Europes Ancient Myths Current Crises And Future Possibilities

TITLE: Europe Was INVENTED. Here’s How | Ash Sarkar Meets Roderick Beaton CHANNEL: Novara Media DATE: 2026-04-19 ---TRANSCRIPT--- One thing we learned from history is that however far back you look through the past, people then were always looking back over their shoulders. We we do define ourselves by where we’ve come from or where we think we’ve come from. And that’s why I think particularly in the dangerous and changing world we’re in today, it’s really important for all all of us who actually do live in this continent for whom it is home to look at this a new to take stock of actually where do we come from? How do we connect? And you know I think there is perhaps a subtext because you know people who come here and they have come here over millennia they’ve had a reason for coming and you know if if people want to be here then that makes them European in my in my view. What makes a European? Is it being white Christian into football? Is it simply having the good fortune not to be born American? The boundaries of Europe have never been easy to define. I mean, sure, westwards it’s obvious. You got a great honken Atlantic Ocean over there, but eastwards you just find yourself shading into Asia, not really knowing where that started. It was the ancient Greeks who set the boundary at the Hlellispond, but that’s only because the Persians kept trying to cross it. Rodrik Beaton’s new book, Europe, a new history, takes us from the Battle of Marathon thousands of years ago, right through to the present day. And throughout each chapter, he’s examining how kings and emperors and politicians and yes, historians have tried to define a coherent idea of Europe into existence to serve a variety of purposes. I don’t think that I can do this fascinating read much justice in the form of an introduction. So, take my word for it and watch the interview. Rodrik Beaton, welcome to Downstream.

Thank you for having me. It’s a great pleasure. Um, thank you so much for joining us. I’ve got to say, I had immense fun reading this book. Um, and I’d like to see um, someone who’s doing some really serious research and making a serious argument also have fun with the way in which they wrote the pros. Well, I’m delighted to hear you say that and I, you know, I hope readers will take the same uh take the same view because, you know, I start out from the principle that history needs to be history is a story and it needs to be written as a story. It’s not just a catalog of facts. AI could do that. What we do is we write stories. Well, I want to get into the father of history or father of lies in a minute, but one of the things that struck me when I was reading the introduction is that fairly early on, you make um a pretty big statement, and it’s this. It’s Europeans now, as in the past, at the most basic level, must surely be defined as all those people who have made their home in Europe, wherever they may have come from or however long ago their ancestors arrived. Now, there’s going to be some people spitting feathers about that. Um, did you have the contemporary far right in your mind when you said, “Well, I mean, let’s not sort of target it too closely, but um, you’re right, of course, and uh, thank you for um, getting my words so so exact because they were actually pretty carefully weighed. Um, I didn’t want to make an, you know, I didn’t want to make a certainly not nowhere a party political kind of kind of uh, kind of argument. It’s not that kind of book. But I mean, I’ve been well, I’ve been thinking all my adult life really about, you know, what it means to be European. And it seems to me the more you read about the history, I mean, there’s various obvious ways you can’t define European and it’s, you know, it’s it’s not race, it’s not territory, it’s not any of the sort of obvious things. Um, and I came up with this and actually it’s, you know, it’s all of us who live here. And I did think it was important to put that in wherever we came from because again if you know someone reads through the 400 odd pages of the book you will find that you know who we in inverted commas Europeans are has constantly kept changing because people have been arriving on this continent um you know ever since remotest prehistory and um of course you know with colonization and then decolonization uh you know I think I said some you know Europe went out to the world and you know good heavens the whole the world came to Europe and you know that’s that’s a perfectly reasonable uh expected consequence. So yes it’s all of us who are here and you know I think there is perhaps a subtext because you know people who come here and they have come here over millennia they’ve had a reason for coming and you know if if people want to be here then that makes them European in my in my view. I was really fascinated um by a point that you made um and once you made it it seemed so obvious and yet it was the first time I thought about it which was that um the Romans held European Europe together through violent conquest and did so for 500 years and no subsequent attempt whether it was by Charlemagne or Napoleon or even Hitler none of them were able to replicate the same feat like why is that do you think? Uh yeah, I mean the one you didn’t mention is the one that I find most fascinating actually and that’s the Emperor Charles I in the 16th century because he was kind of born through a through a kind of game of thrones to inherit a whole lot of small kingdoms and then he was elected because they did have elections of a certain sort in those days not quite like ours but they did. He’s elected as Holy Roman Empire emperor. So this is Katherine of Araggon’s nephew. That’s right. They Yeah. I mean there there are all these relations and of course Henry VIII was one of the other three candidates to be Holy Roman Emperor. And just imagine what might have happened if Henry VIII had been Holy Roman Emperor instead of Charles the f. So Charles V sort of started off with a deck of cards basically which no one had held since the the later Roman emperors and he made a pretty good fist of actually trying to get the whole knit the whole thing back together and he was trying to fight off the Ottomans who were coming in from the southeast. Um, and he was flying the flag for a united Christian Europe. Um, but he ended up fighting actually more battles against his French rival, King Francis the first of f of France than he ever did against the Muslim Ottomans. So, you know, the actual defense of a Christian Europe and defining Europe in that way. Um, it very it could have succeeded. It came quite close. And I think it’s quite important also that Charles was the emperor when the the new world was you know of the Americas was conquered um you know in his name and and Anan Cortez the famous concistador you know who landed in Mexico um and you know he did this you know this slate of hand where he persuaded the uh the Aztec emperor Mckesuma you know that he was you know he was the god who’d come back from across the sea but he was able to do that because he could say quite genuinely that his master back home in Spain wasn’t just king of Spain. He was, you know, the universal monarch. He was the king of all of Europe, which is wasn’t the kind of the world. I mean, how is it though that the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor ended up sacking Rome and holding the Pope hostage for a bit? How did that all happen? Well, this is the point. I mean, Charles was Charles, as I say, he made the best fist of it that I know of anyone who actually tried to pull pull Europe together. and he just he just didn’t manage it. And it was um it was a bunch of French soldiers um under a rival claimment of the French throne who were fighting under the banner of Charles but not really under his control. And then the leader got killed as they were climbing up the ladder was trying to break into Rome. And uh the um you know the the invading army just ran a muck and the it was actually the the worst Rome’s been sacked three times in it history. twice at the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and then in 1527 um in the reign of Charles V and it was done in his name and that I think was another of the nails in the coffin to a kind of revived Roman Roman Empire. But yes, I mean you you went to go back a bit. I mean you said you know how is it that nobody nobody ever managed it after the Romans and I don’t know. I mean is it that there weren’t the right people? Um my guess is that it wouldn’t matter who had been Holy Roman Emperor at that time. Charles couldn’t do it. I don’t think anyone could probably have done it because Europe had just changed uh sufficiently. Um it become much bigger even than it was in in Roman times. But it had also kind of dispersed. It was it was uh you know there was a drawing together that came together around the popes in Rome and the then Catholic Christianity which was unified. But um ever since the break up of the Roman Empire, there had been petty kingdoms and little bits breaking off in different directions. Europeans have been fighting against each other um for every bit as long as they’ve been Europeans. In a way, fighting against each other is part