The EU Is Cracking

0:00The podcast today comes from a bar in Brussels, L 'Amour Subit, and we are contemplating the European Union, the World Cup, the fusion of Visigoths and Romans, and trying to put some shape on the economic, social,

0:16David McWilliams: cultural, and political angst that we see manifesting itself in elections all over European Union. So that's it. It's the European Union through the lens of the bottom of a glass of shime.

0:33Hi, this is Jonathan Fields, host of The Good Life Project. What if your home could welcome you at the door, energize your kitchen, and calm your bedroom all automatically? With Pura's family of smart diffusers, you can scent every space perfectly. Choose premium, clean fragrances, adjust the intensity, and set schedules right from your phone. It's whole home scenting designed for the way you live. Build your Pure system today at pure.com slash wholehome.

1:27Granger, for the ones who get it done.

1:34To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast.

1:46David McWilliams: How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And the podcast today is all going to be about the future of Europe. Now, you know, we are doing our World Cup special. But one of the interesting aspects that came up from Simon Cooper's discussion the other day was that ultimately, the next few World Cups will be about where the rising powers in football, but not just in football, in geopolitics are. In the sense that up until recently, the World Cup was largely a European, or what I would call a proto-European affair, if you describe the football playing countries of Latin America as being in effect part of the European sphere of influence, the Argentinians, the Brazilians, the Mexicans, the Colombians, kind of a proto-European civilization over there.

2:39David McWilliams: But as the world's axis shifts, and it shifts towards Asia, each World Cup will probably be defined by the up-and-coming team. Is it Korea? Is it Japan? Is it one of the African nations? Is it the Asian nations, or at least is it the Arab nations that have the money, the Qatar's, the Saudi Arabia's, because don't forget the next World Cup's going to be in Saudi Arabia, was in Qatar. This is all about the shift in global power. So we're going to look at Europe through the lens of the World Cup, but through the lens of shifts in global power. all because John I was in Brussels the other day but I have been a little bit all over the world I know you have you actually remind me of Bob Dylan these days you're like on the eternal tour when Dylan exactly for fears coming home yeah when Dylan turns up I've given up going to see Dylan live because when he turns up he doesn't know where he is he just comes out delivers his thing and heads off into the night and says nothing to anybody he's picking to the van and off he goes.

3:45David McWilliams: He gets in the van. Well, I tell you, John, I was in a really interesting place the last two days called Cartmel, which is in Cumbria at a little festival called the Lake District Book Festival. This was the inaugural festival. Lovely little festival. Nice part of the world. Gorgeous part of the world. We've come off the back of Dawkins, so I know what it's like to build those festivals from the start to the first couple of years. You're basically putting everything into it. You're putting your money into it. You're putting your contact books. You're putting all your efforts in just to get it up off the ground.

4:16And they were, they're at that stage,

4:18David McWilliams: amazing part of the world, gorgeous part of the world. You know, the Lake District, these kind of Norman priories, these beautiful English villages. You kind of forget how beautiful the English countryside is. It's stunning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. England is absolutely beautiful. Like, you know, I spent, what was it, six, seven months up living in Shropshire. Absolutely beautiful parts of the world. More to it than London. Yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right. I'm always intrigued, but I'll tell you, I got the train from a place called Oxenholm. I always quite liked those English names as well. Those kind of Anglo-Saxon English names, right?

4:53David McWilliams: Yeah. Down to Manchester. And of course, as you're going closer and closer to Manchester, it's getting more Manc, obviously. And I was just thinking, I was on the train. I was on the Pennine Express, I think it was called, or the Northwestern route or something like this. So you go from this sort of idyllic William Wordsworth, sort of poetic rolling hills, valleys, and of course the lakes of the Lake District, back into your Prestons and your Boltons and your Manchesters this world. And I'm telling you, John, whoever is in the business of fake lips in Manchester is making more money than Elon.

