Making Sense with Sam Harris - #85 — Is this the End of Europe?

Episode Date: July 7, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Douglas Murray about his book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.  

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Douglas Murray. Douglas is an associate editor at The Spectator, and he writes for many other publications, including The Sunday Times, Standpoint, and The Wall Street Journal.

He's also given talks at both the British and European parliaments, and at the White House. And he's most recently the author of a wonderful book titled The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam. And if you don't know him, Douglas is a truly wonderful debater. I recommend you check out more or less anything you can find from him on YouTube. Douglas and I spend a lot of time in this podcast, certainly most of the time, talking about the situation in Europe with respect to immigration and Islam and the social attitudes in the Muslim community

that are at odds with values that really should be, really must be, non-negotiable, like free speech and women's rights and gay rights. And what I'd like to point out is that neither of us are against immigration, and you might not notice that in the first hour or so, and we're not against Muslim immigration. the first hour or so, and we're not against Muslim immigration. In fact, both of us count among our friends, Muslims and former Muslims, who are precisely the sorts of people we are most concerned to protect. And in particular, we're worried about protecting them from many of the illiberal people who have been pouring into Europe. I know there are some things that Douglas and I disagree about. I think we have a different sense of the place of Christianity as a foundation of Western

values. I don't give it much of a place at all, certainly not a contemporary one, and Douglas does, but we'll tackle that in another podcast. In this one, we more or less fully agree on what we're against. And what we're against is Western civilization committing suicide. And if you think that puts the matter too strongly, you haven't read Douglass's book, and you probably haven't been paying much attention to what's been happening in Europe. And if you think one has to be a fan of Trump in order to worry about this, well, then you haven't been paying attention to this podcast. But on the topic of Trump,

Trump just gave a speech in Poland where he said, and I quote, the fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for End quote. And while I find abundant fault with the messenger, as you know, I can't find fault with that particular message. And the fact that liberals can't seem to see what's at stake here, the fact that they are embarrassed to defend, quote, Western values, as though that were synonymous with racism, or the legacy of colonialism, or xenophobia, or a lack of compassion.

That is making liberalism politically defunct at this point. And that increasingly worries me. And happily, in the United States, we are in a better situation demographically and with respect to immigration and just geographically. And that has implications for immigration. But one cannot be cheerful about what's been happening in Europe. And in his book and in this conversation, Douglass finds a path through this wilderness of competing concerns that is deeply ethical and also deeply pragmatic. And I don't think Trump comes up, or if he does, it's just in passing, so consider yourself spared. But Douglas and I get into the fairly gloomy thesis of his very witty book, which is that what's happening in Europe

is something that not even the most paranoid people would have predicted a decade ago. And it concerns all of us. And now I give you Douglas Murray. I am here with Douglas Murray. Douglas, thanks for coming back on the podcast. It's a great pleasure to be with you. It's been, what, almost two years? Yeah, I have actually, I haven't checked, but it was, we last spoke when the refugee crisis in Europe was getting its most press here in the US.

I know it had been going on for years before that, unremarked more or less here. But we spoke about immigration and all of its attendant problems, and we will cover some of the same ground again because you've written this great and harrowing book on the topic. But first, congratulations on the book. It seems well-launched, and it's a fantastic book. Well, thank you. That's very kind. It's just really a beautiful read. It's grim. Don't get me wrong. There's not a lot of hope in the book, but it's very funny. rather than be hectoring and communicating a sustained sense of emergency, you become quite ironic. And I recommend people pick it up simply to be amused, in addition to being terrified. That's a fine combination of feeling.

It's all too rare. Now, you've painted a picture of certainly the possible destruction of Europe, and I would say even the likely destruction of Europe. You can walk me back from the cliff's edge if you think I'm being too pessimistic over the course of this hour, but it's hard to feel hopeful that this will turn out well. And at the center of this, that this will turn out well. And at the center of this, you paint a picture of a, really a morally exhausted civilization. And one that is certain of absolutely nothing apart from the fact that it has no right to think itself better than any other civilization. So I guess we could just start with kind of the nihilism and self-doubt at the core of this problem. No, I am...

