The Future of Europe with Niall Ferguson | L'Echo New Year's Event

so ladies and gentlemen it is a true honor and a great pleasure for me to introduce you to neil

ferguson

mr

ferguson

welcome to our

event

the word is yours thank you very much johan I am almost relieved that astrid is not playing an introductory song for me, especially after your reference to my past enthusiasm for punk rock, I was asked what music I would like Astrid to play after I had finished my comments and at first I thought of Schubert's Winterreise because it seems that Europe is in the middle of a long winter journey, which is far away to finish, but as you will see, when it concludes in about 20 minutes, that is not the music that I suggested because I want to end what I have to say on an optimistic note.

What we are going to try to do is establish the

future

of Europe in a global perspective and, in particular, establish the impact of the covert '19 pandemic in Europe in a global perspective. This is a huge challenge because it amounts to writing the story before the

event

ends. The pandemic didn't end more than a

year

ago, when I first wrote about it just after the world economic forum in Davos, I noted that a global pandemic was certainly on the way and one of the first lessons history has for teachers about the Global pandemics are coming. in waves they do not end in a matter of months but extend over more than a

year

and that meant that knowing the great pandemics of the past gave me as a historian a certain advantage over other commentators who work in different disciplines, because of what has happened a year since I first foresaw a global pandemic and where are we?

According to estimates we have so far, 2.2 million people have died worldwide, but the impact of the disease has varied greatly from country to country. In fact, Belgium has been greatly affected if you calculate deaths per million. Belgium has been hit harder than almost any other country in the world. Only Gibraltar and San Marino have a higher proportion of deaths. I didn't need you to tell me that in the first wave in the spring of last year. was hit harder than almost any other country, including the UK and the US, and Belgium had another very serious cover-up experience in the autumn, although mortality figures have greatly improved since November, it seemed that the US was handling the much worse pandemic. than Europe in the middle of the 2020 period, but in fact, when looking at the fall events, Europe ended up catching up in terms of mortality and the United States, in fact, when thinking about this story in terms of waves, we can see that the third wave in the United States has peaked, but we can't completely rule out a fourth wave for reasons I'll talk about in a moment.

The third wave in the United States is not the worst wave in terms of excess mortality, it is in many ways the best. measure to try to calculate the impact of a pandemic, but in almost every other metric the third wave has been the worst, so I think those people in Europe in the summer who disparaged the American performance and took pride in the success of the Europeans . The measures spoke too soon, failing to understand the way pandemics arrive in waves and underestimating the big risks for Europe that loomed in the autumn, especially when attempts were made to reopen economies, restart higher education, etc., before they were spread the epidemic. the virus has been controlled the vaccination race is still at a very early stage, although of course we got to effective vaccines very quickly, much faster than vaccines have been developed in recent years, but if we look at the performance of Europe in this regard.

Of course, one will be deeply disappointed at this point, as one undoubtedly knows that Israel is far ahead in terms of the proportion of people who have received at least one dose of a covert 19 vaccine. Israeli number has exceeded 30 percent, in the United States. The United Arab Emirates are in third place with something like 24 percent, in third place is the United Kingdom, which has already received one dose of vaccine, ten percent of the population, then comes Bahrain, then comes the United States , Europe is far behind if you look at it. Looking at it country by country, or on the EU data as a whole, the number of doses per 100 people for the EU when I checked the Bloomberg tracker yesterday is a little over two percent compared to, as I mentioned, something in the neighborhood of eight. uh percent for the United States and ten percent for the United Kingdom as the vaccination takes place, we can foresee with some clarity what is coming in the coming months will still be deadly for many people and then depending on the country in which that is found, We will see an improvement perhaps starting in late February or in March, as the vaccination thresholds are surpassed and we get closer to something like herd immunity with the vaccine and natural immunity, there will be a sharp decline in mortality, will probably happen in the UK sooner.