5:30David McWilliams: I swear to Jesus, right? There was false eyelashes that you could pick up Sky Television off. there were eight lips. It's just a look. It's that look, that duck face. And I tell you... It suits you, by the way, Mac. It does suit me, doesn't it? So we will have more observations from England. England will definitely be part of our World Cup series as we progress, as we progress. At the moment, we're just doing to those countries that may not necessarily progress, which is why we're doing the Haities, the Canedars of this world. We will go back to England and we'll do an English piece, maybe with musings on the northwestern railway between Oxenholm and Manchester Piccadilly.

6:10David McWilliams: It's slightly Portillo-esque. Yes, it is. I'll have my red trousers on, John. Good man. So, come here, Mac. You have been, apart from England, you have been on the mainland, on the continental mainland in Brussels. What are your musings? I have been in Brussels. And John, I want to start. I was giving a speech in Brussels, but I found myself, John, last Tuesday night in A La Mort Subite, which is basically A La Mort Subite, which is to sudden death, i.e. it's the name of a cafe. If you're going to die, die suddenly is the expression. But it's a very old, old Belgian Brussels institution. And it is a place that you might remember Jacques Brel, the Belgian crooner, the Belgian singer from the 1960s and 70s.

6:59David McWilliams: Jacques Brel, probably the most influential cultural export from Belgium after maybe Eden Hazard. Or Jean-Claude Van Damme. The muscles from Brussels. Don't knock him. Yeah. Don't knock him. But basically, Jacques Brel used to hang out in this cafe. And Jacques Brel, chain-smoking, vulnerable, beautiful singer, hugely significant singer from the 70s, 60s and 70s, influenced all sorts of people, including Divine Comedy's Neil Hallen is a big fan, David Bowie was a big fan, Scott Walker was a big fan. And again, it's this very, very melodious, instrumental, harmonious, gorgeous stuff, right? Actually, we should play a bit of Jack Burrell, a little bit of French music there, John.

7:44Well, here you go.

7:52T 'as voulu voir Vierzon, y 'on a vu Vierzon. T 'as voulu voir Vezoul, y 'on a vu Vezoul.

8:08Oh, gorgeous. Beautiful stuff.

8:11David McWilliams: So as I was sitting in L 'Amour Subit, what I was noticing, John, was the menu. Because it's Belgium, you have a huge amount of brilliantly heavy Teutonic Germanic beers on the menu. Yeah. But you also have on the same menu the classical French cuisine. And this is fused in the menu of this particular bar. And this reminded me of the fact that when you're in Brussels, you're on the fault line between two great civilizations. You have the Teutonic, Germanic, Dutch-speaking, beer-drinking civilization. and you have the Romanic, Latin, French-speaking, French cuisine. Both of these meeting together on what is in effect, John, a massive cultural fault line.

9:05David McWilliams: And then you think to yourself, when you're sitting there, this is the sort of things that happens after a few lefts, John, right? Left is that great Belgian beer, which is a little bit on the strong side, right? I was contemplating, I shouldn't be left on my own too much. If you see that fella taking notes on the far side, and you know you should actually have a few mates. This is what happens when you're Johnny No mates. You're Johnny No mates in the bar, and you're thinking these things. But what struck me is that Western Europe is a fusion of two great cultures, the Germanic culture and the Latin world.

9:35So you have the Teutonic world and the Latin world have fused together, have come together, right? And this is the result of, when I was sitting having my drinks in this bar, I was thinking this is the result of the 5th century Visigoth invasion of Roman Europe. The destruction, the end of the Roman Empire, the fact that the Roman Empire was destroyed in the West by successive invasions of Visigotic tribes from Germany, the Baltics, and beyond. And they were bringing a totally different culture to the Roman culture that had dominated Europe for hundreds of years. But actually, when you look at the European Union now, it is a fusion of these Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire.

10:21And this kind of Germano-Latin mix is the basis of what we would call Western Christendom. It's probably one of the world's most potent and consequential cultural hybrids. It was the basis of the Holy Roman Empire, your mate Charlemagne, who's trying to reunite all these huge areas of Europe. And now, when you look at it, the German and the Latin worlds have really defined Europe, and they've fueled all these great European manor-time expansions. They've imposed the rest of the world's ideologies that were manufactured and refined in this Germano-Latin world. So this kind of began at the fall of the Roman Empire around the 3rd, 4th century, and then the likes of Charlemagne came in in the, what was it, the 8th century after that.

