, it was wasn't um, you know, the pop the majority population in Britain was wide British, and therefore that required kind of cultural delegitimization.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: But, you know, it's not specifically any more it's that was its intent.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: Its intent was anti-democratic.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: So, and politically, that's what multiculturalism is about.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's about saying that uh electoral democracy, mass democracy is dangerous because it threatens minorities, and it's a way of holding the majority in check.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: You're you need to restrain yourselves, you know, you don't matter so much.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: You need to think of other people's needs, the human rights of distant strangers in um foreign places, but also the vulnerable here.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a way for political elites to strengthen themselves and for bureaucratic um elites to um play, divide, and rule, you know, more easily.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it's also worth, you know, pointing out that that's also something which is deeply, unfortunately, deeply embedded in British political history, and that's the legacy of the empire.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's the way, you know, there's Churchill's famous line, um, hug the Hindu to harm the sorry, hug the Muslim to harm the Hindu, the rule for how they ruled India.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: So that kind of sectarian politics of divide and rule comes very easily to a globalist um oriented um political elite.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: And this is now the kind of the policies that they effectively use to rule the to rule the metropole.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: The they're treating the old metropole of the empire as if it was a province.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the kind of the last sorry act of the British Empire in a way.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: So that's what we have to try and overcome.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so what I'm advocating is political monoculturalism.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not um any variety of multiculturalism, and that requires hard political integration.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I think you know those diasporic identifications can be broken up, partly because a lot of them thrive in the uh in the shade of the middle class transnationalism, the liberal transnationalism that we already talked about.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the affinity of what the um of white liberals for Palestine, for um climate change, for Afghanistan, for Iraq, whatever the cause de jour is, you know, um and that I think if that is rolled in, it'll be much harder for other groups to claim diasporic identification.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_01: But also I think, you know, it can we just have a very if we're willing to have these kinds of open discussions and conversations, then all of Britain's peoples, including those who have like um uh diasporic connections um and family connections around the world, you know, and many many people do, uh including myself, you know.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like if you look around the world, then you can say, well, you know, where am I gonna put my where am I gonna put my um where am I gonna put my hopes?
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because the thing that we talked about before about the Americans backing off, you know, that applies everywhere.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, um they're not going to uh come to the rescue of the Kurds, they're not going to come to the rescue of um even the Israelis, you know.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: Trump is kind of distancing himself from Israel in a way that is remarkable and striking.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they're not going to come to the rescue of your kind of vulnerable, your particular um identitarian cause bound up with ethnic conflicts in a remote part of the world.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so when you've got Trump and China and Vladimir Putin, you know, where are you gonna, are you gonna vent it in like um, you know, some kind of United Nations um agency campaign?
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna vest your hopes in the US Agency for International Development that was rolled up?
• 1:04:25
  SPEAKER_01: Are you going to prioritize issues abroad, or are you can you be persuaded to pitch in to the place where you live and the jurisdiction that you share under a common authority with other people?
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and that seems to me to be the offer.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that does mean losing things, right?
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that has to be accepted, you know, the kind of the connections abroad.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, if you want to carry on watching, you know, kind of news channels um from back home in your own language and you know, whatever.
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, what that's that's part of global communications, that's something to be embraced and not to be afraid of, I think.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_01: But political loyalties to be rooted through um the state of which you're a citizen, if you are a citizen indeed, you know, um, and political loyalties to be focused in that area and to focus to identify as a national of this particular state, um, that needs to be created.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that seems to me, like I say, given that the same processes affecting everyone's judgment would also impact on these diasporic identities.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_01: And you've got to decide, you know, are you gonna stay with some kind of um ancient ethnic cause that's kind of stretched out across many different countries now and held together by WhatsApp messages and Telegram or whatever?
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_01: Or are you going to pitch in with a the possibility of a free, prosperous country in the case of Britain that has nuclear weapons?
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's got to be the option that's put before people, and I think that will help to focus people's minds.
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Philip.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I really appreciate you taking the time to get into those ideas of what a new nature would look like and how people might become a part of it, because I think uh not many people try to articulate that as far as I can tell.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that is uh that's definitely credit to you.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um I appreciate I've taken a whole bunch of your time already, but what I would like to ask you is the question that I ask all of my guests who come on the show, which is what have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 1:06:32
  SPEAKER_00: It might have been something big, it might have been something more day-to-day, and what was it that made you think differently?
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: Why was it significant?