It happens in the US and it will happen in the US before it happens in Europe, but we can see, due to the success of vaccine research and development, an end in sight to this catastrophe. John McCain, whom I once advised, used to joke that it was always darkest before it turned completely black, but in fact it is darkest in this case before dawn. I think it will be surprising to you and to Americans how quickly we went from a very gloomy winter of high mortality and still large-scale hospitalization to a much brighter summer, we need to look closely at what is happening in the United Kingdom, where, as I mentioned, vaccination is ahead of Europe and we also need to watch Israel closely because in both countries there is a race between vaccination and new strains of the virus. sars cave ii, particularly the b117 strain, which seems likely to be significantly more infectious wherever it appears than previous strains at this time.

I think the race is being won with vaccination in both countries, but what I can't tell you for sure is what happens if b117 spreads rapidly in the United States? A fourth wave of infection in the United States cannot be ruled out at this time, even as vaccination is gaining momentum now, for the sake of brevity I am not going to dwell deeply on it. The economic consequences of the pandemic have been dramatic, but mainly due to the way Western governments used lockdowns to try to limit the spread of the virus after the first containment strategies failed, the only thing I would say is that it is quite clear.

Lockdowns would not have been necessary if it had been understood, as the South Koreans and Taiwanese did, that early action, large-scale testing, contact tracing, and isolation of suspected infections could, in fact, prevent the spread altogether. spread of the virus. Deaths from hidden causes in Taiwan are still ongoing. Western governments resorted to single-digit lockdowns when all such options had been bypassed. Instead, I want to focus on the political and geopolitical consequences of the pandemic. Let me focus first on the United States. I want to make it clear that the

future

of Europe cannot be understood apart from what is happening in the United States and also what is happening in China, and I think many Europeans are still baffled trying to figure out what happened to American policy not only in the last month but in the last four. years and a half, what exactly should we make of an assault on the capital by an angry pro-Trump mob exhorted to march on the legislature by the then-president himself?

Some surprising features in some of the polls that followed the events of January. On the 6th, no fewer than 45 Republicans said they approved of the assault on the capital, although another poll put the number considerably closer to 18, leaving me unsure how deep support ran for this extraordinary attempted insurrection. Polls agree that a significant proportion perhaps as much as 70 percent of Republicans do not trust the results of the 2020 election, so one could well conclude, like many Europeans, that American politics is in a catastrophic situation, regardless of the fact that Joe Biden won the election and was sworn in as president.

Trump may be out of office, but Trumpism doesn't seem likely to go away anytime soon. Trump ended his presidency unpopularly, but it's worth noting that he is not the most unpopular president in modern American history. Both Harry Truman and Richard Nixon ended their presidencies even more unpopular than Donald Trump. At the end of your article, the other point I draw your attention to is that Congress is also deeply unpopular and has become increasingly unpopular since the 1980s and this hostility toward Congress is part of, I think, the peculiar pathology of Trumpism that Europeans now have. I find them very optimistic about the Biden administration in general, they hate Trump and are relieved to see Barack Obama's vice president now in the top job.

What I want to do is tell you briefly about six events that could derail the Biden administration and disappoint you. As a result, many Europeans, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, back in the 1950s and early 1960s, Hal Macmillan was once asked what his biggest problem was as Prime Minister and he replied: "Events, dear boy, "Let me tell you some of the events I have experienced." one historian anticipates that it will come quickly enough to spoil the enthusiasm that has greeted the first days of the biden administration one of them is the virus itself at the age of 78 joe biden is the age that ronald reagan was at the end of his presidency and even without a The pandemic would have, according to social security actuarial tables, a five percent probability of dying within a year of taking office as president and then we must add to that the risk posed by the virus itself, which of course it has disproportionately affected men in their 70s. and older, let's not rule out that we could be talking about the Harris administration much sooner than I think most people assume.

The second thing that could alter the trajectory of the Biden administration is immigration. It's already clear due to a series of executive orders relaxing immigration rules. that there will be a new wave of interest from south of the border, particularly from Central America and into the United States, especially since Joe Biden is talking about a path to citizenship for all illegal immigrants. The third event, I think, is already a very disturbing feature. of American life is the huge increase in homicides from violent crimes that we have seen since the summer protests that occurred following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this summer.

