Latest / Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger / National, and International, Struggles

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National, and International, Struggles · Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger

0:01
SPEAKER_01: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Q&A.
0:04
I'm Jay Nordlinger,
0:05
and our guest today is Dalibor Rohatch of the American
0:10
Enterprise Institute.
0:12
SPEAKER_01: This,
0:12
SPEAKER_01: as you know,
0:13
SPEAKER_01: is a right-of-center think tank in Washington,
0:15
SPEAKER_01: D.C.,
0:17
conservative in the Reagan-Thatcher sense more than in the
0:20
Trump-Orban sense.
0:23
SPEAKER_01: Mr. Rohatch is a scholar of what?
0:26
SPEAKER_01: Well,
0:27
SPEAKER_01: of economics,
0:28
SPEAKER_01: politics,
0:29
SPEAKER_01: international relations,
0:31
SPEAKER_01: that sort of thing,
0:32
SPEAKER_01: or those sorts of things.
0:35
SPEAKER_01: Dollyboards, good to see you, and thank you for joining me.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: Jay, thank you so much for having me on.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: As they say, long-time listener, first-time caller.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
0:46
SPEAKER_01: What really are you, sir?
0:48
SPEAKER_01: You may laugh at this,
0:49
SPEAKER_01: but I noticed that your PhD is in political economy,
0:53
SPEAKER_01: and we'll get to your education specifically a little later.
0:57
SPEAKER_01: I have known many people with degrees in political economy, mainly PhDs.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: I think I've asked them all, what is political economy?
1:06
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not sure even now I have a real sure grasp on it.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: I think that's a great question.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: I should probably preface it by saying that first and foremost,
1:17
I tend to introduce myself as the recovering Eastern European
1:21
in Washington.
1:21
So I'm somebody who is trying in my professional capacity to
1:26
explain Europe to America.
1:29
and likewise and more increasingly explain what's happening in
1:33
the United States to
1:34
SPEAKER_00: audiences in Europe.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: I want to stop here for just a second.
1:40
It's interesting you said Eastern European because I have known
1:43
in my life Czechs
1:44
SPEAKER_01: and Slovaks who bristle at the designation Eastern European.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: They say, haven't you ever looked at a map?
1:52
SPEAKER_01: Don't you see that we're Central European?
1:55
So I mean,
1:56
you could make the obvious progress to the west of Berlin and
2:00
Vienna.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: But no, I, frankly, I've found this whole discussion a little ridiculous.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: So there is something called Middle Europa,
2:08
SPEAKER_00: which kind of refers to the sort of German speaking Central Europe.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: I mean, to me, the meaningful distinction
2:17
is between the part of Europe that lived in freedom during the
2:21
Cold War and the
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SPEAKER_00: part of Europe that didn't cross.
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SPEAKER_00: And this sort of semantic fight between,
2:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:27
SPEAKER_00: like how,
2:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
2:29
SPEAKER_00: we in Slovakia are better than the Bulgarians.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's not the debate that I found particularly appealing.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: And so,
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SPEAKER_00: especially coming to the United States,
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SPEAKER_00: I thought that was a very sort of parochial discussion to be had.
2:42
SPEAKER_00: So I sort of embraced my Eastern European-ness.
2:46
SPEAKER_01: so to speak.
2:47
SPEAKER_01: Wonderful.
2:48
SPEAKER_01: So political economy, give me a little.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: Political economy.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: So I'm an economist by training originally.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: As a kid,
2:56
I grew up kind of interested in post-communist transitions and
2:59
questions of
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SPEAKER_00: economic growth,
3:01
SPEAKER_00: economic development.
3:02
became this kind of obnoxious young Austrian economist
3:06
libertarian type kind of
3:08
advocating for free markets and so on and so forth and I
3:11
studied economics in
3:12
various universities become kind of tempted by the prospect of
3:19
an academic career
3:21
but I found it very difficult to kind of commit to a single
3:23
topic the way you would
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SPEAKER_00: have to if you were seeking tenure at a major university I mean I
3:29
SPEAKER_00: didn't find the prospect of just publishing narrowly and say,
3:32
SPEAKER_00: you know,
3:32
SPEAKER_00: labor economics for 15 years,
3:34
SPEAKER_00: kind of,
3:34
SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: very technical papers.
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SPEAKER_00: I didn't find it particularly appealing.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: So I found this department,
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SPEAKER_00: I was living in the UK at the time,
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and there was this new department at King's College London that
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had an eclectic
3:45
SPEAKER_00: bunch of economists,
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SPEAKER_00: political theorists,
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SPEAKER_00: political scientists doing kind of interdisciplinary work.
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SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of kind of
3:55
dialogue across disciplines and that was the place where I
4:00
decided to do my PhD on
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SPEAKER_00: political economy of reforms.
4:06
One way of calling what I did for my PhD would be public choice
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economics,
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SPEAKER_00: trying to think through rational choice
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SPEAKER_00: kind of explanations for why reforms,
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SPEAKER_00: especially pro-market efficiency enhancing reforms,
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SPEAKER_00: were more successful in some countries than in others,
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SPEAKER_00: especially in the post-communist context.
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SPEAKER_00: But I also did some work on what were then the Arab Spring countries,
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SPEAKER_00: these sort of,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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short-lived young democracies that were trying to put their
4:39
economic house in order
4:40
SPEAKER_00: as well as democratize.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, there's an opera called Dalibor, is there not, by Smetana?
4:51
SPEAKER_00: There is, yeah.
4:52
SPEAKER_01: Give me the correct pronunciation of that name.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: Bedřich Smetana?
4:56
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the first name is even harder than the last name.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: Give it to me again.
5:01
SPEAKER_00: Funny accent on the R, which makes it Bedřich.
5:05
SPEAKER_01: Smetana.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: Smetana or Smetana?
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Smetana.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: Got it.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: Have you ever seen that opera, Dalibor, by the way?
5:12
SPEAKER_00: I have not.
5:13
It was staged in New York last summer,
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but it's very rarely staged here,
5:19
or anywhere,
5:20
I think.
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SPEAKER_00: So I don't think I've seen any Smetana in the United States.
5:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I know they do them occasionally,
5:28
SPEAKER_00: but...
