The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Wither Europe? – Big Tech vs. Trudeau

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates. The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus.   On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard start the show with a discussion of the riots in France and what they say about the state of Europe as it heads into a key NATO meeting next week. How racially divided is France and other major European states? How do domestic divisions play into Europe’s ability to sustain Ukraine in its fight with Russia? The second half of the program explores the growing battle between Big Tech and the Government of Canada, who wants to see the former subsidize news and journalism in Canada through new legislation. Can Canada go on its own in its fight against two of the world’s most powerful companies? What is at stake for our democracy when the distribution of news is increasingly dependent on large technology platforms? This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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This is the program each week where we dig into the big issues and ideas in the news, hopefully leaving you with some new analysis and insights. We're joined this Friday as we are each and every week by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director, the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, welcome to the, what are we, the Friday, the 7th. Already, graduates. July.

This is not good. Summer is racing ahead. And it was, as you just said, a hot week in every sense of the word. Well, let's in the first half of the show talk about Europe because it was a big week in Europe. And I want to begin with the riots in France. They were big. The images exploded across social media, not just in Europe, partly Macron pointing out that maybe social media had been feeding a lot of copycat writing. But, Janice, the scale of this was not insignificant.

And I guess it begs the question, you know, what is going on in France? We've had massive labor disputes. We've had the yellow jackets. We had a huge blow up over pensions. And now we have what can only be described as kind of racialized violence. Communities have disenfranchised, underprivileged, North African and other immigrant youth, rebelling in their suburbs, the ban lues around Paris and Marseilles and other cities, Lyon, and destroying the very public infrastructure, albeit not a lot that they have,

in the name of, I guess, anger around this shooting of this young North African man by French police. But I sense it's, it is bigger and maybe more complicated than, let's say, the George Floyd protest. in the United States and the kind of Black Lives Matter movement. This strikes me as different in maybe negative ways. I can get into those, but I want your analysis. I was absolutely mesmerized as you were rugged by what was happening. First of all, I think you're absolutely right. What makes this so anomalous in France is there is no race in France.

It doesn't exist. And why doesn't exist? Because the French government says it doesn't exist. There's no census. You don't talk about race. This is secular France. Leicite. And so all the factors that you just mentioned in that introduction,

McComb would tell you, I don't know what you're talking about. But we don't have those problems. There is a denial which exists. You do it by invoking a grief. French tradition, but it actually retards progress. So in the George, in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, there was a discussion about police, police violence, the training police needed.

No such thing, no such thing in France. There's no issue in the French police. And not stoked us, I think, the rage in the streets in these North African communities. because it's very clear to them that there is such a thing. And the denial itself added literally fuel to these riots. And what was so striking to me, but you saw a really humbled Macron for the first time in his presidency. You saw a shaken president who convened a media of experts,

said, I need better information. I need to understand what was going on. That is so off message from Macon. And it takes on, I think, much greater significance. He's the last European leader left standing of any major country. And we literally saw him crumbling in front of our eyes. Yeah, my take on this is that it's a bit like the Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. the week before last that said, you know, discrimination could be undertaken not on the basis

of race, but on the basis of class. I think this was a riot and, you know, a civil kind of uprising based not on race, but more on class. I think this has to do with communities that are large ways locked out of the economy. They live in urban ghettos. As you say, they've largely been ignored by the French state, some token efforts to kind of help them. But it's just in a sense how France has chosen to operate. And yes, at the end of the day, there may be absolutely racial dimensions to that French government response, that these are North Africans, that are not pureloin French. Who knows what's going on there in the background. But, you know, the images of young men, primarily young men in their teens looting Apple stores, there was a

a kind of smash and grab element to this as I'm going to use this event as an opportunity to get what I want. I'm not so sure it's maybe as political or as ideological as the punditory class likes to read into these people's motives. I think these are simply people who are economically disadvantaged, maybe in profound ways. And a lot of them, just saw an opportunity to to loot, to go wild, to swarm and wild, you know, together as groups in numbers that the French state, even with tens of thousands of security forces on the streets, were unable to prevent. Yeah.

You know, I think it's really hard to disentangle because in the French case, there's someone intertwined the race and the class problem. These are poor racialized minorities. They're both, right? So they live in suburbs. The unemployment rate is so high, Rudyard-Dits, in some cases, 40% in young men. But there, and it's so difficult really to translate this into North American terms, but there is a beyond-class issue when hijaps are declared illegal.

We got, we have echoes of that kind of debate in Quebec in, in the plan in the same way. So it's beyond class. There are certain symbols of your differentness, whatever that differentness is, race, religion, that we're just not going to tolerate in France. And those two categories overlap. But these bonnures, these suburbs have been on fire for years now. This is not a new problem in France. What has happened, though, is that French governments refuse to recognize it.

That's what was so striking. and what pushed, I'm really playing with this, what pushed McQuarran? You know, Matt Hol does not suffer from a lack of self-confidence. I think we would all see that. It's really, you could describe it as self-confidence, you could describe it as arrogant, would be the same thing, frankly, in this case. But it was almost as if that was, for the first time, shaken. And when he looked at this and the police were part of the problem rather than the solution,

it didn't matter how many deployed. And even ministers who were saying, we don't have a problem. My call it grows above that noise. And for the first time, said we need to understand this better. Hi, Monk listeners. A friendly reminder that our Monk debate on artificial intelligence is now available in beautiful high definition video on our website, triple W monkdebates.com. Tune in to this 90-minute main stage monk debate featuring four of the world's leading thinkers on AI.