of what sadly defines Europeans. I mean, is is there also an element of um the technological disparity between the Roman army and other fighters in Europe at the time was like pretty big. And that’s why, you know, they’re hemmed in by the Paththeanss to the east who are like pretty hot shots when they’ve got like a horse and a bow and arrow. It takes three punic wars to deal with Carthage in part because they’ve got, you know, to be crude, a shitheot navy, right? And the Romans have to reverse engineer from um a Phoenician ship to work out how do you That’s right. They never had a navy and they had to invent one more or less in order to take on the Carthaginian. I mean, it was just so happened that um they managed to get their hands on a Phoenician ship and they went, “Okay, right. Let’s let’s see how this thing this thing works together.” Yeah. Um and and it’s after the defeat of Hannibal Barker that they sort of like wheel around and they’re like right come on lads Mediterranean ours. But after that point because of of you know when Rome conquers it also makes people more like Romans and they fight like Romans and I don’t know did it sort of equalize technological development to the point that after that you’re fighting people who are too much like you to be able to really hammer them? I don’t think so because um you know you’re right. I mean in the um in today’s Middle East you got the Parththeians who actually are you know they’re pretty sharp shooters and the famous not only they don’t only fight they shoot arrows from horseback but the really famous thing they do is they turn round in the saddle and they fire backwards over the over their shoulders. Hence the phrase we still have the Parthion shot. Um so they they were pretty formidable and they were the you know they were the big enemy that the Romans really um really sort of rated and put their biggest efforts um in you maintaining a stable frontier which they did for hundreds of years and then in the 3rd century of the common era CE um in the third century the Parthan Empire in turn sort of crumbled and it was it was retaken over by the by the Persians. It became an Iranian Persian empire under the Sassinid dynasty. And then for the last centuries of their empire, the Romans were actually fighting against the Persians who had always been a formidable enemy because Persian civilization had always been, you know, at least as advanced as anything in Europe at the time. But the bit the Romans, they didn’t leave it undefended, but the don’t seem to have neglected a bit. It wasn’t superior technology, it was superior numbers. M there were an awful lot of those people whom the Romans had no qualms about calling barbarians and we tend to put in scale quotes you know because we don’t want to get too much sort of um stereotyping but the Romans were pretty crude about in their stereotypes so you know basically the further you went beyond the Roman frontiers the more barbarous became the barbarians and you got you know basically you got a kind of more and more primitive lifestyle until you get to uh the sort of nomads of the central Asian step, but there were an awful lot of these people and at various times in history, we don’t really know why, possibly to do with climate change, they were on the move. And beginning in the late 4th century in 376, um a whole bunch of people called Goths who’d been displaced from central well from today’s Ukraine actually by Central Asian, not from Camden Market with the black lipstick and the white face paint and stuff. No, that I think came a little bit a little bit later, but they were probably still pretty formidable. I’m not sure they painted themselves, but um yeah, they um they’ve been displaced and um they congregated in huge numbers on the north uh shore of the of of the Danube and the Romans were on the south and you know they they they wanted to come across and eventually they petitioned the Roman Empire said please can we come across and the emperor said well okay uh okay you can because he was thinking well he was busy fighting the Persians uh let’s get some extra cannon foder it would be quite handy to have a few extra bods But of course what happened was that this bunch of displaced rather desperate people came across. Um they were under pressure from the and then the more and then more came behind them. The Romans couldn’t cope. You got a if you like a sort of classic migration crisis. But and I do stress this in my book. This was not like the migration so-called crisis today where you’ve got groups of dispersed people or families at the most, you know, fleeing persecution, coming in small groups, getting into even small boats. This was 200,000 men, women, and children with mounted horsemen escorting them. It was much more like when the Goths came into the Roman Empire. It I think it was much more like the American pioneers of the West in the in the 19th century when you know there were people expanding into what was then called Indian territory um rather than you know it was like European expansion not like the migration that we see today into Europe. So there is a migration story there if you like. The Roman Empire did succumb to mass migration but it was huge numbers that did it and it was because these people were organized and in military formations. Well that’s the thing is that you said they wanted to settle but they would fight for it if they weren’t allowed to do so. you know, and there’s a wonderful moment where you say, well, there’s a there’s a description of um how they would fight defensively to, you know, protect the horses and the women and the children in the middle, which is circling the wagons. Well, the wagons. Yes. And again, it sounded sounded just so much like films of the uh of the American West. Um I want to um go back in time just a little bit because you you really begin by thinking about the Persian wars and the Persians, you know, the big enemy of West Asia. They sort of pop up in different forms throughout. So, you know, there’s the Persians and then people get called Persian even when they’re not. Um that there’s a sort of idea of of the Persian enemy. Um, so h how is it that the Persians were sort of framed as the big civilizational enemy to Europe and and and why was the Battle of Marathon in particular um so crucial for forming that narrative? Well, from the Persian point of view, I mean, the Greeks were probably actually quite a small sideshow. And the Persians in in those I mean I mean the heartland was Iran and indeed there are modern parallels but the Persian Empire in the um fifth century BCE was much larger than modern Persia extended all the way from the from today’s Turkey right across to northern India and as far as uh Afghanistan Turkbistan the cas to the Caspian Sea. It was the biggest empire um we think that the world had probably ever seen by that by that time. And the Greek citystates perched on the edge of Europe sort of facing that um were you know they were minnow minnows by comparison and that fabulous description of um the Greek citystates sort of around uh the Mediterranean of of frogs around a pond. Well indeed I mean it was their own great philosopher Socrates who used that that analogy which was recorded by Plato. Um and indeed they did you know there were Greeks in forming little citystates all around the coast but their heartland was more or less today’s Greece which is a small peninsula sticking out into the Mediterranean on the southeast corner of uh of Europe and the Persian Empire had been extending you know it extended right up to the Aian Sea which is the other part of the boundary of of Europe and then it started to you know had a had a go basically at moving westwards into what we now call Greece. Um, now Europe comes into play here because the I don’t know what the Persians said about this, if in fact we know, but the Greeks had a pretty straightforward view of the world. They’d drawn kind of maps and they they knew of three continents and they gave them names. So there was Europe was where they lived. Asia was the other side of the straits where the the Bosphorus and the Dardinels and then across the Mediterranean was Africa. They had a different name for it, but you know, Africa. So, you got these three uh these three continents. So when the Persians sent this massive expedition of about a million men apparently and a thousand ships escorting them across the straits and into Europe, the historian Heroditus, who wrote up the story afterwards, lit on the idea of presenting this Titanic conflict, Titanic from the Greek point of view, not the Persian one, as being a clash of continents. And so far as we know, that was really his own original idea. And he played up the idea that as the Persian king, you know, was mastering his troops and rallying them on and so on. He’s saying, you know, what a wonderful place Europe is, it’s even better than our own country and we’re going to def on once we’ve defeated this lot, the Greeks, you know, we’ll conquer the whole of Europe. No, Heroditus would have had a vague idea that Europe extends all the way to the pillars of Hercules, straits of Gibralar, Kadis, beyond, but he had no idea of, you know, the bits where we live now for for example, or Northern uh Northern