I mean, the book is called The Strange Death of Europe with the subtitle Immigration, Identity, Islam. And I mean, I've been thinking about and writing about these areas and researching them for a very long time now. And it was during the 2015 crisis, the migrant crisis, refugee crisis, that I sort of realized this was the epitome of everything that had been going on. And the core thing really was two things. One was the mass movements of people into Europe in a sped up form of something that had been going on for decades. And the second was the fact that this would be happening at the time that, in my view, Europe had lost any faith in itself or its own right to continue, particularly in a recognizable

form. And I think the combination of these two factors is, it's pretty hard to see how this ends well. But, you know, I constantly throughout the book, try to show that it's not, it's not the case that it's not the case that there's no argument for, for instance, Angela Merkel, opening the doors. It's not as if there's no, no understandable reason or no justification for Europeans feeling the way they do about their history or the way in which we feel towards our past and the way in which we therefore feel in the present. And I, you know, I'm trying to explain this because it's something we all feel to my mind at any rate, something like this crisis goes down the middle of all of us. I mean, it's, you know, there are people on the left who say, let everyone in there. Some people on the right who say, you know, very few, but some people say, you know, let them drown. I think these are people who are peddling fantasies, albeit very dark and grim fantasies, but they're not things you can, you know, they're not things that most of us could possibly think.

And so therefore, what I'm trying to do is to lay out what is what we're really facing in all its grim complexity and amusement. I think you find that the middle line there wonderfully. As you point out in the book, this really, for the most part, isn't a contest between good and evil. This is a contest between competing virtues. And I think you put it in terms of justice and mercy. And that's not often remarked on because each side is so busy painting the other as heartless or insane. Yes. This is one of the things I've felt so strongly in recent years, and which we've all come across some symptoms of or demonstrations of. But to my mind,

this is what we should do with all these sort of complex issues. I had strong feelings that we were doing something suicidal in Europe. But I knew also that I had to go and look this in the face. I had to see it at its hardest. I had to go, as I did, to the reception ports of southern Europe, of the Italian and Greek islands, and speak to the people who literally just got off the boats, to see the boats coming in, to hear the stories of the people coming from all over Africa, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, people from as far away as Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And I had to hear their stories as well as hearing from the, you know, the speaking to people in the

chancellories of Europe and so on. And the reason for this was, as you mentioned, is this thing that, you know, we are very used, sadly, in all of our political discussion, to discussions that basically, you know, I'm Churchill, you're Hitler, you know, or I'm Churchill, you're Chamberlain, and I'm good, you're a Nazi. And it's my view that on something like the migration crisis, it's only possible to see it in these terms of competing virtues. I take it from Aristotle that there are sometimes things that are two goods, two virtues colliding. And this was such a time when, as I say, the desire to be generous to the world ends up, in my view, overriding what should be a sense of justice for the people of Europe.

Well, I want to talk about the ethics of immigration in a few minutes because I think this is a non-trivial ethical and even psychological problem to figure out what one thinks about this and how one can be justified in having a position here that isn't a suicide pact, essentially. But I want us to illustrate the suicide pact because the details are surprising. Some of what you describe is fairly predictable. It's of a piece with the masochism and self-doubt that postmodernism has spread really to the limits of culture. So people will be familiar with some of the details. But there are some things that have happened that actually seem impossible. And to even speak about these events, I feel like I'm trafficking in lies and conspiracy theories, even to speak of them. They're so incredible to me. I mean, this is one of those topics where we have to measure more or less every sentence against our listeners' capacity to wonder whether or not we have our facts wrong or we've lost our minds. And so I

want to start the conversation with one of these extreme cases known as the Rotherham scandal. Because, I mean, first of all, this is not, as far as I can tell, well-known at all in the U.S. I think one of the reasons why it has been underreported is that it just sounds incredible, and the lack of credibility seems to rub off on anyone who would talk about it. So I just want our listeners to be prepared who haven't heard this story, that in a few moments, you're going to wonder whether I'm talking to an Alex Jones character or some other nutcase. I can say, unfortunately, I'm not. So Douglas, just take a couple of minutes to describe what happened in