11:08Yeah, so what I was contemplating, John, in the back of L 'Amour Subit, while I was listening to Jacques Brel, was this idea that this Germano-Roman world has created so many things that we now take for granted. It has imposed on the world many, many ideologies.

11:28David McWilliams: The main one being, I would say, missionary Christianity, the idea of Christians going out from Europe and converting the rest of the world. It's created capitalism, exported capitalism, mercantilism, socialism, Marxism, all these isms, Leninism. These are all products of the Germano-Roman mind. And this really intrigues me, right? And so what you see is that this fusion between these two big cultures has been a kind of uneasy truce in effect. Because in terms of language, in terms of culture, they've never quite simulated each other. So the German world is still very, very different. And of course, within its greatest, let's say, creation, which is kind of Western Christianity or Christendom, as it used to be known, of course, there have been massive cultural divisions.

12:19The main one being the Reformation, John, because the Reformation basically, basically occurred along the fault lines of the old Germanic versus Latin world. In effect, the Goths, the Gothic people and the Hunnic people became Protestant, and the Latin people and the Roman people remained what you would call Roman Catholic. Yeah, and of course the Reformation was Protestant-driven. Well, the Reformation was, in effect, a revolution against Rome, largely based in the Teutonic world.

12:54David McWilliams: So, driven by Martin Luther, driven then by Calvin in France, but mainly driven by the Germanic world. And what you see now, the map of Europe, the sectarian map of Europe within Christianity, is in effect the map of Europe from the 5th century, where the Visigoths clash with the Romans. And again, that hasn't changed, which is really, really fascinating. And of course, then what you get is that that Western European Christian civilization, whether it was Protestant or Catholic, ended up becoming, evolving into the Enlightenment, secularism, all the things that we now take to be European civilization.

13:40And both of these, the Latins and the Teutons, evolved at different paces. We have all evolved into this enlightened world, a world of science, a world of reasoning, a world of rationality, a separation of church and state, all these sort of things, right? But the reason I thought about this is, in effect, the European Union, John, is a truce between the Germanic tribes and the Roman tribes. And that's actually its beauty. And of course, that truce was necessary because the 20th century, the First and Second World Wars,

14:19David McWilliams: which I like to think of, lots of historians and economic historians like to think of, as basically there was a long European war between about 1914 and 1945. With a law in the middle. Second World War. It was basically just one long war with a little bit of peace in the middle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, that plays out exactly along the lines of the Visigoths versus Romans. Yeah, that's a really interesting way to look at it. I've never thought about it that way before. So you're saying that the roots of the First and Second World Wars could date back to Charlemagne and the medieval times. Now, John, this is my thesis after my third bottle of Leff and a little glass of shime in, right?

15:08David McWilliams: Which are all about 10%, aren't they? Yeah, they're shocking, right? But basically, that's exactly what it was. If you look at the fault lines in the First World War, the fault lines in the Second World War, they are exactly the same as the 4th and 5th century Visigoth tribes invading the Roman Empire. It's exactly the same thing. So in effect, it was as much as a war of industrial revolution and all that sort of, it was actually a war between the tribes, in effect, between the German tribes and the Latin tribes. And so after 1945, the European Union was in effect an effort to create a truce between these warring tribes that have been actually at each other's throats since the 5th century, going through the Reformation, going through the World Wars, all that sort of thing.

15:56So basically what the European Union managed to do was effect a ceasefire between Teutons and Latins, between beer drinkers and wine drinkers, between the butter spreaders and the olive oil guzzlers, right? That's in effect what the European Union is. Yeah. So that's why there's this kind of tension at the core of Europe all the time, even still.

16:22David McWilliams: Yes, I think so. I think that's one of the reasons is that what you have is in effect two very, very old cultures trying to find a way to live with each other on the basis that what happened in the past when we fought each other. and I would describe the Irish as being part of that world. Our Norman side, the Norman blood in Ireland would make us probably more on the French side, but the English language, I know it's a reasonably recent acquisition on the part of Ireland. It's a couple of hundred years old, would put us very much in the Teutonic area. But be that as it may, like all these truces, I think you're right, it's kind of uneasy, you know?