Europe. So, it was really the historian’s idea that this clash, this war that the Greeks had unexpectedly won against overwhelming odds had actually been a clash of continents, Asia against Europe. And the way I tell the story, the way I figure it out is that in telling the story that way, Heroditus quite deliberately weaponized a geographical term that was purely geographical until those days and gave it a geopolitical sense. And in one way or another, ever since those battles, Marathon, Thermopila, Salamus, Plateia, um, ever since those battles 2 and a half thousand years ago, there has always been a sense, however changeable and however uncertain in many ways that there is such a thing as Europe, which is it’s a geopolitical concept. It’s a mixture of geography and of ideas. It’s partly the facts of geography given by nature and the the physical terrain. But above all, it’s it’s a human concept. It’s something that people like us have dreamt into existence. I mean, so Herodoticus very famously, father of history, also the the father of lies, some people say um because he liked spicing up a story. He liked to spice up a story to make a point. Um, and there’s a a wonderful um detail that he adds about uh King Xerxes for to lash the sea with his whips and to chuck um iron manicles in to punish punish the sea for what? Being rough or for being rough. Yeah. because the the sea got up in a storm and he he built a bridge of boats across a narrow straight and it’s famously the wind blows down those uh uh that narrow channel and it all got dispersed and he was so furious slaves you lashing it’s a bit like you know King Canoot and the you know and the waves in England but it was more more grand than that he’s punishing nature and of course you know from a Greek point of view that that’s not a good thing to do you know I mean so is this also you know this idea of punishing nature and the sort of um overweening arrogance of a eastern king who thinks he can overstep the boundaries of nature. um you know there’s a sort of moral story here right which is like because you think that Europe is yours there’s something unnatural about it but as you said that the border of Europe and Asia is not clear like it’s not clear where that is a lot indeed and indeed a lot of later uh European history is about still trying to define that border as we still are rather very painfully doing at this very moment but there was at least a geographically uh clear feature the straits between you know Anatolia and the thrian part of uh part of the Balkans. Um and Xerxes brought his army across across there. But yes, you might say, you know, it’s all part of the same region. Um but this was part of Heroditus’s explanation for how the Greeks had succeeded against all the odds that Heroditus reckoned or he basically wanted to encourage the Greeks to think you know they were defending one continent against another and that the idea of the the the tyrant as he called him the great autocrat from from Asia crossing over into Europe this would be an abomination to the gods. it would def it would offend the gods of the Greeks. So the Greeks were being very pious in their own their own world in in in um in in driving the Persians out driving the Persians out again. And so Heroditus ends his history by saying well the Persians went back to Asia where they where they’d always believed that they belonged. So always kind of right with the right with the world. But ever since then, the geopolitical idea that Europe is separate in some way from the rest of the huge Eurasian landmarks, there’s a real distinction between Europe and Asia. That idea has stayed in people’s consciousness. And that, if you like, is kind of the basis of the book. That’s the thread that connects it all. like throughout like what that boundary is in terms of uh religion, culture, um politics, race, like it just comes up again and again and again of going how do we invent this boundary between east and west um and and the sort of shifting place in which we establish it. Um I mean going forward in time just a just a little bit um Alexander the Great did he want to establish a kind of ginormous Eurasian superstate? Is that the reason for him going eastwards and just sort of you know plowing his way through much of Persia getting all the way into India? Was he like, “All right, I’m gonna form something which is much bigger um than than um Macedon obviously, but um much bigger even than what we conceive of as being the the Hellenistic world. Well, one thing about Alexander the Great was that he wasn’t going to do it from the air. He was put he put boots on the ground because that was the way you did it in those days. And he was there at the head of his armies and he fought um any number of battles and was many times uh many times wounded and he was determined to conquer it seems the whole of that vast empire. Uh there are many accounts suggesting that his ambitions were bigger even than that. Um I’m a little skeptical. I’m I’m with the um the sort of minority of historians who argue that actually his aim was really limited to the Persian the Persian Empire. So once he got to northern India, which is as far as the Persians had ever gone, he was actually quite ready to turn back and that he intended to come back and then set up this empire with his capital in in Babylon in the in the Middle East. But one of the fascinating things about Alexander the Great is that we have no evidence from his own lifetime. We have no words of his own. We have hardly any words surviving really from anyone who knew him. Well, it’s not quite true. We have the whole works of Aristotle who taught him. But I I I do wonder, you know, did Aris poor Aristotle did he ever teach Alexander anything. Um I will be honest. I mean, Alexander is a world conqueror. He’s a hero. He’s commemorated all kinds of ways. I do not like him. Do you do you consider him what a wararmonger or genocide or uh it wasn’t genocide. He wasn’t trying to kill whole peoples. He just wanted to rule over them. But he killed a lot of his own people. He killed a lot of his own friends. Um again, you know, his father was murdered in broad daylight in a theater when he was present. And um you know again I’m one of a minority who thinks it’s actually quite likely that Alexander had you know a hand or more than a hand in organizing the plot against his own father and getting you know he was someone who he was a kind of a real psychopath. I mean he was determined to do better and more than anyone living and it’s quite likely that you know he died at the age of 32 but by the time he you know by the time he died he it’s quite likely he really did believe that he was a god. on earth and he got his Greek, you know, his Greek cordiers to bow down in front of him as though he was a god and they did not like that. Hey you, have you subscribed to downstream newsletters yet? If not, click the link below and if you have, as you were. I mean, ju just thinking about the the relevance of the term genocide for thinking about the military campaigns of the ancient world. Um, one of my favorite podcasts. I love um Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome. Love it. Um and that’s because he gets into real nitty-gritty detail and he sort of says if you look at um the Marco Manik wars um waged by uh Marcus Aurelius or um the the uh campaigns in Gaul right famously not only waged by Julius Caesar but then written up as propaganda to be disseminated back in Rome is that these are actually genocidal wars. Um and and I just sort of wondered what you thought about that. Is that too modern an imposition for thinking about what was happening in the ancient world? I Yeah, I mean I think well I mean I’m always I’m also a bit nervous about you know a term like genocide because it’s so heavily loaded and it’s loaded with particular elements of uh really quite recent history in a way. I mean I would think what the Greeks did to the Carthaginians is more like is more like genocide. You know they destroyed the city, they killed all the men. They took the women and children into slavery. Um, and I mean I think there is a bit of a question to what extent Carthaginians as a distinct people, you know, the city was rebuilt but not by Carthaginians anymore. Um, I think there were there were genocidal moments. The ancient uh warriors, ancient peoples were certainly capable of what we would call genocide. Um, but take Caesar in Gaul. Now we have his own his own account for it that he killed somewhere over 1 million Gauls in the process of subduing the whole of today’s France, Western Germany, Belgium and uh most of Switzerland but and he boasts about it but there’s no suggestion that he was actually trying to kill all the people who lived there. He he wasn’t trying to stamp out the Gauls whose lands he was conquering. And in a way, why would he? Because, you know, the effect of these conquests was that the Gauls became Romans. They became, you know, they became eventually they became citizens. But many before that became were slaves. They became they were slaves. Then they were freed. But you they became citizens of the Roman Empire which is why you know French people still speak a form of Latin uh Latin today. So you know I don’t