Rotherham. Sure. I mean, the context of this is that I try to explain that absolutely everything that happened in the post-war period in Europe in terms of migration was not expected by anybody at all, really, and particularly not anybody in charge politically. And I say that because in 2010, Angela Merkel gave a famous, at the time, speech in Potsdam in which she famously said that multiculturalism had failed and went on to say that it failed utterly. And that particularly, she said, the people who came after the war, in case of Germany, the guest workers mainly from Turkey, she said, we expected them to go home. And they didn't. Well, of course they didn't. I mean, you know, looking back, why would you if you were leaving a poor developing country and had landed in a developed country? And, you know, why would you not then bring your wife? And why would you,

if you're with your wife, not have children? And why would your children not go to the local school and so on and so forth? But it's just a piece with everything that wasn't expected. And one of the things I say in the book when charting out the sort of brief history of this period in post-war European migration is that we got to a stage, the so-called multicultural era, where we became good at talking about the good sides of it. I mean, at the lowest, most sort of frivolous end, but actually very common, talking about cuisine, for instance, the benefits we had in cuisine terms. And I mean, you know, it's understandable who would want to go back to the British food of the 1950s. But it was also that the negatives, anything bad at all, started to become impossible to say because it was as if that might speak to the whole. Now, the most visceral and terrible example of this inability to talk to the bad things that happened emerged in different countries at

different times. And in my telling, it emerged really first in the UK. And that was the scandal that subsequently became known as the Rotherham scandal. This was in the first decade of this century. I became aware of it and other journalists did because two groups of people really started to mention it. One were Sikh groups and others in the north of England who complained that their, as it were, girls from their community were being trafficked by Muslim men. And the other was that it started to become a focal point for some far-right elements in the UK. That is, particularly, and this was at a time when the British National Party, which is, you know,

the British National Party, which is, you know, really a truly racist, neo-Nazi party. It's now, thank goodness, pretty much moribund. But for a moment, they got almost a million votes in the UK. And there were two, to our shame, there were two members of the European Parliament for the British National Party. And they made enormous headway with this or tried to. And this was around 2004. And at the time, there was actually a Channel 4 documentary that was meant to, because some, you know, finally, some journalists took a real interest in this. And Channel 4 was meant to broadcast a documentary about this,

what became known as the Grooming Gang scandal. cast a documentary about this, what became known as the grooming gang scandal. And it was actually stopped from broadcasting at the request of local police, among others, who feared that it would be a recruiting sergeant for the British National Party at forthcoming elections. So the documentary was cancelled. It was subsequently shown after elections and at a time that was deemed to be less volatile. But that episode spoke to a sort of general issue, which was that people really didn't want to know about these stories. Largely, it was thought these were events that were happening in northern towns, you know, outside the sort of metropolitan London bubble. And so they were easier to ignore for a lot of people. But within the last decade, it became increasingly hard to ignore it. And eventually, the government set up an official

inquiry into what went wrong. And it turned out that in the town of Rotherham alone, into what went wrong. And it turned out that in the town of Rotherham alone, up to 1400 young girls had been systematically groomed and raped, often gang raped, by gangs of Muslim men, largely of Pakistani origin. And it was the official inquiry into this, the government inquiry, found that the fear of accusations of racism, as it were, penetrated and prevented the police and local authorities acting on this, even when the local outcry was really very, very strong indeed. And it gets worse because, unfortunately, as we all know, like the Catholic Church rape scandals and with all sorts of other similar cases, sadly, what happens is the first story breaks and then you learn the depth of width of the problem. And this in the last few years, it's turned out that there were similar cases in towns across the north of England and in places that people thought to be more leafy and

green in Oxfordshire. Most people think Oxford, dreaming spires, etc, etc. In Oxfordshire, there was a case five years ago now that came to trial, the Operation Bullfinch case, where numerous young white girls, again, often underage, had been trafficked for sex by Muslim gangs. And I mean, the details that came out of that trial at the Old Bailey in London included, for instance, that one of the men branded one of the girls on her backside, I think, with an M for Mohammed, which was his name. He branded her as his property. And again, these cases, when they came to trial, they just, for the reasons that you and I feel awkward talking about it, I mean, much faster between being covered up and coming out, but of similar events that, for instance, music festivals in Sweden in recent years, where it wasn't till Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015, that when the large scale assaults