17:10Even the 2008 financial crisis, John, played out along Teutonic versus Roman lines. In effect, the Catholic countries all required a bailout, every single one of us. Right. And the Protestant countries all gave the lectures, which is actually quite amazing when you think about it.

17:29David McWilliams: So why was that? Is that just part of the kind of our DNA? I think it is. I've always believed that money has a personality. and that different cultures deal with money differently and different cultures deal with debts and different cultures deal with deploying money and fiscal resources differently. And I think there's a reason for it, John. And it's the most beautiful reason of all. It's called confession. Okay, go on, explain that. Catholics believe in forgiveness. Yeah. Which is aligned to default and saying we won't do it again. I promise I won't do it again. I'm burning the bondholders.

18:07David McWilliams: All that sort of thing. Whereas the Protestants believe in, no, there is a day of redemption and that day is today and therefore you should save and you shouldn't spend more than you earn and all that sort of thing. I also think that modern Germany believes in money a little bit differently. I think modern Germany and the Protestants there, and I call them Protestants, but we could be calling them Teutonics, Visigoths, whatever, right? They also believe that money should be treated like a public good, like sort of clean air. So you create laws around money and then you do your best to leave it alone.

18:46Whereas I think the Catholics believe that money is a tool,

18:49David McWilliams: particularly Italians and French, to be used to lever the economy out of situations. Or into situations. Yeah, the money with it, exactly. So in a sense, what the Germans always say is leave money alone and it'll set itself down. Whereas I think the Catholic view is always let's use the money in a more interventionist state. And that's what I think, in effect, happened at a time in 2008. But let's not label the point. It's just interesting, the way in which this truce manifests itself all the time. So as long as there was an external enemy for Western Christendom, which is what I'm saying in parentheses, is the European Union, right?

19:29As long as there is an external enemy, the European Union can galvanize itself. So the big external enemy now is, of course, Putin's Russia. And that, of course, has at its core a fear of what the Teutons were always worried about, was the Asiatic hordes, which is why in Nazi propaganda, the Russians were always painted as slightly Asiatic, with slightly Asiatic features. and this fed into a very, very deep German stroke, Prussian stroke, Visigoth fear of the East, of the people who lived beyond the steppe. And we now describe those people as Russians and we now describe those people as Putinists.

20:14Then they used to be communists and they used to be Bolsheviks. But I think the fear goes much, much deeper. I think it's an existential, deep-rooted, tribal fear of what lay beyond the steppe. And therefore, the Teutons have always wanted to create buffer states between themselves and Russia, such as Poland, Ukraine, you know, Ruthania,

20:40David McWilliams: that part of Slovakia, all those places. Because what they feared as they expanded westwards, the reason the Visigoth expanded west into the Roman Empire was they were afraid of what was coming from behind them from the east. So they too were running away from something. So this is what you think, when I see the European Union, I think it is a truce between these Visigoths, Romans, and as long as there is an external enemy, then we can all come together. And in recent years, that external enemy has been Putin's Russia. But what might that mean for, you know, this expansionist policy of Europe, you know, to propose inclusion of, you know, the likes of Moldova and Serbia and Ukraine?

21:27Well, I think it's been proposed for all the right reasons, right? Which is that the Ukrainians are European. But my deeper sense of economic history is that The Teutonic tribes of Western Europe, the Germanic tribes, have always wanted a buffer zone between themselves and the steppe in order to defend themselves. And I think the European Union will turn Ukraine into, we spoke about this before, into a garrison state. And it will be in effect, it wouldn't be in effect a military headquarters on the eastern flank of the European Union to protect the European Union and do for the European Union what the European Union won't do, which is to fight and to put up a fight against the Russians.

22:27David McWilliams: And the Ukrainians understand this, but they understand the quid pro quo is what they're in effect saying to the Europeans is, we will do the fighting, but you have to give us some of the goodies that you have. So what are the goodies that the European Union have? Let's say since the Berlin Wall came down, the European Union has largely been defined by human rights, civil liberties, and what you would describe as the good life. You know, very, very long retirements, good health systems. We don't work too hard. We have welfare states. People can come and go. It's a culturally very nice place to live.