think it was about actually trying to it was trying to ex I think this awful thing is trying to exterminate a people which is I think the the essence of genocide. Um my impression is that ancient wars tend not to have quite that totalitarian aim. It’s about conquering territory and grabbing the people for your own use to make them subject to you. Um Alexander certainly doesn’t seem to have at any I mean Alexander far from being genocidal actually wanted to bring the peoples that he conquered together under his uh under his rule. And again, a lot of his Greek courtiers, you know, started to look down at their look down their noses or worse when they saw him sort of dressing up as a Persian or giving honors to Persian nobles because Alexander understood in just the way that the Romans did did three centuries after him, the best way to rule a vast empire is actually um through the people who’ve been ruling it already. I mean, in the in the chapter about the Roman uh republic, you you cover the period of um civil wars that end up breaking the the republic. Um and so you’ve got the this era of great generals, you’ve got Marius and Sullah, you’ve got Pompy and Caesar. Um, is the lesson that you can extrapolate from that period of time? Is it that you can have a republic or you can have an expansionist empire being driven by a very powerful military but not both? Well, that’s quite a question and I think that’s that I think that’s probably the kind of classic question that my my classical colleagues would you know set in in you know in final year undergraduate essay it’s you know can you have both um the Roman Empire I mean the Roman Empire the Roman Republic it I mean its institutions simply cracked under the pressures of having conquered as large an empire as they had and the way things turned out. The only way actually to hold that together was by the stroke of genius that Augustus came up with the first emperor which is to was to institute a very strict firm one-man rule but call it a republic. And in fact that term you know the the raised publica Romana was used right through the Roman Empire and it continued to be used in Greek actually right through the Byzantine Empire right through into our own 15th century. So it was a very powerful idea but the raised publica the republic didn’t have to be democratic. Um and that was the slate of hand that Augustus got away with because the Romans had this absolute horror of monarchy of one man rule and yet they bought into it and then some in the form of the emperors and nobody you know nobody after that they constantly ousting emperors but nobody ever questioned the form of government that Augustus had set up in the empire. It was one man rule but they called it a republic. I mean um there was this I think there’s a quote that comes from Virgil, you can correct me and it’s in the voice of of Jupiter, right? Imagining the you know big head honcho Tony Soprano god saying for them I set neither boundary nor season power without end of limit shall be theirs. And so that’s one part of the Roman identity. And then the other and you get this with Hrien is that you have a consolidation of where the the borders are and it was kind of controversial at the time. People were like what are you being such a wimp for? Like you know um go further into the Rhineland. You can do it. Um so you had these two things of like the world is meant to be ours but like here are our boundaries. This is as big as we can go. Um how did those two things sit together? Yeah. I mean actually I think it’s in the same speech that Jupiter also says Jupiter also says to Ina you know um you conquer people and so on but also you know you mild towards the vanquished you bring people together you bring the arts of uh you bring the arts of peace and the Romans certainly believed that they had brought peace to the world that they uh they conquered a famous it was Tacitus who wrote you know he put into the words of a barbarian chieftain you know they called they created a desert and they called it peace so the the Romans knew what they were doing um And sometimes it was uh it it actually it actually wasn’t really very nice at all. But you I’m glad you me I’m glad you pick on Hrien. He’s actually one of my heroes among uh among Roman emperors. Had a beard and people thought that was um a bit weird. Super weird. Um he I mean he went beyond this my understanding anyway from History of Rome podcast so I could be wrong. Um, you could have male lovers, but you couldn’t be flaunting them. They certainly couldn’t be a replacement for a female wife, and you certainly should never be the receiving partner. And Hrien apparently was, you know, you describe him as flamboyant in modern parliament, I suppose. So, I mean, exact. I mean, you know, one of the things I quite admire of him, he was quite a technocrat. You know, he’s his surviving words. I mean we have a lot of you know a lot of his own words are preserved on on altars and on decrees that he you know been inscribed on stone and you know he’s always inspecting the troops and saying kind you know jolly good you know jolly good show chaps carry on you know um and he you know he’s checking the water supply he’s building walls all over the place um uh I’m not sure how flam maybe he did have a flamboyant side I mean there’s a famous story of his male lover Antinois um and you know when he died he kind of broke him um But uh but also as you say, you know, he didn’t let personal except perhaps at the end uh he didn’t let personal affections get in the way of running an empire and he was pretty thorough about running an empire. And he was the one who, you know, he he built he he built walls around it. I mean, it seems rather bizarre today that, you know, the one that survives is the one he built across the north of England to keep actually us Scots because I come from Edinburgh, uh out. Oh god. didn’t work for very long then, did it? Well, uh, you know, when you think of all the threats that the Roman Empire faced, you know, the one that wasn’t wasn’t really going wasn’t really going to finish them off was the PS from PS from Scotland with the wild tattoos and the agots and the strange accents. But, um, it was the idea that you actually do set bounds around the empire. And you know he built more seriously he built a a wooden wall between the RE and the Danube but he fortified these rivers the banks of those rivers as being a bound to the emperor of the empire uh in the Middle East. He brought a a rare period of relative peace when he negotiated actually the Euphrates as a boundary between uh Roman and what was then Parthion uh territory on the on the other side. He built a whole series of fort forts along the in North Africa um to you know along the the edge of the Sahara desert. So if you like he you know Europe the heartland with these extensions on other continents North Africa Middle East he builds you know he he puts boundaries around them and you’re absolutely right. Uh elite Romans thought this wasn’t really a very Roman sort of thing to be doing. You know we ought to be gung-ho. We ought going out and conquering barbarians. Um but Adri said no you know this is how far it goes and the boundaries that he set pretty much lasted for the best part of 300 years. So he was right. Well he had a point. He had a point. Um I was thinking about you know kind of modern comparisons to the Roman idea of um where its rit can run. And it made me think of the American idea of manifest destiny which is our manifest destiny to you know control continental North America between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Um and that sets boundaries but obviously America is overstepping its boundaries all the time. um you know as we speak in Iran um you know is the real inheritor to um that Roman imperial sense of both um power without end of limit but also there being some hard natural boundaries. The real inheritor of that is America rather than any contemporary European power. Well, I mean where did that manifest destiny come from? you know, Washington and Jefferson and all these founding fathers, they’d read their Virgil. And not for nothing did they call their administrative, their legislative building the capital of the capital line hill in in Rome. Look at the architecture of Washington DC. Um, you know, the capital with its Roman dome. Uh, my favorite of those buildings is the Supreme Court building, which was actually built, I believe, as late as the 1930s, but it’s a it’s a huge replica of an ancient Greek temple. Um so the um you know the founding fathers the idea of modern America is very much founded on the precedent of ancient Rome uh with an awareness of Rome’s Greek uh Greek anticcedence behind that. And I mean it’s not a new idea. It’s been said since uh I think you know probably quite early on in the 20th century that um well more about Britain perhaps Britain and America more than perhaps Europe and America. But you know Britain is like ancient Greece and America is like ancient Rome. So you know the one sort of rather engulfs and takes over the the other but the you know the sort of cultural bedrock the soft bar if you like comes from the ancient Greeks or from us Brits. Um and uh you know mutantis mutandis as you say