happened famously in front of the cathedral on New Year's Eve, that then the Swedes, sort of having reported that, turned around, and some of the press said, oh, yeah, didn't that happen at our music festivals in recent years? And everybody, oh, yeah, that did. So it's a real scandal, and it's an ongoing scandal. There are still many cases coming to trial. I think there's a lot more to find out. But it is just a symbol, a symptomatic example of this deep, deep discomfort of this whole discussion. Because if you or I had been asked to invent a sort of gross, you know, racist sort of favourite trope, it would be, you know, well, they'd complain about people coming over

here and raping our women. And I think that's one of the reasons that it's been so little covered. I have a friend who's a journalist who mentioned to me just a few days ago that he went to interview some of the victims in Rotherham, actually. He said he thought by now, as it were, their stories, they'd be talked out about their stories. They've been interviewed so many times. Not so. about their stories. They've been interviewed so many times. Not so. These women now, even now,

have basically not had a chance to tell their story to the press or anyone else because people just really don't want to know this stuff. And one of the points in my book is that, you know, everyone knows the benefits of some migration, but the downside bits we're still not really willing to face up to. And that is it at its absolute most base and worst. Again, this story just puts me at the absolute limit of what I find believable. The fact that this happened, I'm thinking now specifically about Rotherham. I mean, the numbers of people in this small town and the parents having to appeal to the police for years and nothing comes of it, right? The fact that the authorities stood by and let this happen year after year. There are so many. I mean, I'd test your listeners' patience if I gave too many examples. But I mean, let me give you an

example from the Oxfordshire case I mentioned, which is, it's sort of in the UK, it's less well known than Rotherham, which has become really well known in the UK. But in the Oxfordshire case, there was a girl who, because quite often, the young girls were bribed with drugs and things, or plied with drugs and alcohol and so on. There's one case of a girl who was actually in a care home in Oxford, and she was being gang raped, and she managed to escape. And she got back to the children's home she was in, meant to be being looked after by local authorities.

And she didn't have the money for the taxi that she had managed to hail to get her back to the care home. And the care home staff thought that she was just playing up, as it were. The taxi driver took her back and she was gang raped again. I mean, it's sort of wholesale failure of, you know, I think this is why it particularly has begun to, or at least has for time for some people, really speak to a greater

failing. Because we'd like to think, I think, that young people, particularly young people in trouble in care homes and things, are actually the people the state should most look after and care for. And that at that stage, there's such a total lack of care that you could end up basically facilitating that is, I think, horrifying. Well, yeah, and facilitating it at a certain point knowingly. I mean, so the thing that the situation you just described is a horrible misunderstanding on some level. But when you have the police knowing what's happening but being unwilling to investigate for fear of being

perceived as racist, right? By the way, the interesting thing is some of your listeners may not know the background to this, but this also speaks to a fascinating thing, again, which doesn't come from nowhere. The police didn't have that fear for no reason. In the 1990s, there was a famous racist murder in Britain of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered on the streets. And his killers weren't brought to trial for a very long time. And one of the failings, undoubtedly, in the Lawrence case was the presumption by the police that it had been a black-on-black gang murder. And this was encouraged by various people, this perception.

And when there was a report in the late 90s into this, the Macpherson report it was called, it found that the local police and the police in the UK in general were, quote, institutionally racist. the local police and the police in the UK in general were, quote, institutionally racist. And this label was certainly, I would have said, accurate in some cases. I think it was far too broad a claim to make about the British police as a whole. But it meant that in the years immediately afterwards, the police in Britain would have been even more adamant in Britain would have been even more adamant than they would have been for not to tread onto things that, you know, would embed that or take them back to having that reputational

problem again. So all these things are, you know, problems built on problems. Yeah. What is illustrative and perhaps even diagnostic about this case for me is that, and again, it really strains credulity on every level, is that the fact that it's possible, the fact that you have really a whole society being willing to just eat this horror year after year and do nothing about it, that suggests to me that other things are possible. And this kind of great unraveling that you sound like a scaremonger to worry about is possible. I mean, what freedom wouldn't you be willing to forfeit if you're willing to let your daughters

and your neighbor's daughters by the thousands get gang raped for years? It absolutely beggars belief. I mean, another example was that during the same period that the Rotherham scandal was starting to break was when the British police admitted that there had been certainly some scores of murders in the UK, which had almost certainly been so-called honor murders, honor crimes, which the police hadn't really bothered to investigate because they were community matters. Right.