5:29
SPEAKER_01: Well,
5:29
SPEAKER_01: you get the bartered bride,
5:30
SPEAKER_01: as we call it.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a staple in the Czech lands as well.
5:37
SPEAKER_01: Are you from a country called Czechoslovakia?
5:41
SPEAKER_00: I like to say that.
5:42
I mean,
5:42
I was born in Bratislava,
5:43
in Slovakia,
5:45
to an overwhelmingly Slovak family.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: But on my mom's side, there are some Czech roots.
5:53
There were lots of Czechs who came to the Slovak side of the
5:57
country in the 1920s,
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SPEAKER_00: when Czechoslovakia emerged as an independent country.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: And so we,
6:06
SPEAKER_00: as a result at home,
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had very mixed feelings about the velvet divorce of 1993 when
6:12
the two countries
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SPEAKER_00: went in somewhat separate,
6:16
SPEAKER_00: somewhat distinct ways.
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SPEAKER_01: And what language did you speak at home?
6:20
SPEAKER_01: Slovak?
6:21
SPEAKER_00: Slovak.
6:22
SPEAKER_01: And in school?
6:23
SPEAKER_01: Slovak.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: Slovak as well.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
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SPEAKER_00: my mom,
6:26
SPEAKER_00: as a kid,
6:27
SPEAKER_00: although growing up in Radislava,
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SPEAKER_00: I spoke mostly Czech until she entered elementary school.
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SPEAKER_00: But, yeah, that... I mean, technically...
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SPEAKER_00: Czechs and Slovaks tend to be bilingual,
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SPEAKER_00: at least being able to kind of understand the other language more or less
6:47
SPEAKER_00: perfectly,
6:47
even though they would sort of speak it with a funny accent or
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not at all.
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SPEAKER_00: I mean,
6:53
you can just sort of speak with the Czech in your respective
6:57
language and you would
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SPEAKER_00: be able to
6:59
SPEAKER_00: perfectly understand each other,
7:00
including all the sort of semantic nuances that exist in the
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two languages just
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SPEAKER_00: because of the exposure,
7:07
of the mutual exposure of the two cultures and publishing and
7:12
films and so on.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: Well,
7:14
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor,
7:15
SPEAKER_01: that fellow on the wall over your right shoulder,
7:19
SPEAKER_01: I shook his hand once,
7:20
SPEAKER_01: I'm happy to say.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: I am so pleased about that.
7:25
SPEAKER_01: Tell us what Vaclav Havel
7:28
SPEAKER_01: meant to you when you were a youth?
7:32
SPEAKER_00: I was six years old when communism collapsed.
7:37
SPEAKER_00: I only saw him once from a distance as a small kid in Bratislava.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: And for me, I mean, he really, I think, epitomized
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SPEAKER_00: both the struggle for freedom and democracy and kind of providing serious
7:58
intellectual answers to the questions of how to live a sort of
8:02
truthful life under
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SPEAKER_00: authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: And he also was, I mean, a real beacon of...
8:12
more leadership and quite effective leadership in the 1990s as
8:16
the president of
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SPEAKER_00: Czechoslovakia and of the Czech Republic.
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I mean,
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he's not a sort of saintly figure by any stretch of the
8:24
imagination.
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SPEAKER_00: I had many flaws.
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SPEAKER_00: If you even read...
8:27
SPEAKER_00: There's a wonderful biography by,
8:29
SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
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SPEAKER_00: our mutual friend,
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SPEAKER_00: Mikhail Zhantovsky,
8:32
SPEAKER_00: who you should have on the podcast as well,
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SPEAKER_00: which kind of describes his personal life,
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SPEAKER_00: his flaws.
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I mean,
8:40
the way he was kind of prone to marital infidelity and so on
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and so forth.
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SPEAKER_00: All that.
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SPEAKER_00: He also, when he arrived in the presidential office.
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SPEAKER_01: Not an atypical playwright.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, keep going.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: when he arrived in the presidential office in 1989,
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SPEAKER_00: I think he was full of naivete about many important questions.
9:05
SPEAKER_00: But the important calls,
9:07
SPEAKER_00: you know,
9:09
SPEAKER_00: he learned quickly and the important calls he made,
9:10
SPEAKER_00: I think,
9:11
SPEAKER_00: were right.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: And then we...
9:13
SPEAKER_00: kind of miss him,
9:14
SPEAKER_00: I think,
9:15
SPEAKER_00: to this day,
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SPEAKER_00: both in Central and Eastern Europe,
9:18
SPEAKER_00: but also in the kind of wider West,
9:22
SPEAKER_00: having this voice that,
9:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
9:25
SPEAKER_00: he never really sort of sought political office actively.
9:29
He always sort of described how absurd it was that he was sort
9:33
of thrown into this
9:34
SPEAKER_00: role in the fall of 1989.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: And he always sort of kept the distance from trappings of power.
9:42
SPEAKER_00: And I find it very appealing at a sort of personal level,
9:44
especially kind of juxtaposed against a president who might
9:50
kind of relish in these
9:52
SPEAKER_00: trappings that we have currently on this side of the Atlantic.
9:55
And I think it would occur to Havel to kind of put golden bling
10:00
on the walls of his office.
10:01
SPEAKER_00: No.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: You know,
10:03
SPEAKER_01: Havel,
10:03
SPEAKER_01: the playwright,
10:04
was such an unlikely president in Czechoslovakia and then the
10:08
Czech Republic.
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SPEAKER_01: And then Lech Wałęsa in Poland was,
10:12
SPEAKER_01: to some of us,
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SPEAKER_01: a rather unlikely president,
10:15
SPEAKER_01: an electrician,
10:16
SPEAKER_01: a labor leader,
10:18
SPEAKER_01: a political prisoner,
10:19
SPEAKER_01: so on and so forth.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: What an interesting period.
10:24
SPEAKER_01: In your view, was the split, the divorce period,
10:28
SPEAKER_01: between... By the way, do you like the term Czechia?
10:32
SPEAKER_01: I can't quite get with it.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
10:34
SPEAKER_00: I don't do Czechia.
10:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't do Myanmar.
10:37
And I also don't do Turkey,
10:39
which is kind of the official name for Turkey.
10:43
SPEAKER_00: No, I'm... Right, right.
10:45
It's mostly conservative in that sense that I don't welcome new
10:48
words into my vocabulary easily.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: Was the split, the divorce correct?