in Latin other things being equal. You could say the same of of Europe of of Europe as well. You know, Europe is the old world because, you know, I mean, whatever America is or has set itself up to be, it was founded by Europeans. And in many ways, the American Constitution is the most manifest and consequential result of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. Something which actually Europeans failed to do in their own continent. it was Europeans on another continent who actually created that whole constitutional uh arrangement which worked for more than 200 years. So it you do wonder exactly where it’s going now. And as someone who’s really interested in how the stories we tell about ourselves appeal to the past. So even um in Herod Heroditus’s telling of the battle of Marathon, he’s talking about the Trojan War and saying, well that’s the sort of origin of the emnity um between these two continents. And he said, well that’s like us talking about Anglo French relations um basically being set by the Battle of Aen. I mean, if you’re thinking about the period of time, um, why is it that the EU chose as its capital Brussels rather than Rome or Athens? And how would it be different if if they’ chosen Rome or Athens? You know, I don’t know the answer to that question, and I I jolly well ought to. I I’d better find this out. Uh, the first thing that came to my mind is it was the birthplace of Charles the F that we were talking about before, but I don’t know if that’s got anything to do with it. I think it’s to do with the, you know, the way the the rather prosaic coal and steel community came together in the 1950s. Um the the first really coming together of European nations was what they call the Benilux nations, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg. So Brussels was a kind of um you know meeting point, central point for um uh for them. Um it’s I mean Char then of course Charlemagne had his his capital not far away in Aken which is today in Germany but it’s not very far away. Um but it’s a good it’s a good question. Why why Brussels? Because I was thinking I was thinking this when I was thinking about you know what makes a European and what what um makes you feel like you are the inheritor of of a cultural tradition and a story. And ironically, I feel it a lot more strongly than my white British husband does. When I was in Athens and I was at the Acropolis, I’m kind of tearfully being like, “Yeah, this is the birthplace of who we are.” And he’s like, “Can we just get some spanicopter, please?” Um, you know, or or when we’re in Rome and, you know, you see Marcus agria’s name above the Pantheon. Above the Pantheon. And I know that the lintil was, you know, remade and stuff like don’t don’t spoil my fun viewers. um something about, you know, this guy and his ambition and his his state craft being there for thousands of years and I’m looking at it drinking my apperol spritz is that for me that makes me feel connected to this European story um and and a cultural tradition that goes all the way back to the Greek citystates whereas I’m sure Brussels is very charming. I don’t think I’m going to feel that way about the home of the French fry. You know what I mean? may or may not be the Brussels sprout. Well, no. I mean, and also, let’s be honest, I mean, Brussels Brussels in Berlin in political terms. I mean, has a pretty pretty tarnish name these days and the whole um I mean, you know, I’d rather deplore the whole sort of fetish about Brussels bureaucrats and how faceless they are and uh you know, and how they um they want to take away our British sausage and actually that was yes minister rather than reality, but you know what I mean. Curvy bananas. Curvy Curvy Bananas was again it was a real one except it wasn’t. Um whereas if it was if you’re trying to talk about Athens in that term or Rome you know the eternal city or you know the home of philosophy you can’t be as disparaging about it. Well that’s true and maybe the maybe the European got it wrong actually. We should have put the because you know again there has been actually more serious I mean there has been a huge shift in sort of polit in political and economic power from the Mediterranean parts of Europe to the north of Europe over over about 2,000 years. So it probably does make sense that you know the sort of most economically developed part of Europe is the is the north. I mean, one thing that does fascinate me, if you look at, you know, sometimes a weather map at night, um, you know, they show Europe with just all the lights or if you look at a satellite picture of of the world, you can see all, you know, you see the nodes of light where the big cities are and you can see the clusters where more and more people live. Um, or if you look at a map, you see how tightly the roads, the big roads like motorways are packed together. And if you look at either of those for Northern Europe, Brussels actually is kind of where it’s at. you know, it’s about the brightest light in the in the in that road to Brussels kind of in the way they once led to led to Rome. In the same way that, you know, once you cross a channel, you’re looking at Britain. Um you know, this the same is true of London. But actually, you know, even compared to um even compared to Northern Europe, the cluster of lights around London is not as dense as intense as it is, you know, between Paris and Brussels and Amsterdam and Berlin on the on the continent. That’s kind of where where the that’s where the the motor if you like the sort of the motor is. But I agree. I mean you need to I mean you need to have that connection with the past and I think it’s terribly important that people do. The other thing I’m going back to something you said a little bit before one thing we learn from history is that however back far back you look through the past people then were always looking back over their shoulders. you know, Heroditus looking back to the to the Trojan War, which is five or six hundred years before his time and even more distant conflicts um still. And you know, we know that, you know, other peoples do this uh do this too. We we do define ourselves by where we’ve come from or where we think we’ve come from. And that’s why I think particularly in the dangerous and changing world we’re in today, it’s really important for all all of us who actually do live in this continent for whom it is home to look at this a new to take stock of actually where do we come from? How do we connect with Brussels whether you like it or not uh Rome definitely Athens uh great love of mine. um and you know all the other sort of centers of European culture and achievement throughout the the centuries because you know I really don’t think it matters where we were born if we live here and we care about it this is what this is what defines us we can become Roman at the stroke of an emperor’s pen you know well I mean that literally happened which shows it it shows it can happen and you know thousands well hundreds of years later people were still calling themselves Romans who had no organic connection at all to that city in the Italian peninsula. So it, you know, it does work. I want to I want to talk about religious identity because religion forms a really important part of this book and and the idea of Christendom and forgive me if I’m compressing, but emperors in the line of Augustus, so you know, the Julian Claudian dynasty and onwards, they could expect after they died to become gods. And after Constantine and when uh Christianity becomes the state religion of Rome, um you can’t become God anymore, right? Last guy to do that was a Palestinian carpenter. After that, no more turning into God. Um but you can be uh you know, and every Christian king is a sort of viceroy for God. Exactly. Um, what’s the difference in state craft between a god in waiting, right? You know, a sort of pagan emperor. Um, and God’s man on earth. Well, I mean, I can’t really believe that these Romans took it very seriously that their emperor, their emperors were going to become gods. And, you know, I was saying before Alexander the Great sort of wanted to be worshiped as a god and may have believed he was a god on on earth. And all the Roman emperors, you know, looked back to Alexander and they kind of, you know, kind of wanted to imitate imitate him. But, you know, there’s a famous anecdote. I’m sure you know it. The emperor Vespasian on his deathbed um you know, turned to his court and they’re all sort of weeping around and he says, “Oh dear, I think I must be turning into a god.” And you know, it’s kind of well, you know, okay, you know, we don’t really believe this, but they did, you know, they did build temples to the uh to the emperors. They made sacrifices to them. And it was it was a way basically I think of just worshiping the state. But I don’t believe those emperors thought they were actually going to you know go up and drink their nectar with Zeus and with a spanopita on Mount Olympus. But Constantine when he became a Christian um I mean again nobody knows why how it happened. U for what it’s worth my reading of the evidence is that actually he had bitten off more than he could chew. He didn’t know what he’d let himself in for by becoming the champion of Christianity