23:03all that sort of, that idea of being prosperous and being centrist was what in effect the European Union in the early part of this century offered. And that's what we're offering to the Ukrainians, right? And it's not too hyperbolic to say that the best place in the world in human history ever to have been born was in Western Europe in the late 20th century and early 21st century, in terms of your life expectancy, your education expectancy, your health, all that sort of stuff. And of course, the threat to that is one part from the East, but there's also another threat. And I think this is what's really going on, John.

23:48So you're saying the main threats are coming from Putin's Russia and Asia, but where are the other threats coming from? Could one of them be this new American regime or even internally in Europe? But before you answer that, let's do a bit of this.

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25:36So we're talking about possible threats to Europe coming from like Putin's Russia and further east in Asia. But where are the other threats coming from? You know, is the new American regime, is that becoming a new threat then? No, no, it's much closer to home. And this, of course, gets us into the very tricky, tricky area of immigration and culture and religion and all that. Yeah. So if you think since the 8th and 9th century, when Christendom lost North Africa to the Arabs. So prior to that, North Africa was part of the Roman Empire and the Roman world. And the Mediterranean was in effect a big internal sea, which people traded up and down.

26:20David McWilliams: And there were huge connections. But you know, North Africa and Southern Italy, Sicily, all those places, right? Then, very suddenly, the Christian Roman Empire, the southern flank, loses its strategic hold in Africa to the Saracens, to the Arabs, and to Islam. And since the 8th century or 9th century, Christendom has been defined by its opposition to Islam. That has been one of the great defining characters of this Western-Christian fusion. that whatever the Visigoths and the Romans were, they weren't Islamic. And therefore, the Mediterranean effect mutated from being a sea across which people traded to being a sea that constituted the southern border of Europe.

27:20And that has always been part of the European definition that we are not these people and these people are not us. And so the whole history of the Balkans as well, John, has been that history of how far does the Constantinople Ottoman Empire reach into Europe. And that's why you have countries like Serbia, Croatia, Kraina. These are all buffer states which were set up by the Christian Austrians and the Catholic Austrians to protect them from the Muslims coming up from what is now Turkey. And these are all facts that you can't kind of escape, right? They're in the DNA of people. They're in the collective memory.

28:03They're in the folklore. They're in what you would call the broad, broad culture. And of course, into that is this general idea that, you know, the Western European sense of itself is tied together by a fusion of the Germans and the Romans, the tribes, but be hemmed in by an enemy in the East called, let's say, the Asiatic hordes. Not even Russian, but even beyond Russia, right? Number one. An enemy in the South called Islam, and of course, a gateway to America called the Atlantic Ocean. And the Atlantic Ocean has always been our gateway out of Europe. So Europeans moved across the Atlantic. They didn't move the other way.

28:53Europeans didn't migrate eastward. We always migrated westward across the Atlantic. And we created what we call, again, proto-European civilizations like North America. And so when I think Europe started to gradually lose its own huge industrial and economic preeminence to America, there wasn't that really feeling of loss because we were losing it to what were in effect our cousins, our cultural cousins over there. And so now I think what you have, and this gets into, I think, fascinating stuff, John, is that there is a thing called the European way of life. And that is a thing. It's a very nebulous thing.

29:33It means a lot of things and different things to different people. But that, I think, is what people are reacting to and is under threat. And is that threat economic? Is that threat cultural? Does that threat come from immigration? Is it from the fact that the people who are on our streets now look differently to us,

29:51David McWilliams: that they have a different culture, they have a different religion, all that sort of stuff. And this is why I think you have to see these huge tectonic shifts in the world through these very long lenses for them to make sense. So for example, now you have three big groups in Europe, it seems to me, intellectual groups and ideological groups. You've got the traditional Christian white people who say, we don't want, let's say, for example, immigration from Islamic countries. Let's take that, right? We don't want that because that affects our understanding of the European way of life, which is the Christian tradition, right?