These increases in homicides are truly dramatic. Homicide numbers are up 74 in Seattle, to give you just one example. The fourth issue that I think will emerge very soon is the large scale of debt that the United States has accumulated as a result of the pandemic and will continue to accumulate under the presidency. Biden's plans and the trajectory of the federal debt undoubtedly have an alarming dimension. We're already above where the federal debt was at the end of World War II, and we could see that ratio to gross domestic product double between now and mid-century. century on current policies, at least, the combination of fiscal and monetary expansion almost certainly means a weaker dollar in the coming months and it is not even clear whether the federal reserve and the US treasury will care a weaker dollar.

Event five takes me to China, the rise of China. Eh, in many ways it explains Donald Trump's accession to power. It was his willingness to change policy on China that was one of the winners of the vote in 2016. China is on track to catch up with the United States in terms of gross domestic product, perhaps as soon as possible. As in 2030 or at least the early 2030s, China, which was the point of origin of the pandemic, is also the only economy of any size that managed to grow in 2020 and looks set to lead the recovery in 2021, the challenge China is the biggest geopolitical challenge. the biden administration faces off and you will have been surprised, I think if you've been following, by the continuity that seems likely between the trump administration and the biden administration yes, I said continuity, not everything Donald Trump did is being repudiated by Joe Biden In particular, Trump's tough stance on China seems likely to continue judging from everything I've heard so far from Tony Blinken, the new secretary of state, Jake Sullivan, the new national security adviser, and Kurt Campbell. , the so-called tsar of Asia. the national security council let me conclude my comments with some reflections on

europe

in a world that I would characterize as dominated by the second cold war, by a struggle for economic, technological and strategic dominance between the united states and the people's republic of china.

Remember that in the first cold warThere were many countries, including India and Yugoslavia, that wanted to be non-aligned and did not want to take sides in the cold war. Well, judging by opinion polls, it seems to me that many Europeans would like to be non-aligned in the Second Cold War. Polls conducted in European countries suggest a strong and widespread belief that the United States political system is broken . A really large proportion of Europeans agree with the proposition that it is totally or partially broken. Second, there is a staggering amount of support across European nations for neutrality in the event of a disagreement between the United States and China. 66 percent of Germans say they would like their country to remain neutral in the event of a dispute between the United States and China, and therefore the future of Europe that seems to attract us is quite surprising: being a non-aligned power during the Second Cold War, while the First Cold War was in many ways a transatlantic phenomenon with Berlin as flashpoint number one.

The Second Cold War is a transpacific phenomenon. The conflict and Taiwan will probably be one of the key points of tension in that sense, Europe is less strategically important than in the Cold War and that may explain this preference for non-alignment that we see. Among many voters, let me conclude with a final observation , as Johan mentioned in his nice introduction. I was someone who voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum, not because I am passionately attached to European institutions, but because I suspected that Britain's divorce from Europe would take much longer and cost much more than I expected. people were affirming on the Leave side of the debate, but when that vote came my attitude was to admit defeat and get on with the realities of Brexit.

It seems to me that we see it more clearly now. While Brexit has had some clear benefits for a year now, if anything could have confirmed the wisdom of Britain's decision to leave the European Union, it has surely been the fiasco of EU vaccination coordination that has become in an absolute debacle, I must say It seems to me that the slowness with which EU authorities acted in procuring vaccines from manufacturers was a classic example of the kind of cumbersome bureaucracy that many Brexiteers have criticized about Europe for many years and success, compared to the high level of Great Britain. -The rapid vaccination program suggests that getting divorced may have some benefits after all, even if it may take a long time and cost a lot more than you thought.

Well, now I have reached the end of the time available for my comments and all I have to do is ask Astrid Stockman to play me a song Astrid I have tried to paint the future as realistically as possible but you will have noticed that I started with a short and painful winter trip a trainer for winter i want to end with an evocation of what summer will probably be like for most of us, at least in the northern hemisphere, when summer comes, this Astrid is the song that I hope we all sing regardless of whether we are in

europe

, uk or united states, happy days are here again, happy days of joy again, happy days, who can doubt it now, so let's tell the world now, happy days, it's always good to end on a positive note, thank you astrid, you are very, very Really talented now another talented woman is Isabel Albers as editor-at-large of Ted Liko.