Yeah. I mean, it's all a part of a stumbling through a period which, as I say in the book, I mean, we were just having to improvise during. Yeah. And the interesting wrinkle here that we'll get to, and this will be quite familiar to our listeners, but the hypocrisy here on the left is fairly breathtaking because you have the same people who are most concerned about women's rights and gay rights. And even as you describe, even more niche concerns, you know, now transgender rights and getting your pronouns straight. I mean, these are the kind of the highest moral priorities at this moment. These are the very people who seem quite happy to import millions of people into their society

for whom the very notion of women's rights and gay rights and to say nothing of transgender rights is not only foreign, but anathema. There's a double think here that everyone is paying a massive penalty for, even the, and this is a point you also make in the book, when you look at the most vulnerable people in these immigrant communities, I mean, so the liberal Muslims and the gay Muslims and the apostates and the Muslim reformers, the people who threaten their lives, right, who make their lives an actual safety concern from one moment to the next, are not by and large the fascists and the neo-Nazis and the bigots and the xenophobes. It's the intolerant Muslims who are being brought into the same community. the intolerant Muslims who are being brought into the same community.

It's a subject that's incredibly disheartening because it suggests that there are many other things going on, doesn't it? I mean, it suggests, for instance, that there are people who are perfectly willing to cover up atrocity, really, in order that their own community doesn't have any negative publicity. By the way, I mean, that's normal in most communities, I think, that you don't want your dirty linen, as it were, washed in public. But there's obviously a greater tolerance of that going on. I mean, you might think that, you know, a small amount of embarrassment might be not worth airing in public. But, you know, considerable numbers of gang rapes might be serious enough to actually think it's worth having it out. think that this is a story about white working class girls, and they don't find much sympathy for them, to put it at its strongest. By the way, I mean, it's a very, very slightly analogous example, but I was following with great interest the case of this American student who died

last week, who was brutalized in North Korea after trying to take down a post, Otto Warmbier. The bit of this whole horrible story that in a way was most striking was that, I mean, it's not as if the North Korean authorities behave differently from one would expect, but that there was this glee on parts of the left, on Huffington Post and Salon and so on, when he got arrested and detained and then brutalized and tortured and beaten, as it turned out, to death, because he was a sort of beneficiary of white privilege. And ha-ha, it was both Huffington Post and Salon, you know, ha-ha, he's just learned the limits of white privilege. And you just think, how much sickness do you have to have as a human being to respond to these stories with this kind of political reflex that actually, I mean, overrides all humanity?

rides all humanity. And that's really, I think, one of the less spoken about things in this whole Rotherham sort of thing was this kind of these are white working class trash, you know, not people I know sort of thing and therefore not deserving of your pity or concern even. Yeah. And that's especially odious when you reflect on the fact that some of these girls were as young as 11, right? It is mind boggling. I saw that piece

and I think it was the Huffington Post on the North Korea incident. And it is, yeah, the idea that his white privilege caused him to think that he could tear down a propaganda poster with impunity and that he got his just desserts for that sort of arrogance. It is wrecking of one's hopes for humanity to see that sentiment even articulated.

I want to talk a minute about the ethics of immigration because this is the other side of the equation. of immigration because, I mean, this is the other side of the equation. This is, they felt moral imperative, which I certainly feel, to respond generously to the unluckiest people on earth. This really comes to the moral indefensibility of good luck, right? I mean, so like when I search my mind, I can't find any way to argue that I deserve my good luck. I'm extraordinarily lucky. And among the many reasons I could list, you know, one that comes to mind is I'm extraordinarily lucky not to have been born a woman in Afghanistan. Now, to what can I ascribe that good luck? Well, it's just pure good luck. I didn't earn it. There's nothing I imagine I did in my past life or in utero to earn that good luck.