10:54
SPEAKER_01: Was it a right thing?
10:57
I mean,
10:58
I think of it more as of an accident than the sort of earth
11:04
shattering moment.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: It's
11:07
SPEAKER_00: probably made some political calls on the Czech side easier,
11:12
SPEAKER_00: probably made the likelihood of Czech transition,
11:16
SPEAKER_00: more of a successful Czech transition towards market and democracy,
11:20
SPEAKER_00: probably more likely with a sort of more coherent body politic.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to sort of assess the counterfactualism.
11:30
There are some who sort of say that Czechoslovakia was an
11:33
artificial entity from the get-go,
11:35
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure I buy into that.
11:39
I can sort of imagine a sort of state of the world in which
11:42
Yugoslavia would persist.
11:44
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor, let's spend a minute or two on lustration.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: And I know a lot of Russians who say,
11:51
SPEAKER_01: and other people who say,
11:54
SPEAKER_01: the great problem with Russia was there was never an accounting,
11:58
SPEAKER_01: a reckoning for all those decades of communism.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: And the slogan for a while was no witch hunts.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: And dissidents or former dissidents like Sakharov said,
12:12
SPEAKER_01: if we don't have a reckoning now,
12:14
SPEAKER_01: some accountability,
12:16
SPEAKER_01: the witches will come back to hunt us.
12:19
I wonder if you go along with that argument that this was a
12:23
great failure back then
12:25
SPEAKER_01: in Russia in the early 90s.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's an easy call.
12:29
SPEAKER_00: There's a wonderful political scientist of Romanian extraction,
12:34
SPEAKER_00: I believe,
12:34
SPEAKER_00: Lavinia Stan,
12:35
SPEAKER_00: who writes about kind of illustration and transitional justice.
12:40
And the basic kind of trade-off is that if you are seeking
12:45
democratic transition,
12:47
SPEAKER_00: you want the autocratic elites to hand over power easily.
12:53
SPEAKER_00: If you threaten them with
12:56
criminal and legal accountability,
12:58
they might be more reluctant to hand over power.
13:01
And also the obverse of this argument is that the more
13:07
oppressive the regime is,
13:09
the more there is need for some form of transitional justice
13:13
and holding people to
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SPEAKER_00: account,
13:14
SPEAKER_00: possibly even criminally speaking.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: And so different countries kind of fell on different
13:19
part of that spectrum um and i think it sort of shaped politics
13:24
uh going forward so
13:27
so you had like in romania obviously you had to you know you
13:30
had the president who
13:31
SPEAKER_00: sent tanks against protesters and so yeah they shot him and his wife
13:36
SPEAKER_00: and he did all kinds of horrible things.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: In Hungary and Poland,
13:41
you had communist elites that basically kind of negotiated a
13:45
peaceful transfer of
13:46
power even before the fall of the Berlin Wall and they kind of
13:52
integrated into the
13:53
SPEAKER_00: new political system.
13:56
In Czechoslovakia,
13:57
you had a kind of peaceful transfer of power negotiation that
14:00
occurred on the
14:02
very sort of strong public pressure and these sort of general
14:06
strikes that happened.
14:07
And so you had almost like a sweet middle where you had some
14:12
accountability,
14:13
SPEAKER_00: some illustration,
14:14
kind of preventing agents of secret police from running in
14:18
elections and occupying
14:20
SPEAKER_00: positions in the public administration.
14:24
And it kind of neutralized this question of whether the
14:28
transition was sort of
14:28
SPEAKER_00: captured by communist elites.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
14:33
SPEAKER_00: in the former Soviet Union,
14:35
I think the problem was that there was no alternative kind of
14:40
elite to take over,
14:43
SPEAKER_00: right?
14:43
SPEAKER_00: So it was kind of a transition or a democratization that was...
14:47
kind of done by the former upper art chicks and the political
14:52
landscape was
14:53
SPEAKER_00: dominated by former upper art chicks.
14:56
I'm not sure if it was even feasible to do anything else under
15:00
those circumstances.
15:03
SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
15:03
it is an interesting question of how you kind of do these
15:06
things and maybe one that
15:07
will come back in America to the top of the agenda when our
15:13
current national
15:14
SPEAKER_00: nightmare is over.
15:17
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor, something personal.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: What made you come to America?
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Initially, I always looked up to the United States.
15:29
SPEAKER_00: I always liked visiting.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: It was an educational opportunity.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: I first came here to live here in 2006.
15:39
SPEAKER_00: I got into the economics program at George Mason.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: So it was between Charles University and Oxford.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: I spent two years at George Mason.
15:48
SPEAKER_01: I can't remember the dates, Dalibor.
15:51
SPEAKER_01: Were you too late for or on time for James Buchanan?
15:56
SPEAKER_01: You mentioned public choice a while ago.
15:57
SPEAKER_00: So he didn't teach me directly.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: He was around.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: He was at a summer school I was at.
16:04
SPEAKER_00: He was in his kind of late 80s, early 90s.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: But I was in Gordon Tullock's final public choice class.
16:12
SPEAKER_00: And
16:12
my first academic publication on the political economy of the
16:19
Liberum Beto,
16:19
which was the unanimity principle used in the Polish-Lithuanian
16:23
Commonwealth.
16:25
SPEAKER_00: So I wrote it as a paper for his class in 2008,
16:28
published it in a journal called Constitutional Political
16:31
Economy a few months
16:32
SPEAKER_00: later.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: And Gordon gave me a B+.
16:36
SPEAKER_00: I think he was not very impressed with the work.
16:40
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a pretty good grade from him.
16:43
SPEAKER_00: I guess so.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: So keep going about being in America.
16:47
So I came here,
16:48
yeah,
16:49
as part of the kind of libertarian international,
16:53
right?
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Like recruiting young economists and sending them to George Mason.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: Came on a scholarship, loved it.
17:03
And then I was sort of thinking about academic career and maybe
17:06
going back to Europe.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: And also I was already dating my current wife and just sort of
17:14
SPEAKER_00: stumbled on this opportunity to go to Oxford and we did.
