Hello, everyone and welcome to this E-Sype online conversation. My name is Frederick Erickson, and I'm very pleased to welcome today, Hans Kuntnani, a thoughtful and thoughtful and thought-provocative writer, who has been in a global think tank community for quite some time

and who writes about matters such as geopolitics, security, Europe,

German politics and the health of liberalism.

He is now the director of the Europe program at Chatham House

and has previously been with the German Marshall Fund and the

European Council on Foreign Relations among others. He's also the author of the book The Paradox

of German Power and he joins me now from London. Hello Hans. I'm very glad to have you with me

today. Hi Frederick. Thank you so much for having me and Thank you for that kind introduction. So you had very recently, I would say a very powerful piece in The Guardian that

builds on a longer essay that you published in the new statesman in February this year.

Where you chart a change in the way that some or many people think about Europe and its identity.

The gist of it, and correct me if I'm putting my words in your mouth, is that the political thinking about Europe has become less cosmopolitan and more occupied with concepts that are closer to nationalism or a civilization-based political order that defines itself against the other.

So can we start here, Hans? What has changed in the thinking about Europe in your mind?

Yeah, good question. And I think that's a pretty accurate summary of what I've been arguing in those two pieces. I guess I'd maybe

sort of add two sort of caveats, though. I mean, one is that my argument is not quite

that Europe has become less cosmopolitan, but that it was never cosmopolitan, actually.

It's just that some pro-Europeans imagined that it was.

And it seems to me actually that that in itself is kind of an expression of Eurocentrism

because there's this tendency, I think, among pro-Europeans to sort of mistake Europe for the

world, right?

Europe is not the world.

And if you have openness and integration and so on

within Europe, that doesn't mean you're open and integrated with the rest of the world. These are two

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