She is absolutely skilled at journalism and will ask Neil Ferguson a few more questions. Isabel ours. She talks to Neil about all these different topics. Good evening, Neil, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We've only got 20 minutes to discuss some of your issues, Neil, so let's get right to the heart of the matter regarding the pandemic. It is not over yet. You proved it, but when a disaster like this happens, we should be better prepared than before. You still say and it seems like we are getting worse, not better in handling these disasters, what do you call it the politics of catastrophe?

How is it possible, Isabel, that is the subtitle of my new book that will come out in May with the title? Condemning the politics of catastrophe and what I have tried to do is put our disaster in historical perspective by looking at the history of disaster in general, all types of disasters, including earthquakes, including wars, and the conclusion that I have reached is that Western democracies despite being aware of the risk of a pandemic despite multiple warnings not only from Bill Gates but from many experts, were woefully unprepared when reality hit compared to countries like Taiwan and South Korea in East Asia, which had learned the lessons of SARS. and mars, so I think the simple answer is not just that we had poor leadership;

It's easy to criticize donald trump and boris johnson, for example, but also that our public health bureaucracies, the experts who really should have seen this coming and better prepared for it, let us down and I think the fact that Belgium and the United Kingdom have had very similar experiences it gives you an idea that we can not only blame the populist leaders for what happened because Belgium did not have a populist leader during this crisis, yes we did not have a leader at that time but about this pandemic and Vaccination When we look at the European Commission we see that they have enormous difficulties in facing the big pharmaceutical companies Astrazeneca You said in your speech that it was a debacle.

What does that say about Europe and European countries? commission, yes, I don't want to be too critical because the decision-making around vaccination was difficult, it was being done at very high speed, that's why the Trump administration called its intensive vaccination program breakneck speed and required decisions that involved risks . That is, governments had to commit to purchasing vaccines before they knew if they worked and before they knew if there were significant risks associated with them. The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom assumed the risk. European bureaucrats were much more risk-averse and therefore important purchases were delayed for several months and that is the main reason for the delay.

I would add another thing, what we see here is the importance of subsidiarity. European integration should not be European centralization, but too often that has been the And I think if you look back at the successive crises that the European Union has fought, the financial crisis, then the migration crisis and now This crisis, one is forced to conclude that things have gone wrong due to bad decisions in the central government. for the big uh or the biggest countries in the eu it's not that I'm celebrating Brexit, I still think that ultimately Britain will be the poorest for having left the European Union in 10 years, but what I do celebrate It is proof that decentralization of decision-making is actually preferable and that is an important lesson that we should all learn from this crisis.

It is one reason why we should not idolize the Chinese system, as some people are trying to do so. China's highly centralized system was the reason this pandemic started in the first place because when it started, over a year ago, the centralized communist party system tried to hide the extent of the danger that China and the pandemic posed. You said in one of your articles that the pandemic is for China very similar to what Chernobyl was. Russia, but if we take a look at the economic dashboard we see that China is functioning again while Europe, for example, is still suffering a lot.

So why do you say a Chernobyl moment for China? Well, it's actually a disaster worse than Chernobyl by far. not many people died as a result of chernobyl and almost no one died outside the soviet union even though the radiation spread throughout europe, in contrast, as i mentioned, we are seeing two million deaths worldwide due to covet 19 and I think that if the communist party had been honest and transparent in December and early January at the beginning of this crisis, that number would have been much lower so in fact it is a worse disaster than Chernobyl now it is true that the Chinese economy is in much better shape shape the Soviet economy was in the late 1980s, on the other hand, the damage this has caused to China's reputation around the world is truly remarkable.