17:19
So I was in the UK for a couple of years and then came back in
17:23
2013 to work
17:24
SPEAKER_00: initially at Cato,
17:25
SPEAKER_00: had two very good years at Cato,
17:29
which is a free market think tank in Washington on the same
17:34
street as AEI,
17:36
SPEAKER_00: Massachusetts Avenue,
17:37
SPEAKER_00: and then moved to AEI in 2015.
17:42
Let's go back to Slovakia and the prime minister of that
17:45
country,
17:46
Robert Fico.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
17:50
SPEAKER_01: Fascist with a small F, Democrat with a small D, something else?
17:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't think either of those two terms kind of do him justice.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: He's a...
18:03
SPEAKER_00: He's a sort of pragmatist in the worst possible sense.
18:05
SPEAKER_00: He's a political survivor.
18:06
He's somebody who was doing well and was determined to do well
18:14
under the communist regime.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: Then he reinvented himself as...
18:19
SPEAKER_00: Third way,
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Blair,
18:21
SPEAKER_00: Clinton-style social democrat,
18:24
then adapted himself to sort of becoming a critic of kind of
18:32
neoliberal reforms
18:34
SPEAKER_00: that Slovakia had in the early noughties,
18:37
SPEAKER_00: then became...
18:40
somewhat more sinister figure from my perspective by trying to
18:44
sort of occupy that
18:45
SPEAKER_00: political space on the far right.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: So his party is still called Slovak Social Democracy.
18:54
SPEAKER_00: So he is this sort of hybrid between
18:58
SPEAKER_00: kind of big government,
19:01
redistributionist kind of approach to economic policy and
19:08
obviously being kind of
19:09
this fighter against all things woke and against immigration
19:13
and against the EU.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: He was trying recently to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump.
19:21
SPEAKER_00: He was at Mar-a-Lago.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: Slovakia,
19:23
SPEAKER_00: by the way,
19:24
seems to be entering into a contract with Westinghouse to build
19:29
a big nuclear power
19:32
SPEAKER_00: plant in Slovakia.
19:34
SPEAKER_00: And apparently at Mar-a-Lago, Fico got scared of Trump.
19:38
SPEAKER_00: That was kind of...
19:39
SPEAKER_00: mid-January,
19:42
Trump talked about Maduro and about how they could do the same
19:48
kind of thing
19:49
SPEAKER_00: anywhere in the world.
19:52
SPEAKER_00: And then you saw the story in Politico the week later that he briefed,
19:55
SPEAKER_00: FISA briefed the other European leaders about how crazy Trump was,
19:59
that he kind of had assumed that Trump talks this way only to
20:02
journalists,
20:03
SPEAKER_00: and that's just for show.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: But he was sort of taken aback by the fact that kind of,
20:08
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:08
the sort of Trump you see on through social and in his kind of
20:12
battles with Caitlin
20:15
SPEAKER_00: Collins and so on is,
20:17
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:18
SPEAKER_00: that's the real Trump.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's the Trump.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: There's not a role he's sort of playing.
20:22
SPEAKER_01: And forgive my earlier mispronunciation.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: So the prime minister of Slovakia is Fico, not Fico, right?
20:29
SPEAKER_01: Fico.
20:30
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
20:30
SPEAKER_01: On the model of Vaclav and not Vaclav.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's exactly right.
20:35
SPEAKER_01: I gotcha.
20:36
SPEAKER_01: I gotcha.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: So moving to, I was going to ask you something else.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to ask you this, Dalibor.
20:44
SPEAKER_01: You use the word neoliberal or neoliberalism.
20:48
And I hear it almost every day as a sneer from the left or a
20:53
sneer from the right.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: The left and the right are the same to me in this respect.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: They're always sneering at neoliberalism.
21:00
SPEAKER_01: I have no idea what it is.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: How is it different from liberalism?
21:05
I suppose what this kind of refers to both as a sort of sneer
21:11
and also as a sort of
21:13
neutral word is a sort of policy consensus that existed on the
21:19
center left and
21:20
SPEAKER_00: center right around the question of relying on markets,
21:25
SPEAKER_00: relying on open trade,
21:27
relying on some form of multilateralism to deal with
21:31
international disputes.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: But what's new about it?
21:36
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
21:43
SPEAKER_00: it is different from,
21:45
SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
21:45
the sort of classical liberalism of Adam Smith and Hayek and
21:51
von Mises in the sense
21:52
SPEAKER_00: that it,
21:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
21:53
SPEAKER_00: does...
21:55
SPEAKER_00: assert that the state has a fairly sort of sized role to play.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
22:01
SPEAKER_00: it sort of like,
22:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:02
it sort of refers technically to this kind of policy consensus
22:05
that existed,
22:07
SPEAKER_00: politically speaking,
22:10
SPEAKER_00: between mid-1980s to the Great Recession,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: when it started crumbling away.
22:16
And what I want to say is that consensus existed for very good
22:18
reasons and actually
22:19
SPEAKER_00: kind of delivered very good results.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: So I'm in the camp of those who...
22:23
I mean,
22:23
I take it as a sort of point of pride to be a defender of
22:26
neoliberalism in some sense.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not alone.
22:28
There is a group at the Progressive Policy Institute around
22:32
Jeremiah Johnson,
22:35
SPEAKER_00: the Center for Neoliberalism,
22:37
who kind of try to make the case for what they sort of call
22:43
neoliberalism,
22:43
which would be a sort of embrace of free markets and robust
22:48
social safety nets.
22:49
SPEAKER_00: And I think there is something to it.
22:53
SPEAKER_01: Back to classical liberalism, those Scotsmen, they weren't anarchists.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they believed in government and good government and so on, right?
23:03
SPEAKER_01: So that can't be the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: That is true,
23:09
SPEAKER_00: but a lot of,
23:10
SPEAKER_00: when you think about kind of like the early days of the,
23:13
SPEAKER_00: let's set aside the human Smith,
23:15
SPEAKER_00: because I think we would sort of get- Let's go to Hayek maybe.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Into the weeds,
23:20
but I would argue that a lot of what fueled the Mont Pelerin
23:27
society and the
23:28
generation of Hayek and Mises and also the American
23:31
libertarians was a sense of
23:34
SPEAKER_00: discomfort with the rise of the welfare state.