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And, of course, our much-inticipated weekly Friday Focus Podcast. Get all this right now on triple-w monkdebates.com and learn about the future of AI. Yeah, but he said that before, and the government said that before. and nothing really changes. I wonder if the person, though, looking at this from the outside and kind of rubbing their hands and saying, I told you so, was Vladimir Putin. Because this is very much his narrative about Europe, that it is, it's on the verge of race war, it's decadent, it's governed by this soulless technocratic kind of elite that Macron is the

epitome of. And I just think, and let's go on to talk about NATO, because. that's the next big story in Europe that'll come next week as the NATO leaders gather to consider the next steps in the Ukraine war. I think this was a big win for Putin. It has to have weakened a key NATO player. And again, it just plays to a narrative, a narrative of a Europe in decline, a Europe fractured along ethnic and class lines. I mean, this is France. Come on. I mean, to see these images of libraries, schools, a mayor's house, his family brutally attacked and hospitalized. I mean, not good. For sure, not good. And let's just add one more

piece to the story, Roger, that just a few days before this teenager was killed and the riots erupted, Macron had convened literally the almost, you know, a glittering gathering of what the populace might call the elites, right? So leading business people from the private sector, leading NGOs, leading climate supporters, you know, heads of state in what he said was a French-led initiative to take charge and move the global agenda forward and deal with the problems of the world. And you had news media from all over the world, you know, gathering desperate for interviews. And it was, and he strode the stage.

And yet right behind him is, I think quite rightly, as you put in, a story of a Europe that is fractured by populism is so in Italy. You know, in Germany, the AFD is still a factor. They just had a big win this week. Just a big win. One of the elections. That's right. So the heartland of Western Europe, we talk about the United States all the time,

but the heartland of Western Europe is frankly riven with populism that has now been going on for more than a decade. And we don't see any signs that that wave is receding. that has to mean something as we approach this crucial NATO summit with leaders that come together, every one of them virtually with feet of clay at home, except for the Baltics, and Poland, Hungary, and the other East Europeans. It is not a good story. And I just add to that, in addition to populism, there's now a multi-decade history of failed integration I'm not to blame these immigrant communities.

A lot of this blame lies to the state, but it also just has to do with how different the cultures and traditions are of a lot of the immigrants' populations that have come in legally or illegally through the collapse of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan. Europe has a profound integration problem that is both fueling these types of riots, but also fueling right-wing populism. This makes this is a double loss for Europe. And it makes, again, the arguments of the Putin's and the Gis and the strong men of the world more convincing in a way because they're set against not a West that's unified, that seems successful, that seems, you know, shoulder to shoulder, not just externally at the councils of NATO, but on their own home court.

Yeah. Well, that's why I think it's so concerning. And it is very interesting because the immigrant way that you talked about that came to Europe in the wake of a failure in Afghanistan and the brutal Syrian civil war, that's not the story of France. These immigrant communities are largely from North Africa. So there's both race, religion, and class all mixed in. They are old communities. That immigration is three, four decades. decades old, Rudyard, and it is a failure of the French state. It's remarkable, really, if you go to Paris,

there is this glittering white city center in the middle. And you think, oh, well, I'm in the most beautiful city in the world. When you walk around, you take the train

and then there's a ring of suburbs filled with unemployed or underemployed immigrant community, so many of them young men, so many of them hopeless. This is a story of deep failure, but the French state over four decades, frankly. Just finally in the segment, James, how do you think this plays out at the NATO meeting?

I mean, what shape is Europe showing up at this meeting? Let's be honest about it. I mean, Zelensky himself has said the counteroffensive is going much slower than expected. He's blaming that on the lack of weapons and more advanced weapon systems. NATO's big spring summer offensive seems to be in trouble. You've got, as you say, dissension within the domestic populations, populism, these types of riots in France, but also right-wing parties capitalizing. That's the ADF, we just mentioned, an alternative for Deutsche Land,

having a big electoral win at the state level municipal elections in Germany. So what does NATO do? Is it just, you know, onward Christian soldiers? Well, literally, right? Literally, in this case, that's a really metaphor. It's very interesting because when you talk to European leaders and officials privately, they will admit that what has pulled NATO together is two things. Russia's strategic stupidity, which is unrivaled, frankly.

And President Biden and the really good team, competent team he has around him. And they will say honestly that without American leadership, there would have been nothing like the NATO response that we've seen. And, you know, you get some Europeans, a familiar old song that I've heard so many times before, Europe is contracting out its defense and security to the United States. It simply can't get its act together yet again. But think about that one, Richard. How many months are we now from the U.S. election? We are, what, 16 months? My mouth isn't good enough to get me there fast, but we're 16 months away.

And nobody can take off the table that we might have a change in administration. And I don't think anybody counts on a Republican administration led perhaps by Donald Trump. shoring up NATO and making a long-term commitment to Ukraine. So I can tell you those leaders who are coming to Vilnius in Lithuania have to be looking older over their shoulder. And it's the domestic politics. It's the populism that plays out differently in each country, but is nevertheless a big problem in many that has to be spooking people,

including Zelensky. Yeah. Okay. let's take a break, say goodbye to our monk members. Welcome our monk donors on the other side of this break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, triple-w, the monk debates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year or 50 cents. an episode and we'll send you not only the full-length editions of each and every

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