30:31David McWilliams: That we should be white, we should be homogenous in the sense we're all from either the Germanic tribes or the Roman tribes. And that has been the great, great propulsive mechanism which has propelled European power and ideas all over the world, right? And be they Marxist or socialist or whatever, well, in effect, they're traditionalists. And then there's a second sort of group that wants to protect the European way of life. And I think they are the liberals who believe, well, hold on a second. The European way of life is it's all about democracy. It's all about civil liberties. It's all about the protection of women.

31:09It's all about the protection of gay people. It's all about the protection of minorities within our own state. and anything that actually threatens that,

31:21David McWilliams: any countervailing culture that doesn't protect women and doesn't protect gay people and doesn't have democratic elected governments that can be kicked in or kicked out all the time, well, that's an anathema to us. So there's these two things which, when we were kids, that traditional world, like let's say in Ireland, the traditional Catholics versus the liberals, they were always at each other's throats. Now I think they're beginning to coalesce around this protection of the European way of life. And then there's a third part, which I think Ireland has been completely infected with, which you could call third worldism.

31:54David McWilliams: Yeah, what's that? Third worldism is basically sees the world, everything through colonizer and colonized. Imperialist and victims. And so nothing that Europe has done in the past, be it scientific discovery, be it the enlightenment, be it the separation of church and state, be it the extraordinary innovation of the European commercial and industrial mind, which has brought us almost everything that we call the modern world. None of that matters because we colonized somebody, right? And therefore, the victims always are on a higher moral vanguard than any sort of inheritors of the European ideal.

32:36David McWilliams: And that is a very prevalent view that third worldism actually comes, John, from sort of Marxists who got really fed up in the 1940s and 1950s that the proletariat didn't rise up. And they thought, okay, the proletariat didn't rise up within Europe. Let's find ourselves a new proletariat. And that proletariat now are the colonized people of Africa, the Middle East, etc. And they have become, in effect, the guerrilla fighter, the liberation fighter, has replaced the proletariat man as the hero of this type of what I call third worldism. And that I think you see a lot all over the West. The interesting thing about third worldism, it didn't come from the third world.

33:16David McWilliams: It came from people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault, these French intellectuals. But what I'm saying is that's very alive now as well in the debate about immigration and about culture and all that sort of stuff. So you're saying that Europe is in this kind of transitioning inflection point, however long that lasts. But like in Europe in the medieval times and under Charlemagne and etc. Europe was full of tribes and there was a kind of coming together of tribes and there was a lot of mixing and all the rest. And while you're saying that there was a kind of a fault line between the Visigoths and the Latins, they still kind of came together.

33:57Is that not inevitable anyway? It was inevitable in Europe. Is it not inevitable kind of on a broader scale, given that the population of the world is 8 billion plus and growing. People move, people mix, people trade.

34:14David McWilliams: Well, I think you're right. I think that the history of humanity is the history of movement. There's no doubt of that. And I think what we're seeing here is something really, really fascinating, which is for the first time in 500 years, the Europeans are no longer preeminent. economically. And I think that for quite a while, as we were losing our preeminence to Americans, as I call them, proto-Europeans, there was an unease, but not a fear. Because ultimately, there was an understanding that the Americans would come in on our side. Why? Because they are umbilically linked to us by DNA. So there was a kind of like, the baton was passed, wasn't that bad.

35:02I think what's happening now in Europe is a fear that, as it is China, that is actually growing much quicker. That it's not so much you're passing the baton to the Americans, but that the Chinese are beginning to dominate. And I think this is one of these unspoken, unrecognized, unattributable fears that is going on within this idea of the European mind. So for example, I'll just give you one statistic, right? Since 2000, John, the European Union's economy has grown by about 2.6 times. So it's about 2.6 times bigger than it was in 2000. The American economy has grown by around 3.7. Not a huge amount more, but it's sufficient more.

35:51The Chinese economy has grown 16 times. It is 16 times bigger today.