23:38
A lot of it was sort of reaction to the New Deal liberalism and
23:45
then changes.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: And what I think where sort of neoliberalism,
23:49
SPEAKER_00: I guess,
23:49
departs from that is that it kind of makes peace to some extent
23:53
with the size of a
23:54
SPEAKER_00: social safety net.
23:55
SPEAKER_01: That's very clear.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: That's very clear.
23:58
SPEAKER_01: Let's move next door to the Czech Republic.
24:02
where the president is,
24:05
forgive my pronunciation,
24:06
I'll say in English,
24:07
Peter Pavel.
24:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's close enough.
24:10
SPEAKER_00: Peter Pavel.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: It's a man with two first names, right?
24:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:15
He strikes me as a liberal Democrat with a small L and a small
24:18
D and a man of the West.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: I think he's a former NATO commander.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:23
The prime minister of the country,
24:25
Andrei Babiš,
24:27
he's the Czech Trump,
24:29
isn't he?
24:31
SPEAKER_00: So Babiš is an interesting figure.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: So first of all, he's ethnically Slovak.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: He was born, brought up in Slovakia.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: And he speaks in this kind of like funny,
24:41
SPEAKER_00: unidiomatic,
24:42
SPEAKER_00: accented Czech with lots of kind of Slovak words thrown into it.
24:47
SPEAKER_01: And the voters may have been prime minister.
24:50
It is a testament to kind of the openness and tolerance that
24:54
exists within Czech
24:55
society that they kind of accepted a Slovak prime minister and
24:59
also the leader of
25:01
one of the kind of most noxious anti-immigration parties is
25:07
half Japanese.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: Typical.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: Which also sort of adds an ironic twist to it.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: So Babish...
25:17
SPEAKER_01: Hang on,
25:17
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor,
25:18
SPEAKER_01: on the accent,
25:19
SPEAKER_01: not that I'm comparing Babish with Stalin,
25:22
but I understand that Stalin always spoke Russian with a heavy
25:26
Georgian accent.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: Did he?
25:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I wasn't aware of that.
25:29
SPEAKER_01: It's sort of the apotheosis of Soviet leadership.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: Go right ahead.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: I think in Babish's case, it's just like he can't help himself.
25:36
SPEAKER_00: It's not a sort of pose that he's trying to strike.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: But he, I mean, I wouldn't really kind of...
25:43
SPEAKER_00: present him as a too sinister figure.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: He's somebody who,
25:48
SPEAKER_00: you know,
25:48
SPEAKER_00: he made a lot of money in the 1990s,
25:52
SPEAKER_00: not by being a sort of innovator and a kind of Elon Musk-like figure,
25:59
SPEAKER_00: but by kind of being an insider.
26:02
SPEAKER_00: He was kind of working on foreign trade in the 1980s.
26:05
He was posted as a sort of commercial diplomat on various
26:09
Czechoslovak embassies.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's safe to assert that he was
26:13
working with the communist secret police at the time as other
26:17
people who were in
26:18
SPEAKER_00: those positions were.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: And so in the 1990s,
26:20
SPEAKER_00: he was able to sort of get hold of a bunch of enterprises in agriculture,
26:26
SPEAKER_00: in food processing,
26:29
in chemical plants and build this massive conglomerate that
26:35
made him at some point
26:37
SPEAKER_00: the wealthiest Czech.
26:38
SPEAKER_00: largest private sector employer in the country.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: And he lived comfortably and then I suppose got bored.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: And around 2012, 2013, he decided to enter politics.
26:53
SPEAKER_00: He bought a bunch of newspapers and he created this political party,
26:57
SPEAKER_00: which is still called the Alliance of Dissatisfied Citizens.
27:03
SPEAKER_00: which the acronym is ANO, which stands for yes in Czech.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor, is there a little Berlusconi in him?
27:13
SPEAKER_00: I think he's much more on the spectrum.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: He's not quite as colorful as Berlusconi.
27:17
I think he's kind of an austere man in the way he kind of lives
27:21
and works,
27:23
SPEAKER_00: has a very impressive work,
27:24
SPEAKER_00: I think.
27:24
But that party,
27:25
when it started,
27:25
it was a sort of big catch-all party,
27:29
but it joined...
27:31
the alliance of kind of centuries liberal European parties,
27:35
roughly where Emmanuel Macron was.
27:38
And I think Babis himself kind of looked up to Macron for a
27:41
very long time.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: But he's a Francophile.
27:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure if that's still the case,
27:47
SPEAKER_00: but he used to run,
27:48
SPEAKER_00: own a two Michelin star restaurant in the south of France.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: And he always tried to kind of break into these kind of French circles.
27:58
SPEAKER_00: And then I think over time he sort of realized that
28:01
SPEAKER_00: He'd be better served if he wants to have a casual party,
28:05
he'd be better served by moving and catering to that sort of
28:09
far right and
28:10
SPEAKER_00: anti-immigrant kind of sentiments that existed.
28:15
SPEAKER_00: So he's been kind of moving in that direction.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: You mean the anti-immigrant sentiments?
28:20
the anti-immigrant sentiments and also obviously it's been very
28:25
flaky on Ukraine.
28:29
Czechs overwhelmingly support Ukrainian defense effort and
28:33
President Powell was
28:34
SPEAKER_00: actually instrumental in getting
28:37
setting in motion the the munitions initiative that supplies
28:41
artillery shells to to
28:43
the ukrainians and and so babish has been kind of complaining
28:46
bitterly about it but
28:48
now that he became prime minister again uh he did nothing to
28:51
stop it and does bobby
28:54
SPEAKER_01: tilt toward putin and the kremlin
28:57
SPEAKER_00: I don't, it's a sort of easy shortcut to make.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, again, like he's been very flaky as a supporter of Ukraine.
29:07
He would say,
29:08
oh,
29:08
we want peace and we don't want to be sending money to the
29:12
Ukrainians.
29:13
But I don't think he has kind of explicitly pro-Russian
29:16
positions in the sense that
29:18
that he kind of understands that that you know like prussia is
29:21
an unpleasant and
29:22
dangerous country there are people in his political coalition
29:25
who are much worse
29:26
than him on this that that he sort of welcomed and accepted as
29:30
part of the part of
29:31
SPEAKER_00: the government and these people are now gutting
29:35
SPEAKER_00: some areas of civil service.
29:38
There was a strategic communications department at the foreign
29:41
ministry that got
29:42
SPEAKER_00: completely abolished recently.