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a great question, and uh I've you know tried to think about it and to come up with an answer, and it's not easy because obviously it's very easy to it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you've always, you know, you've never changed your mind, and you know, it's hard for people to admit that they've made mistakes or that they've changed their mind.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um I would say, so I think I my concern with uh maximizing uh the possibility for self-rule, maximizing freedom and self-government, those have long, you know, that's long been my primary concern and or my primary uh political kind of hope.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_01: The ways in which you get to that, I've changed my mind about, but the underlying idea has stayed the same.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_01: The person, the big personal Rubicon for me, so in answer to your question, a big personal Rubicon for me was um my belief that the academy, uh the professoriate and the university sector would be able to course-correct without external intervention.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I clung to this libertarian view for a long time, this hope, desperate hope, increasingly desperate hope, that academic freedom was something that would, that academics would come round to seeing to be in their professional interest in preserving their institutional autonomy, their ability to have intellectual, could cultivate intellectual diversity and differences of views, and that it would be possible to impose this upon them because it was within their interest to do so.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so, but you know, after years of attending kind of very thinly, thinly attended academic freedom panels, signing lots of crappy petitions with, you know, maybe a hundred or so um signatories defending this or that cause of academic freedom and free speech on campus, and then especially through um lockdown and seeing how many academics supported um online teaching in place of teaching in the classroom, it brought me to the sad conclusion that there was no possibility of the academy correcting itself from the inside through an organic transformation and that it would require external intervention from the state.
• 1:08:52
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a very important uh change in my view uh was the acceptance of the need for state involvement in uh institutions that historically have been very jealously protective of their independence and whose freedom was an important component of civil society and its separateness from the state.
• 1:09:12
  SPEAKER_01: But with the most recent uh from the last Tory government, the um Petosa legislation, the higher protection of academic freedom and higher education, which fortunately the Labour government, this Labour government has just about kept going, uh, that I've been um, you know, that's something which I was uh came to initially re regretfully kind of accept with heavy heart, and but slowly see that because it was a necessity it had to be embraced and taken further.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: I see those so that is that was that's was a big personal change in my thinking, the acceptance of state involvement in the academy in order to bring about necessary changes to safeguard uh academic freedom because the sector was incapable of sustaining it itself.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh w w would you describe your political views as being broadly aligned to something approximating libertarianism and then a kind of begrudging acceptance of of of state uh intervention where required, or uh a mile from out there?
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean my uh I was in my youthful kind of days as a university student, um certainly I skewed libertarian in many of my instinctual responses.
• 1:10:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was never particularly uh consistent or dogmatic as and my instincts are certainly bl um, I would say, uh pro-liberty in you know, anything meaningful that I could think of in terms of civil liberty, political restrictions on speech, political speech, whatever it might be.
• 1:10:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, generally my instincts skew in that direction.
• 1:10:49
  SPEAKER_01: What I appreciated more recently, I suppose, is the and this, and it shouldn't come as such as a surprise, but I suppose it did, given the fact that we're in England, was the fact that liberty uh has emerged through uh accepting the necessity for centralized authority and political representation.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's the lesson of classical uh liberal, the liberal social contract, the ideas of Hobbes and Locke and um their subsequent uh followers was this idea that liberty is meaningful in a condition of civil society in which there is security provided by a central authority.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I think what I I was my libertarianism, such as it was, was partly also a result of missing that dimension of it because I lived in the American, you know, in a province of the American Empire.
• 1:11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I missed the the idea of liberty as something libertarian, which is just so, you know, kind of do whatever you want as long as you don't harm anyone.
• 1:11:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's all you need to think about, really.
• 1:11:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um that was, I think, also kind of a uh luxury, kind of luxury belief that was a product of growing up in the in going living through the heyday of the American Empire.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_01: And now that we're past that peak, uh it's pressed upon me the idea that I need to remember that liberty is something that is bound up with sovereignty, um, and in this case the sovereignty of the national state of which I'm a citizen.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that has helped to focus my mind in terms of thinking more uh discriminatingly and more um thinking harder, I suppose, about how that needs to be won and defended rather than just imagining that it's um something cultural or something which is about striking a pose or you know, like that.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Fascinating.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh I I I think Socrates said something like life's mission is to know thyself well.
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: You you seem to be you seem to be passing the test, Philip.
• 1:12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um Philip, before I let you go, you've written about the national interest.
• 1:12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps you can tell everyone where they can find that and also where they can find you in the dark corners of the internet and whether we can expect anything else coming out from you in the near to mid-future.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, thank you.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, John.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, as you mentioned, the book was released in July here in the UK.
• 1:13:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's just been released this month, October, in the US.
• 1:13:15
  SPEAKER_01: The National Interest Politics After Globalization.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's published with Polity Press, available from the Polity website, but also Amazon and all the major um bookshops as usual.
• 1:13:24
  SPEAKER_01: You can easily find it online.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_01: My I can be found on X at the Philippics, um, and the same handle on other um social media platforms.
• 1:13:34
  SPEAKER_01: What I'm working on at the moment is thinking about the, as I mentioned, um, how managing conflict works out in the aftermath of American unipolarity, but also trying to think through what political freedom looks like under multipolarity.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's my next big project.
• 1:13:50
  SPEAKER_01: So those are some of the strands growing out of these this most recent project, national interest.
• 1:13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I look forward to seeing the fruits of th those labours, and I hope that I can invite you back on the show to talk about them when they when they come to fruition, if I'm going to carry that metaphor on to the the very end.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to.
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's been great, and I I genuinely appreciate you putting me um posing me hard questions and challenges about these questions of nation building and political integration.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you, Philip.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate you engaging with it and also from putting things in front of me that I hadn't thought of before.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_00: So uh let's uh let's keep keep that good spirited debate going in the future and keep fighting the good fight.