35:56David McWilliams: 16 times than it was in 2000. So as I was sitting in Le Monde Subit, having my shimmets and contemplating the world, because I'm interested in why people are so anxious at the moment about the world and why people are so anxious about migration and about their economic status and growth and all that sort of stuff. What I think is happening is that for the first time in many centuries, this Germanic-Latin fusion is no longer the dominant force in the world. And that fear of what comes next is populating and colonizing the minds of many, many Europeans, whether they're in Belgium, whether they're in Germany, whether they're in Britain, whether they're in Ireland, Spain, wherever you look, which may explain better than just the economic numbers.

36:58why we are having this constant, constant churn of fear, etc. And you've just said about the nation state. I mean, the nation state is a 20th century idea. Because prior to the 20th century, the vast majority of humans, for the vast majority of our history, have lived in empires. Yeah. Not in nation states. And empires were a way of galvanizing the resources of the various different nation states and races and tribes and whatever. And in a way, getting people to live together. And we destroyed the world of empire in the 20th century. We said, no, this is not the way to go. We're going to go down the nation state way.

37:41And you could be right. Maybe the nation state is a short-lived thing. You know, sometimes the thing that you feel is most permanent is the thing that's least permanent. And again, of course, the EU at its core understood that in order to preside over a fusion of these tribes, you would eventually have to have some sort of federation and confederation

38:04David McWilliams: and centralized government and centralized budget and centralized monetary policy. We have the first iteration of this in the currency, John, in the euro. This is the first iteration of a federal project. It has stalled. It's on the back foot now, John. Yeah. And just that thing about the nation states. I mean, if you just look back in Europe alone over the last 40 years, how borders have shifted, how new countries have formed, you know, the breakup of Yugoslavia into its various constituent parts, etc. But one thing, and this is a slight aside, but one thing that always struck me about the internet when it first came into being, I suddenly realized that the nation state was kind of less important because people all of a sudden could communicate with each other and connect with each other across the world.

38:57So like, for instance, me personally, I've probably more in common with, you know, somebody in Manchester or London or Singapore or Istanbul or whatever than I do with the guy down the road. It's not that, you know, I have anything against the guy down the road. It's just I probably have more in common. So, you know, you connect with people on different levels, whether it's music or hobbies or values or religion or whatever. So that's why I was kind of wondering about the nation state and the future of the nation state and the future of Europe.

39:29David McWilliams: Well, it's very interesting. Let's get back to the World Cup, right? The World Cup is an expression of the nation state. It is a massively, massively reinforcing idea of what they call war by any other means, right? Sport is war by any other means. So the Scots, the English, I mean, obviously we're not there, but we would have been the same. You know, you become a... You should be. Right? I know, should be, should be. But you become a hyper-defined version of your own self. Yeah. And you default nation-state stereotypes and whatever. And I think that what you're talking about is this, what you've discovered with the net and with the free flow of information is this sort of globalist tendency to say, well, I actually have more in common with somebody maybe in France or somebody in Germany or not even somebody much further, somebody in Singapore or China, you know?

40:27David McWilliams: And this, of course, is the big threat. This is what the anti-globalist forces would say, that that's a globalist worldview and it doesn't take into account what I would call blood and soil nationalism, which is the stuff of the rebellions and we are different to everybody else. And I think what you're finding, John, is the World Cup may well be one of those great 20th century institutions where the nation state is absolutely crucial to the definition of the individual. But what I was sitting, now I know, look, it is not lost on me the irony of the bourgeois man sitting in the cafe obsessing about the Visigoths and the Romans, right?

41:14David McWilliams: Smoking Gitans. I do take the piss out of my own self listening to Jacques Brel, okay? I do understand that this is a great luxury to be able to do that. But I do think, you know, while we are looking at the world, while we are seeing Europe lose its preeminence, while we're seeing the rise of China and the rise of India and other Asian countries, while we are seeing America going off on its own way, maybe defending itself and standing back between those two great oceans and saying we can be independent. And while we see anti-immigrant movements everywhere, et cetera, you can't take away from the fact that a lot of this angst and anxiety isn't just economic, but it actually comes from somewhere very, very deep.

41:59And that's a very deep culture that when I was sitting in Brussels and thinking what the hell is the European Union? I think all it is is a fusion of the Visigoths and the Romans, John. And we haven't gone that far from there.

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