I didn't mention it in my talk, but European attitudes towards China have become much more negative in the last 12 months - that's the other side of this story. I spoke about European non-alignment. I believe that the generation of political leaders in Europe who wanted a good relationship with China, like Angela Merkel, will soon leave the stage and their successes. We will be much more aggressive and skeptical towards China, so I think it is similar in terms of reputational damage abroad. What we don't know, Isabel, is how deep the internal damage to China has been. We know that the Communist Party has complete control of the country.

Chinese population through a surveillance system that even George Orwell would have considered surprising, but deep down there are problems: the Chinese economy is not going to be able to grow as quickly as in the past due to demographic and financial headwinds and I don't think I'm convinced that the system that we see today in China is going to last as long as most people assume that I think it is much weaker, partly because of this centralization that I mentioned, partly because it is a genuinely repressive totalitarian regime and, therefore , the analogy with Chernobyl. It's a bit like that, it took four years, wasn't it from Chernobyl to the collapse of the Soviet Union?

I would imagine that in a time period maybe closer to 10 years, major issues arose about China's stability and that's a black swan that most people don't give any consideration to today, okay, thank you and in In our audience there are a lot of people asking questions about China and the relationship with Europe and the United States and, more particularly, about Big Tech, and I guess I propose that we listen to two of our CEOs. From Swaziland from Malexis and Guillen Bhutan from Proximous want to ask you a question as a high-tech company based in Europe but serving global clients, half of which are in Asia.

I am interested in understanding niels ferguson's view on how the eu can play to its strengths better than today so as not to be squeezed in the tech cold war between china and the us mr ferguson how do you think europe and the european champions play a role important in a global digital scene? Well, the questions are clear, thank you for these two Excellent questions. I think the key to understanding Europe's power is that it is a regulatory superpower but not really a technological superpower. Big tech companies are overwhelmingly American or Chinese and that's because the Chinese were able to build their own versions of American big tech companies.

Behind their big firewall they essentially used methods that Europe couldn't use to compete with the United States, but Europe has regulatory power and it's very important because both American and Chinese big tech companies need to be regulated and from what I can see, They are not going to be regulated by the US Congress because the American political class, for reasons there is no time to analyze, is not really serious about curbing the power of Silicon Valley, the Chinese problems, the opposite problem, large technology companies. In China they are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, so what Europe needs to do is create or help create a global regulatory framework that significantly protects individual users, their privacy, protects their data and limits the power of these corporations too much. powerful.

The real blow that What happened in the United States on January 6 of this year was the blow of big technology companies against Donald Trump, not that a desperate populist mob that stormed the capital and the fact that Donald Trump could be canceled even when he was still president by a handful. from CEOs mark zuckerberg jack dorsey jeff bezos that is an extraordinarily dangerous situation not only for the united states but for all democracies, so I think this must be the key, but what is needed is to establish global digital standards in the second question: I think it is difficult, I don't see how Europe can easily compete at the software level because it simply cannot achieve the economies of scale that are seen in the United States and China, but in the hardware field I think Europe is still an important contender and one day we will all look back and wonder why with the advantage it had in companies like nokia and erickson europe it didn't compete better with china with huawei in the deployment of 5g networks I will leave it there for the For the sake of brevity, okay , thank you very much, um, let's quickly go to the new president joe biden, the new era of joe biden, you say, well, it will be more or less the same, he has another style, decency is back, but you hope that the events, my dear boy, they happen. determine whether he will succeed or not, but what aboutyour economic policy?

When we looked at the first week, it seemed to emphasize that America First is only as strong as Donald Trump made it. Will there be a difference? Well, as I mentioned, the obvious continuity so far is uh in the China policy, but closely related to it is the first element of the United States and, in fact, the element of fair trade in what Biden campaigned on and is going to do. The willingness to buy America is already part of the series of executive orders we have seen since the inauguration. and I think it's a reminder that as much as they hate Donald Trump and as much as Europeans in general hate Donald Trump, he did change the direction of American policy fundamentally on China and on trade, and that's not something that the Biden administration is going to change.