29:45
SPEAKER_00: But under the radar,
29:47
SPEAKER_00: I think Babaji is sort of comfortable with kind of,
29:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
29:50
SPEAKER_00: keeping things as they are,
29:52
SPEAKER_00: especially the current assistance to Ukraine kind of relies on
29:58
Czech and Slovak government industry and on funding coming from
30:02
other EU countries
30:03
or from the EU as a whole and that is a sort of net plus for
30:08
him politically he
30:09
doesn't want to talk about it very much but there hasn't been
30:13
kind of substantive
30:14
change in kind of Czech kind of hard power posture and
30:20
assistance to Ukraine and so
30:22
SPEAKER_00: that's
30:23
SPEAKER_00: to me, a piece of good news.
30:25
And I think it sort of puts him in a slightly different
30:28
category from Orban or some
30:30
SPEAKER_00: of the other more extreme figures.
30:33
SPEAKER_00: Even Fito,
30:34
SPEAKER_00: who has been a frequent visitor to Moscow and has kind of...
30:43
SPEAKER_00: So Fito is a real kind of Soviet nostalgist in some sense.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't think Babish is.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor, on Orban in Hungary.
30:56
SPEAKER_01: Do you understand his transition,
30:58
his evolution from the kid who went to Oxford on a Soros
31:03
scholarship and was
31:06
SPEAKER_01: pro-freedom,
31:07
SPEAKER_01: pro-democracy,
31:10
SPEAKER_01: anti-Putin,
31:11
SPEAKER_01: pro-West,
31:14
SPEAKER_01: and now he is what he is.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: Do you know why?
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Is it personal and psychological or is it
31:21
SPEAKER_01: Did he just simply have an ideological change of mind?
31:26
SPEAKER_00: I think the sort of political imperative goes first,
31:32
SPEAKER_00: but I assume that human minds have a great capacity of kind of
31:37
providing justifications and kind of the veneer of kind of
31:42
intellectual and
31:44
SPEAKER_00: ideological kind of justification for what is useful to you politically.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's something that's been sort of going on in his mind.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: So you can go back to the year 2000,
31:53
SPEAKER_00: I think 2001,
31:54
SPEAKER_00: way before my time at AEI,
31:56
SPEAKER_00: but he was a dinner speaker at our annual dinner.
31:59
SPEAKER_00: And you can still find the speech somewhere on the AEI's website.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: And he speaks like this.
32:05
SPEAKER_00: kind of upstanding Atlanticist, praising America, talking about freedom.
32:11
SPEAKER_00: It's, you know, it's a wonderful speech.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I wish I had been there.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: He talks like an AEI fellow.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
32:21
And so the change that happened was...
32:25
And now he's Heritage Foundation at best.
32:28
SPEAKER_00: At best, yeah.
32:31
SPEAKER_00: So what happened is that after 2002,
32:35
he spent two terms in opposition and Hungarian politics was
32:42
already becoming more
32:43
SPEAKER_00: and more polarized.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: In 2006, there was an election.
32:47
That was the legitimacy of which was contested by Orbán's
32:51
party,
32:52
by Fidesz.
32:54
There were public protests,
32:55
you know,
32:56
water cannons used against protesters.
32:59
SPEAKER_00: And the point of contention was that the then prime minister,
33:02
SPEAKER_00: Ferenc Durcan,
33:06
SPEAKER_00: was caught on tape telling...
33:09
uh his party members that that he had been just lying to the
33:13
voters all day every
33:15
day just to win the election and and that was made public and
33:20
and and and and then
33:21
fidesz kind of used that as a sort of argument for why the
33:24
election was kind of
33:25
illegitimate and and and so there was way before january 6 and
33:29
trump um there was
33:32
SPEAKER_00: in hungary kind of a sense kind of the rooted sense that that that
33:38
SPEAKER_00: these peaceful handovers of power might be contested.
33:44
And so he comes with a big mandate in 2010 on the back of the
33:47
financial crisis,
33:48
SPEAKER_00: which had hit Hungary very hard.
33:50
So they had their own currency and they had all the mortgages
33:55
and loans denominated
33:56
SPEAKER_00: for some reason in Swiss francs and foreign currencies.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: And you had a massive kind of financial meltdown in Hungary.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: Many people kind of impoverished from one day to the next.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: So it was a very difficult period for the Hungarians.
34:10
He comes back with this program of economic nationalism and
34:14
kind of national renewal.
34:15
SPEAKER_00: So they had a new constitution adopted.
34:18
SPEAKER_00: He changed the electoral law.
34:23
And he kind of firmly kind of occupied that sort of nationalist
34:28
space and also made
34:29
SPEAKER_00: it much harder for his opponents to compete.
34:32
I mean,
34:33
to some extent,
34:34
his opponents were kind of discredited for a long time.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: And then he's been very sort of apt at seizing the moment,
34:42
SPEAKER_00: whether it's the refugee crisis of 2015.
34:47
During COVID,
34:48
there was a real kind of like push to rule by executive decree.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: There was this sort of hunt against Soros and foreign-funded NGOs.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: And then when it came to Ukraine,
35:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
35:04
SPEAKER_00: he...
35:04
SPEAKER_00: I thought that would be a disaster for him,
35:07
SPEAKER_00: actually.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: There was an election in 2022,
35:09
SPEAKER_00: a few months into the full-scale invasion,
35:13
SPEAKER_00: and he took the firmly pro-Russian side very early on in the conflict.
35:18
SPEAKER_00: And I thought, well, Hungarians can't possibly stand for that.
35:21
SPEAKER_00: But it was actually something he was able to get away with.
35:24
SPEAKER_00: And he's been very consistent on siding with Russia.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: With the exception of Lukashenko in Belarus,
35:33
SPEAKER_01: is he Putin's best friend and warmest ally in Europe?
35:39
SPEAKER_01: Among heads of government.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think Fica would like to sort of occupy that role as well.
35:46
SPEAKER_00: And I think he's genuine in his sympathies towards Moscow.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: But Orban is, I think, a much more sophisticated political person.
35:55
SPEAKER_00: player.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: So he definitely is of great use to Moscow and he,
36:01
SPEAKER_00: you know,
36:01
oftentimes throws a wrench in the works when Europeans feel
36:06
that they are kind of
36:07
SPEAKER_00: nearing consensus on some important decisions.