because he changed not only the nature of Christianity by making it a top-down religion whereas it was the religion of you know slaves and the conquered and god forbid women you know. Yeah. Yes. Yes, I mean you know people you know it it was the common you know the people it was the ordinary people it was um um yeah it was a it was the ruled and then suddenly it was the rulers who were patronizing it and increasingly constant didn’t particularly impose it on others but his successors did so it beca you know from bottom up it became suddenly top down and that changed the nature of Christianity and you know it became an element uh I mean say what you like kind of there was an element of power political power built into the way the religion functioned in practice which there hadn’t been before but he also changed as you say the nature of the imperial role because uh you know Constantine he was baptized on his deathbed uh which meant okay no becoming say no becoming a god for you but it meant that every emperor after that is actually god’s viceroy and this I mean I wrote it in the book I mean there’s a lot written about the divine right of kings But you know, I’m not sure whether it’s generally accepted that this is quite where it comes from. But it seemed to me very clear that it was Constantine and particularly the people who wrote the story of Constantine’s conversion who really established for all time in Europe anyway that an emperor or a king any temporal ruler was going to owe his power to the higher power above which was the Christian God. So in that way the emperor gained power in one sense and lost it in another because he was always subject to a higher power. What was the role of Islam in establishing the cultural and religious boundaries of Europe, right? Like here’s Christendom and you know here’s our competitor monotheistic religion. Um how how important is Islam for setting our idea of where where Europe begins and ends? uh pretty important in fact it’s pro I mean since um you know pretty much since the death of the prophet it’s been the the almost almost one of the most important defining characteristics of Europe because you know out of from European in European eyes almost nowhere suddenly came this you know worldconquering monotheistic uh religion um and one of the things that seems to I think is fascinating about that early stage when you know Islamic uh Arab Armies were conquering everywhere. But it wasn’t only conquest. There were subject peoples who people who thought of themselves as Romans right throughout the Middle East who actually had been locked for generations in tedious, interminable, insoluble doctrinal questions about the nature of the Christian Trinity and what exactly was we’re going to fix that for you. No trinity and exactly you know and and uh you know the uh Islam simply said you know it is genuinely this is this is real monotheism if you like and I think people who just craved that simple not simple but I mean you know that straightforward uh transcendent truth rather than this complicated one thought you know actually this is what you know this is what we’ve always been looking for because an awful lot of you know a lot of Christians in that part of the world did convert and we make conversion very very easy we make it very Easy for people. Face east, say your shahada, Bob’s your uncle. Yeah, I know. It’s the other way that is more problematic, is it not? Look, no one makes it out alive. That’s right. But like it’s it, you know, it is a sort of, you know, it’s interesting to me in terms of do you think of Islam as a religion of conquest or do you also think of it as a religion of immense pragmatism? um you make conversion really easy and you know these as you say very complicated doctrinal questions which have also resulted in you know hugely painful schisms which you go we’re not going to do any of that. Yeah. Well I mean okay but I mean let’s again let’s be honest. I mean I’m coming from a position of relevant relative ignorance about uh about about Islam. So am I and I am Muslim so it’s fine. Well I mean clearly well clearly but anyway I’m not. So you know that’s where we’re both coming from. But um you know I’m seeing it from the the European point of view and I mean okay two things first of all becoming being Roman be has already come to mean to be Christian before the arrival of Islam. You know first Caracala makes all Roman subjects into Romans and that you know that really takes root. So you know everybody as a subject is a Roman. by the time of Justinian in the sixth century, we’re still a century before Muhammad or in the century before Muhammad. Um where uh he’s saying, you know, it’s pretty well written up in the law court in in the law codes. You know, if you’re a citizen of this empire, you are a Christian. So the, you know, the the terms Christian and Roman are pretty well interchangeable. Um and the the barbarian well the barbarian see the goths are Christians as well so that’s not you know that’s and but then the barbarians the Franks are not and then but they become Christian so what happens in Europe is that all these you know all these barbarians keep you know pouring in the they’re fight you know they’re fight they’re fighting men are fighting their way in they’re taking over Roman territory they’re basically lording it over the people who’ve lived there before but sooner or later and often quite really quite soon they become Christian and that means you know they’ve already become taken the first step towards becoming Europeans. Well, so I know I’m skipping around um the schedule a little bit here but you know leaping forward in time to you know

This is then the big crisis for um colonizers because if you take religion over to the Americas and you convert people, you know, does that mean they’ve got to be, you know, just as human as you and have the same rights as you? You need some system which um you can’t really convert in and out of and we’ll call that race.

Um yes. Well, okay. Well, let’s just spool back a little bit because the other thing about the arrival of Islam is that, you know, all these tribes, you know, they’re polytheistic and they all without exception, well, they either become Christian or like the Huns, they go or the Mongols later, they go away again. So people come into Europe, they become, you know, they’re all they’re sort of, you know, it’s all mixed mixed race, mixed peoples, mixed languages, it doesn’t matter, but they’re all Christian. They got that in common. The one people who never convert are the Muslims. So when the when the Eastern Empire falls and when North Africa falls, there’s no going back there because that that’s the difference. And you know, the Romans might have expected that the Arabs um you know as sort of barbarian people beyond the frontiers, okay, they’ve got their wild religion, but they come and they settle among us. They become Christians like us. Doesn’t work with monotheism. I mean, so then the um Moish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula then what does that do for Europe’s image of itself because no longer are the Muslims over there, you know? And I mean it creates I mean it creates quite I mean quite a ticklish problem for me writing the history the way I am because my definition of Europe as Christian Europe Christendom means that actually Iberia is lost to to Europe for a bit for most of the Middle Ages. Um though you know I’d be the first to say that of course you know um equally you know Alandaloo Muslim Spain is probably the most civilized place in Europe apart from Constantinople you know the um the Muslim civilization at that time is is definitely in advance of uh of certainly western certainly western Europe. So um you might say I’m taking a partisan or you know a sort of uh well it’s by definition so it’s an attempt. So so the way I see it is that you know that the south that southwestern uh edge of Europe is actually lost to Europe through those centuries and then the the Rayconista the um the reconquest but Christian reconquest of Spain and Portugal in the later middle ages and gradually the Muslims are pushed out of Europe. And what I see happening in that later period is it’s a kind of domino effect. And it struck me actually. I mean I remember this very vividly. It was visiting the um the uh the famous mosque in Cordoba in in southern Spain um where you know this beautiful sort of huge Muslim architecture with its arcades and then there’s a really rather brash tower in the middle where the Christians sort of wrecked a bit put a big big tower in it and they filled it full of bling that they ripped off from South America and I was just looking at that sort of palimpest of history you know the history imposed upon the uh the the Muslim civilization that’s been there and I just I mean because my field is Greek studies I’m always very aware of you know the fall of Constantinople in 1453 um the Ottomans bringing Islam into into Europe from the east and I see it kind of domino effect that in exactly the same years in the west you know the Christians are pushing the Muslims westwards and they’re being pushed westwards themselves at the other end by um by the Muslims so I mean one of the things I argue in the book is that it’s actually it may not even be conscious, but it’s a kind of movement of peoples. They’re being pressed by an opposing civilization in the in from the east. It’s pushing them west. They’re pushing the Muslims out of Europe. Once they’ve succeeded in pushing the Muslims out of Europe, where’d you go next? And then it’s a kind of panic moment. You’ve actually suddenly, you know, you look like send this weird sailor guy west. Where are we go? You know, where are we going? I’m sure it never this would this would not have crossed Columbus’s mind. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t think so. But um you know, we’re being hardressed. Let’s get in these ships. Let’s see what we can get to. And actually there is when you read because we do have quite a lot of Columbus’s words. He was obsessed with Islam. In what way? And not a good way, I’m afraid. Uh but no, he had a wonderful idea that he was going to sail right around the world and complete the work of the crusaders by taking Jerusalem from the other side. ah he’s going he’s going to you know he’s going to outwit the uh you know the the Ottomans on the on the other side. Um so no I mean it fear of Islam and a kind of demon if you like demonization of Islam um is I think it’s a mainspring of the um of the conquest the discoveries both of the new world and of course the Portuguese going around Africa and into the you know they then take on the the the Turks and the the Malaysians and the Chinese and the Indian uh the Indian Ocean. Um, so it’s a, you know, it’s I don’t want to say civilizational because that you you’re putting in people into blocks, but it’s Europeans in the at the end very end of the 15th century, they’re finally breaking out of a homeland that consciously or not, you know, it’s under threat. They’re being they’re being pushed. They’re being squeezed. And you got to go, you know, you got to go kind of got to go somewhere. There’s a there’s a fabulous book about this called How the West Came to Rule by Kermnish Jolu and Alex Anas. And part of the argument is that um the Ottoman Navy, right, you big bad cats of the Mediterranean sort of like ends up displacing Genoies capital and it’s like going westwards. And so without that interaction between um the Ottoman Empire and Christian powers, you don’t you don’t get the um colonization of the Americas. It’s is part of the argument. It’s an interesting book. Um I mean I I want to think just a little bit about the um reconista. So you know Isabella and Ferdinand. I’m I don’t know why for me everyone is you know how do they relate to Katherine of Aragan? Katherine of Aragan’s parents. Um it’s the dominance of tutors in the English educational system. Is this all the fault of Hillary Mantel? I wonder. It absolutely is. Well they’re great books. Fabulous books. Um, so you’ve got Isabella and Ferdinand and you’ve got um the uh you know pushing out of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula. You’ve got Columbus set on his way and you also have the Inquisition, right? You also have this um violent paranoia about um secret Jews basically and Muslims um and Muslims. Um you had the expulsion of the Marisos a bit later I think. So who were who were Christian but descended from from Moors and my sense is that this is where race as a way of understanding people this thing that you can’t fully con you know doesn’t matter that you’re Christian you’re still this other thing um is becoming quite important and I suppose I I’m I’m interested in um the the difference between how Jews and Muslims are framed right one being a sort of um civilizational threat and the other being this kind of enemy a enemy within um and how um anti-semitism has functioned in Europe in terms of one defining a sense of of of Europeanness. How central is anti-semitism to that? And two, um its relationship to the idea of an Islamic civilizational threat. Yeah. I mean I’d like to take it back beyond antise-semitism actually more about and to talk about the inquisition because I mean one thing that you know I would say about my book is that you know I’m writing as a European in a way for Europeans and I’m talking about you know if you like us Europeans um and as well as people anywhere else is reading the book but you know taking stock of who we are where we came from what our ancestors cultural ancestors have done one thing I’m not doing is banging the drum and saying that Europeans have always got it right and one of The starkkest comparisons I always find is the treatment the Christians meed out to the Muslims when they reconquered Spain as compared to the way the Ottoman Turks treated the European Christian populations whom they conquered are pretty much exactly the same time because the Catholic monarchs uh they drove out the Jews. They uh they persecuted the Muslims. They instituted the inquisition for generations uh in all because they had this absolute paranoia about anyone thinking in a way which was different from the Christian way of thinking. So that basically you know by the time of of General Franco I mean Spain must have been probably 100% Catholic Christian whereas you look at you know the Balkans or Greece uh they were conquered by the Ottomans but the Ottoman Ottomans had a much more broad-minded system in the the way they treated religious difference. So the um the European subjects were allowed to maintain their religion. uh the Orthodox Church became part of the institutions in the Ottoman of the Ottoman Empire. Um but look at what happened in history afterwards because as I said, you know, by the time of Franco, Spain is 100% Catholic. No question there. Look at the Balkans. The Ottomans got driven out again by those same Christians who were allowed to keep their religion. If they’d been persecuted in the same way, there wouldn’t have been any Christians left to be able to do it. But you you know so who’s who’s right? It’s it’s rather a horrible comparison, but No, no, no. I I I hear a point. I’m I’m We will clip it up to make it sound like you’re advocating for more Ottoman persecution, so don’t worry about that. Um I mean, I want to move on a little bit to the sort of ambiguous status of Russia. Um and there’s this wonderful quote that you uh you select from um uh Libnetsz, the the mathematician, not the biscuit. um who refers to Thesar as the Turk of the North. Um in in some way does that idea of this kind of unstable contingent um difficult to classify racial identity, does that still hold for how Russians um are viewed to this very day? Well, again, I mean, I’d prefer not to see it in racial terms. I see it in cultural terms. and Russia and Russians are in a very they’re precisely impossible to categorize clearly in those uh in those terms because uh the original duche of Muscovie was Orthodox Christian. Uh the Russian Empire was Orthodox Christian. As Russia expanded right across Siberia, it imposed Orthodox Christianity on the peoples or many of the peoples of the regions that it uh it conquered. So, as a Christian power, you know, it’s um it ought to qualify as European, but most of it’s not in Europe and probably not any of it’s really in in Europe. Um the way I the way I get I get round that kind of ambiguity, but I mean the the truth is it’s an ambiguity. The way I get I get round it is that from 1703 until 1918 the capital of Russia was in Europe because uh Peter the Great founded his new city sanct Peterborg. He even gave it a European name based it on Amsterdam doesn’t he? He based it on Amsterdam. He even gave it a Dutch new a Dutch named after his own patron saint. He built it out of out of out of nothing. It was designed by Europeans. it looks European. Um and um you know to that extent and and during those centuries the um 18th and 19th centuries but the um you know elite Russians spoke French among themselves. So Russia was you know Russians were in the process of becoming European and the Congress of Berlin in 1814 and 1815 after the Napoleonic wars. King Alexander I of Sar Alexander the first of Russia is one of the big players and everybody accepts him as being a European ruler and you couldn’t gain say in that because he’d done he done the heavy lifting of chasing Napoleon out of uh out of his native land uh after all. But then you know come the Bolshevik revolution the capital moves I would say out of Europe back to Asia to Moscow and the the Soviet Empire was clearly very anti-European. So that’s a clear divide. There was a kind of hiatus in the 1990s into the naughties perhaps when it looked as though Russia was perhaps becoming European as it always had the potential to. And it seems to have been very largely down to dare I say Putin himself or the people around him. I suspect the way that American capital behaved in postcold war Russia also played a large part of that in making possible the kind of kleptocratic capitalism that took over. Uh there there ought to have been other ways surely for that to be transition to be managed because it was badly managed. Putin came out on top. But the result is we now have this, you know, seemingly visceral and quite clearly articulated enmity from the Kremlin towards Europe. So if you like, it’s not just Europeans looking at Russia and othering Russia. Russians are doing the