In fact, I don't think the Biden administration is going to be able to turn back the clock to the Obama years in many ways. In fact, what we will see are two important things. First, they learned from the Obama era, that if to get the economy going again after a crisis it is necessary to increase a lot in terms of fiscal support and they are going to do it, and I think they may even go overboard, because I don't think this crisis will be Like the financial crisis, the economy is actually going. To emerge from the pandemic strong by the summer of this year, additional fiscal stimulus may be superfluous, but that is the lesson learned from the Obama years.

The second point to note is that the Democratic Party has moved a lot towards the Left since Barack Obama was president and that leftist element personified by Alexandria Carzio Cortés will have to be appeased by Biden on multiple issues if you look at the first 17 executive orders, six of them were on immigration and two of them really sparked identity. The policy concerns transgender rights, for example, so the Biden administration is going to be quite woke in terms of the way it addresses issues of identity and, indeed, gender, and I think that already It is quite disturbing from a conservative point of view to see how much Biden and his people have accepted notions of social justice and racial equity that, in fact, if looked closely, turn out to involve discrimination against white Americans.

Well, let's go back to Europe also about this new Joe Biden. Era, I have a question from Ilham Kadri, CEO of the chemical company Solver Neil. The transatlantic link has been essential for the European Union. The military and economic support of the United States has been key to the European integration process. However, this link has been greatly weakened under President Trump, but also under President Obama, given that the new priorities of the United States now seem to be in Asia, how would you assess the need for the United States to review the transatlantic relationship? in the context of the growing Sino-American rivalry and how could Europe position itself?

In this, that's a big question again, I think in terms of mood music and atmosphere, things will be much better with Joe Biden as president and, indeed, Tony Blinken as secretary of state than when it was Trump and Pompeo who ran them. Europeans had to do. deal, so you can expect all kinds of good speeches from both sides about the importance of the transatlantic relationship, but behind the good speeches I think there will be ongoing problems, after all Trump was basically right that Europeans don't pay enough For their security relative to the United States within the NATO structure, American presidents have been arguing that almost since the 1970s, so that issue is not about to go away.

I think the second issue that is not about to go away really has to do with China. and that's why I emphasize this issue of non-alignment, if Europeans and European leaders want to somehow be neutral in a cold war between the US and China, then I think the transatlantic relationship will soon come under strain because I don't think Joe Biden and his team are going to stop asking Europeans not to use Huawei hardware, they're not going to stop pressuring the Chinese government on a number of human rights issues, in fact I think they will do it a lot. more than what the Trump administration did, so I think Once we get past the speeches that will certainly happen in Davos and in Munich, the speeches that will be given when Joe Biden visits his European counterparts on key substantive issues, in particular security and the China issue, I don't think the transatlantic.

The relationship is actually going to improve enormously, it will only be the background music that improves and, in response to your final point, what can Europe do about it? My view is that Europe ultimately has no choice if we are in the Second Cold War and I believe that. Isn't it possible that he will side with China if it decides to pursue Taiwan's autonomy or continues to militarize southern China? So, uh, so this idea of ​​a non-aligned Europe I think is an illusion and when Angela Merkel leaves the stage, I hope that a new generation of independent German and European politicians will see that ultimately the transatlantic relationship really matters and has For it to be meaningful, it can't just be speeches, okay, thank you very much for your ideas.

Our time is almost up, but before we conclude let me ask a more personal question. I heard you say it's darkest before the dawn, but those happy days. They will return, what will you do the day we regain our freedom? What will you do personally? What do you long for? Well, I'm originally from the UK. I was born in Glasgow, as mentioned I have three grown-up children living in England. and my mother who lives just outside Oxford and what I can't wait to do is be able to fly to the UK and see them in particular.

I really want to go to a pub somewhere in my favorite part of London, Highgate. with my children and maybe also with my grandmother if we can get along and I'm going to order a pint of uh best uh bitter uh and razor uh until the fact that uh it's over, that's what I'm waiting for and I'm sure that you have a similar fantasy related to beer, after all, you are Belgian, that is true and I wish you a very good flight back to your mother, your children and that pint of beer. Thank you very much for this inspiring keynote and these questions and Ladies and gentlemen, I very much hope that we will meet again in real life next year, thank you.