36:10
So now the EU has kind of tried to,
36:12
has almost had to learn to work around him in various ways.
36:17
So decisions that would have been kind of EU level decisions
36:19
are now taken by kind
36:20
SPEAKER_00: of smaller coalitions of countries.
36:24
SPEAKER_00: But he, I mean, he very much does Moscow's bidding.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: And the question is why,
36:27
SPEAKER_00: whether it's just cheap energy,
36:29
SPEAKER_00: which is what he always wants to talk about.
36:33
SPEAKER_00: And I think there is a kind of ideological project there as well.
36:38
SPEAKER_00: So Hungary used to be a big country.
36:41
SPEAKER_00: It's a small country.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: It was dismembered by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920.
36:47
SPEAKER_00: And there is this sort of
36:49
SPEAKER_00: ongoing trauma among Hungarians,
36:52
SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
36:52
SPEAKER_00: about having Hungarian speakers living outside of Hungary.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: So he's been distributing Hungarian passports,
36:59
SPEAKER_00: Hungarian citizenship to people in neighboring countries,
37:01
SPEAKER_00: including in Slovakia,
37:02
SPEAKER_00: in Romania,
37:03
SPEAKER_00: in Serbia.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: And every year there is a commemoration of the Treaty of Trianon.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: I think it's in the summer.
37:12
He gives these sort of speeches about how we have to rectify
37:16
this historic injustice.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: I would invite people to read his 2020 speech.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: This was during COVID.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: It was the 100th anniversary of the treaty.
37:29
And he basically sort of makes threats to these countries like
37:33
the UK and France,
37:34
which...
37:36
SPEAKER_00: all wanted to be at the funeral of Hungary 100 years ago,
37:39
but now they are in the grips of immigration from their former
37:43
colonies and we
37:45
SPEAKER_00: Hungarians will outlive them all.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's really creepy stuff.
37:49
SPEAKER_00: At the same time,
37:49
SPEAKER_00: Hungary is also nurturing,
37:52
SPEAKER_00: and this is very strange,
37:53
SPEAKER_00: has a very special relationship with Iran that goes on forever.
37:59
SPEAKER_00: for years.
37:59
It's been kind of muted during the first Trump administration,
38:04
came back alive during Biden.
38:06
Hungary is the home to some 4,000 Iranian students studying at
38:12
Hungarian universities.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: And whenever,
38:16
SPEAKER_00: and especially in areas that are not covered by sanctions,
38:19
SPEAKER_00: there's always this sort of push to try to deepen cooperation and trade.
38:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
38:25
the kind of visits by the economy and foreign ministers from
38:29
Iran to Hungary and
38:30
SPEAKER_00: vice versa have been impressively frequent.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: And for Hungarians, there is this sort of sense that...
38:39
that Hungarians are not quite from Europe and that they have
38:41
this sort of special
38:42
SPEAKER_00: relationship with Turkic nations and Persians.
38:46
It's something that sort of goes back to kind of the romantic
38:49
nationalism period
38:50
SPEAKER_00: and got strengthened in the interwar years.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: And there's sort of resonance there,
38:57
SPEAKER_00: which,
38:58
SPEAKER_00: you know,
38:58
SPEAKER_00: again,
38:59
like this is not something that the Hungarians would sort of
39:01
tell the Heritage
39:02
SPEAKER_00: Foundation when they visit,
39:05
SPEAKER_00: but it's there in the background as well.
39:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: Well,
39:08
SPEAKER_01: as you well know,
39:09
a lot of Americans who consider themselves conservatives are in
39:15
love with Orban.
39:17
SPEAKER_01: And
39:18
SPEAKER_01: regard him as a model, maybe their favorite leader, apart from Trump.
39:24
SPEAKER_01: Do you ever try to dissuade them,
39:25
SPEAKER_01: or do you just say,
39:27
SPEAKER_01: c'est la vie,
39:28
SPEAKER_01: as part of the political spectrum?
39:30
I remember a lunch I had in Washington in 2012 or 2013 with a
39:36
former head of an
39:37
SPEAKER_00: influential right-of-center
39:40
SPEAKER_00: think tank in D.C.
39:41
SPEAKER_00: who had already been kind of gravitating towards Orban.
39:47
SPEAKER_00: And at that time in 2012,
39:48
there was some kind of plausible deniability about Orban's real
39:53
project and the
39:55
SPEAKER_00: extent of his incumbent entrenchment.
39:57
And also Orban at the time had all these kind of previous bona
40:00
fides as this Atlanticist.
40:01
SPEAKER_01: Oh, sure.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: Pro-market leader.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: I was quite an admirer.
40:06
SPEAKER_01: We all were.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: And I was trying to warn him, this friend of mine.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: We considered him a kind of child of 1956.
40:12
SPEAKER_01: Right.
40:12
SPEAKER_00: And so I was trying to warn this friend of,
40:17
SPEAKER_00: I suppose you would sort of recognize the name if I said it out,
40:19
SPEAKER_00: but I don't get him in trouble.
40:21
SPEAKER_00: I was trying to kind of disarray him, like, you know, be careful.
40:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, it's not all going well.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: I wrote even a piece for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2011 or 2012,
40:32
SPEAKER_00: warning against Hungary's road to serve them.
40:36
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
40:37
um not many people on the right listened and and in in in a way
40:42
sort of got
40:42
converted to the hungarian cause even before then many of them
40:46
got converted to the
40:47
trump cause and the national conservatism cause well don't
40:50
forget some of them were
40:51
on the orban payroll um that's right that has to make a
40:55
difference dalibor um can
41:00
SPEAKER_01: you explain
41:02
SPEAKER_01: The pro-Putinism,
41:05
SPEAKER_01: the sympathy for Putin and Putin's Russia,
41:10
SPEAKER_01: that many people in the West who regard themselves as nationalists have.
41:15
How is it that people who think of themselves as nationalists
41:19
can be pro-Putin and
41:21
SPEAKER_01: anti-Ukraine,
41:23
SPEAKER_01: given that the Ukrainian cause,
41:25
SPEAKER_01: that Ukrainian fight for survival,
41:28
SPEAKER_01: is the great nationalist cause of the 21st century?