And so when I think of the unlucky people who happen to be women in Afghanistan or in really anyone in Syria at the moment, I can't justify this ethical disparity. And so this is just the sheer fact of the matter, that I seem to have emerged in part of the world where I was simply given citizenship and where good luck and opportunity just more or less grows on trees. And you have millions of people born elsewhere into circumstances that are about as pointlessly wretched as any in human history. So the question is, how does one live a moral life in light of this kind of disparity? And how do we build societies in light of this fact that good luck has not been spread equally over the surface of the earth,

and societies that are organized around a moral vision that we can defend. And I'm happy to have you give your answer to that question, but it clearly can't be. I mean, this is the answer that I think we want to close the door to, and this is an answer that some people have tried to defend, it can't be that we have a moral obligation to let as many people as possible move into our society in such numbers that it becomes scarcely better than the societies they're leaving, right? It can't be some kind of principle of osmosis, which just creates the lowest common denominator of all possible fates on earth. And that's something that is defended by, essentially, someone like Mariam Namazi, who I had on the podcast, to the absolute frustration of

every listener. The problem of open borders, perhaps you want to touch it but it seems to me that can't be a solution at some point you are regulating the flow at at a minimum yes of course and and i mean i'm so glad you framed in those terms because that's obviously how most you know decent people in the west feel these days i mean we don't feel that we've not only won the lottery of life, but deserve it. You know, we know that it's luck. We all have friends who, or most of us have friends who have been born without some of that luck and have acquired it explain what we should do and why we should keep anyone else out from sharing it. I think that one of the bits that is least focused in on all this is the long-term point. It's one you touched on there about the open borders thing. You see, for short-term reasons,

one can understand why we have the views we do. For long-term reasons, it's inexplicable that, for instance, you would think that you could import, as Angela Merkel did in 2015 alone, an extra up to 2% of the population in a single year, and for it not to have long-term effects. I recount towards the end of my book a conversation with a great supporter of Angela Merkel's in the German Bundestag, and it made me hit on one of the thoughts which I express in the book about this, which is that we seem to think at this stage in our liberal democracies that our liberal democracies are so appealing

and so strong that basically, if you bring the world in, it comes up to speed with us almost immediately. Or as I say in one point in the book, that to just walk into Europe is to immediately breathe the air of St. Paul and Voltaire. And it seems highly unlikely to me, to put it no stronger, that everybody who walks into Europe arrives at the same point that we are at in regards to our views on religion, our views on all sorts of rights questions and others. It's just very implausible to me. But then the idea that changes, and to me, at any rate, I say that we should understand our societies to be more like a fragile ecosystem where you can't just endlessly tear things up and put new things in and expect the whole thing to look the same. It's much more likely that it'll

look very different and therefore you should take care with it and take care with the thing you've inherited in order that you pass it on. At least you pass on something that isn't a grand version of the Balkans. And that, I suppose, brings me to the other analogy, which I at one point hit on. Some people would find it uncomfortable because, of course, so many of the people coming into Europe come on boats, and so many of the boats, thanks to the smugglers, are very rickety vehicles indeed. But I say, what if Europe is not this massive liner that can just keep taking people on, but a boat itself, which has to decide how many people it can take on before it itself capsizes? And I think that this is something we have not given sufficient thought to. And of

course, one of the reasons is that it isn't a science, is it? I mean, it's not as if there was a graph one could produce to show the point at which people become uncomfortable about where their society is going, the point at which the welfare stretch is too great, etc., etc. It's just something you get feelings about. And that's why I have one chapter on what I call early warning sirens. Various people who went off across Europe in recent decades, different people, left-wing feminists there, a gay activist there, and the people who just went off saying, hang on, I'm starting to get nervous about the future. And again, I mean, we didn't really listen to those because we kept on to this idea that it doesn't matter because when people get to here, they'll realize how great it

is and they'll become just like us. This intuition is also propped up by arguments in favor of immigration that you dispatch fairly early in the book. And there's really a set of myths, at least on certain points, about immigration. Aging society and all that, yeah. Yeah. and all that, yeah. Yeah, perhaps take a minute or two to talk to those because people have this sense that this is not only, in some sense, inevitable but necessary. There's no alternative for Europe.

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