41:34
SPEAKER_00: I was just so weird.
41:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I have a good explanation for that.
41:38
SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, there is a clear kind of cognitive dissonance there.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: They must not be nationalists really.
41:46
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're sort of pro-Russian empire.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: They're just,
41:51
or they hate democracy and liberalism so much that they'd like
41:55
to see independent
41:57
SPEAKER_01: national Ukraine smashed and reabsorbed into an empire,
42:02
SPEAKER_01: I suppose.
42:03
I suppose people convince themselves that really kind of like
42:06
the worst threat to
42:07
SPEAKER_00: our civilization,
42:09
civilization is now a term that kind of pops up in state
42:12
department papers and
42:16
SPEAKER_00: statements that the biggest threat to that is globalism,
42:20
SPEAKER_00: the European Union,
42:21
kind of the erosion of kind of sovereignty by international
42:24
bodies or woke
42:26
SPEAKER_00: ideology,
42:26
SPEAKER_00: if you will.
42:28
And then they're happy to ally themselves with whoever even
42:32
sort of superficially
42:33
SPEAKER_00: pretends to be opposed to those things.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: And Russians have very aptly kind of exploited this kind of
42:44
that exists in Western societies by presenting themselves as
42:49
the alternative to the
42:51
SPEAKER_00: decadent,
42:51
SPEAKER_00: woke,
42:53
SPEAKER_00: globalized West.
42:55
SPEAKER_00: Well,
42:55
SPEAKER_01: you could say even if you hated the EU,
42:59
the members of the constituents of the EU made the EU their
43:03
choice and the Brits
43:04
SPEAKER_01: chose to leave.
43:05
SPEAKER_01: In the USSR, that was a union also of nations whose people had no choice.
43:13
SPEAKER_00: Of course.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
43:14
SPEAKER_00: like,
43:15
if you are a sort of serious Brexitier who was concerned about
43:19
national sovereignty
43:21
in 2016 and thought that what Brussels was doing was an
43:25
unacceptable kind of,
43:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
43:28
SPEAKER_00: put an unacceptable yoke on the UK,
43:34
SPEAKER_00: then you should be up in arms about...
43:37
about about the invasion and many to their credit many brexit
43:39
years are very few
43:41
people in the uk sort of came on on on putin's side in this but
43:46
but it's it's
43:47
obviously a you know yeah countries can freely enter and leave
43:52
the eu um ukraine
43:54
can't kind of tell russians to stop it has to has to fight back
43:59
and and you know
43:59
SPEAKER_00: hundreds of thousands of people have died
44:04
SPEAKER_01: Dalibor Rohatch, and by the way, thank you so much for joining us today.
44:10
SPEAKER_01: Let's end our discussion with the United States.
44:14
You've lived here for some years now,
44:17
and you've seen,
44:18
I gather,
44:19
big changes.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: And I wonder whether you're shocked or whether you have second,
44:25
SPEAKER_01: third,
44:26
SPEAKER_01: fourth thoughts about making your life here.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: What do you think are the prospects for old Uncle Sam?
44:36
SPEAKER_00: I don't think I have a good answer to that question.
44:39
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
44:39
there are people who study American history at AEI and beyond
44:44
AEI who try to
44:47
reassure me that there are these sort of ebbs and flows of kind
44:51
of liberalism and
44:53
SPEAKER_00: illiberalism in US history and we are sort of going through these cycles.
44:57
SPEAKER_00: and will kind of deal with it,
44:59
that the constitutional system and our institutions are kind of
45:02
strong enough to
45:05
SPEAKER_00: kind of absorb these contradictions and move on.
45:07
SPEAKER_00: On the other hand,
45:10
SPEAKER_00: and maybe that's part of me coming from a smaller country,
45:13
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
45:14
SPEAKER_00: I've always liked to look at a sort of comparative perspective.
45:17
SPEAKER_00: And once you sort of see things like this happen in the political system,
45:22
SPEAKER_00: whether it's the kleptocracy,
45:25
SPEAKER_00: the erosion of the role of the legislature,
45:28
the sort of massive kind of executive self-aggrandizement that
45:34
we witness.
45:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's difficult to come back from it.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: And even though,
45:38
SPEAKER_00: you know,
45:39
the autocrat might be defeated or the aspiring autocrat might
45:43
be defeated,
45:44
there is a real kind of lasting damage to the body politic that
45:48
it's kind of
45:48
SPEAKER_00: difficult to come back from.
45:50
SPEAKER_00: Even,
45:50
SPEAKER_00: you know,
45:51
SPEAKER_00: to use another example,
45:52
SPEAKER_00: even if Orban goes in this coming election in April 2026,
46:00
SPEAKER_00: He'll still have, you know, his friends will control all the media.
46:04
SPEAKER_00: He'll still have party loyalists across the public administration.
46:08
It will be very difficult for the new incoming government to
46:12
sort of turn Hungary
46:13
SPEAKER_00: into a successful European democracy.
46:16
And I fear that America will kind of be a lesser country when
46:21
we sort of leave this
46:23
SPEAKER_00: current period and the sort of project of kind of rebuilding will be
46:27
SPEAKER_00: will be difficult.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: At the same time,
46:29
SPEAKER_00: you know,
46:30
SPEAKER_00: that has lots of strengths,
46:33
SPEAKER_00: the internal market,
46:36
SPEAKER_00: the fact that it detracts the best talent from around the world,
46:41
SPEAKER_00: that in a sort of sufficiently long run,
46:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm an optimist.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: But I think,
46:46
SPEAKER_00: you know,
46:47
SPEAKER_00: we might see sort of turbulences for the remains of our lives,
46:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm afraid.
46:53
SPEAKER_01: Ladies and gentlemen,
46:55
we've been listening to Dalibor Rohach of the American
46:58
Enterprise Institute.
47:00
SPEAKER_01: He is D-A-L-I-B-O-R, Dalibor Rohach, R-O-H-A-C.
47:06
SPEAKER_01: There are some diacritical marks in there.
47:10
SPEAKER_01: I'm Jay Nordlinger doing Q&A, Dalibor.
47:13
SPEAKER_01: It was a pleasure and an education, and I thank you so much.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: Jay, thank you so much.
47:18
SPEAKER_01: Till next time, everyone.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: So long.