same to us. But one thing I would say, oh yeah, we’re all gay Muslims. That’s the Russian narrative. Well, but I mean, just as that physical frontier has never been never been stable, neither is that kind of cultural or ideological one. It is it it has been the case in the past when Russians have been much more European than they are now and there’s no reason why they couldn’t be in future. Well, and one of the things that you talk about towards the end of the book is um Putin’s long very rambling essay about Ukraine and the argument that he makes is that Ukraine doesn’t really exist. Um it’s an invention of Europe. It’s always been a part of Russia and it’s intended to be um a buffer between Europe and Russia and then also a a sort of um springboard into Russia. Um in terms of Russia’s own sense of where its borders are both in the east and to the west, I guess also to the south. Um how does that in interact with or or disrupt Europe’s ideas of where its borders are? Um, and do you think that the the plan is for more expansion after Ukraine? Well, I mean, there’s obvious there’s obvious I mean there’s obvious obviously danger there and the more this rhetoric has been ramped up on both sides. Envy between Europe and Russia. Um, I have no idea to what extent Putin might actually have territorial ambitions or how far they might uh they might go. I mean the bogey, you know, the sort of the sort of sort of bogey man picture is Stalin who extended if not quite the borders of Russia, at least Russian influence as far as the river Ela in in Germany. So you know you could you could in theory if the opportunity arose you could get either through satellite states or through direct uh conquest. It’s it it’s imaginable in today’s world of strongman leaders in which it seems to be all right for you know any strong man leader basically trying to grab territory if it’s within reach in which case I think you know Europeans are have every every reason to be pretty pretty nervous about what might uh uh what might happen but you know falling back a little bit before that I mean it shouldn’t I mean that should not have happened um I I mean, it’s not quite the, you know, the Trump argument that the war of Ukraine should never have happened, but, you know, Europe was a bit hamfisted in the way it extended its influence into the former Soviet republics and Putin was unnecessarily terms of flirting with the idea of Ukraine joining NATO or Well, I mean, Ukrainians flirted with the idea of joining NATO and of course, I mean, the irony of irony is the it was the US who wanted them to and the French and Germans who said they mustn’t and the result was a stalemate. um you know look how these things have changed have changed now and the latest American um you know strategic document says that you know NATO should not uh should not aim to expand any uh expand any further. Um I mean I’m pretty skeptical about the exter expansion of NATO for a rather different reason that you know what sense does it make to have a North Atlantic treaty organization if you’re on the far side of the Black Sea. You know it’s the same with very Ukraine or Georgia. Um you know does this entirely make sense? But for people in all of these former Soviet republics, if they look, you know, they look what they look one way to Moscow, the other way to Brussels and and you know, I think it’s entirely legitimate for them to choose as independent states, which the end of the cold war made them to decide which way they want to go. And you know, Belarus went Belar Rus went one way under uh Lucenko. Um and Ukraine went the other. Um which again it if you like at least looks at it looks it looks like quite an untidy map of that east west divide but it just emphasizes that it’s not a fixed thing. And I mean again it fascinates me to the extent to which in just about 10 years Ukrainians are people of whom dare I say people in this country perhaps knew rather little have suddenly you know emerged onto the world stage as Europeans. It matters to them to be part of Europe. And I wonder for how many of their parents and grandparents that would even have been the case. What is a contemporary European cultural identity? Because when I’m amongst Americans, I feel European. When I’m when I’m amongst continental Europeans, I feel like a Burish Brit. Do you know what I mean? Well, I take I take the bit about the Burish Brits. Yeah, we’ve got that reputation. Yeah. um you know so so what’s it mean to have a a a European cultural identity that can take you know England at our um you know backwater of the Roman Empire best um you know all the way to Greece you know maybe even little bits of Turkey as well you know what is it that can hold all these things together well I mean for me I suppose fundamentally it’s the it’s reading history it’s knowing that this is our story that you know we are the inherittor of the civilization that has built up, that has changed, that has changed its boundaries, has changed its content, um, its beliefs, its values, and they’re still changing, and they will continue to change. But nonetheless there is has been for two thou two and a half thousand years there has been some kind of consensus some kind of awareness that people who live on this promonry on the western edge sticking out into the sea on the western edge of Asia that we call Europe ever since the time of Heroditus have things that define them and because definition tends to be about difference that make us different from those who live in other places. Um, and I would I would absolutely not put that in racial terms, but I would put it in cultural uh in cultural terms, which is why I think again the you know the boundaries are open. It’s not is not fixed. It’s in flux. But what do European what makes people European today? I mean to put it perhaps more narrowly one might say in terms of culture politics um the rule of law democracy um human rights these are perhaps the the kind of tick box if you like things that I would inevitably come back to and if I have time I mean I would gloss each of those because you know they’re not as simple as they sound when we talk about human rights I mean you know the way that term is used and sometimes dare I say it can be perhaps overused today um you know it’s it’s got a very specific and some sometimes quite narrow legalistic kind of kind of sense and also perhaps excuse me also perhaps easily separated from the responsibilities which are the other parts of rights you know historically but when we talk about human rights I think I for me we’re talking about an idea of the human individual that you can trace through the evolution of Christianity and the and Christian theology back to the Roman Empire, back to the ancient Greeks to the idea of the unique worth of every human individual. Um, democracy, you know, is invented in Europe. It didn’t work that well in Europe when it was first invented and it was pretty well suppressed for the best part of 2,000 years. So, let’s not let’s not bang a drum and say democracy defines Europe. It defines Europe today, but our history takes in many other things. The thing above all that I think does most effectively link the culture right through all the many phases of European history and and cultural development is the rule of law. The idea that every human individual is subject to rules which are invented by fellow human beings but which all of us equally are obliged to follow and which apply equally to all of us. I’m I’m interested in what you think it might take for Europe to be neither conquered by Russia nor bought by America. Um because there’s a there’s a quote that you you open with which is neither the west nor the east will rescue Europe. Russia wants to conquer it. America wants to buy it. Um, does it basically come down to we need a centralized European army of some sort without that in this age of multipolarity with the Greek city states who can’t quite get their together? Short answer, yes. I think we probably do. Um, I mean, I can’t honestly see how we’re going to get from here to there, but yes, as the way I see the world at the moment, I think yes, we ought to have a European army. Um, I even would dare to say I think we ought to have a European nuclear deterrent. Um, many people would not agree with that, but um, you know, look what happens to countries that don’t have a nuclear deterrent. Um, but more more seriously, um, I think the thing that we lack is a single voice in world affairs. And the difficulty is you know how do you get you know we Europe is it’s one of the great powers economically in the world today. It’s one of the largest population blocks. It has the highest among the highest standards of living anywhere in the world. You know we punch hugely above our weight economically and culturally. And you know so much of the world actually follows intentionally or not or even aware or not you know lots of different European ways is hugely influential. But you know Europe achieved that worldwide influence through its very diversity through constantly squabbbling among you know Europeans squabbbling among themselves never quite agreeing sometimes fighting fatally and and tragically against each other. But how do you harness that diversity in order that Europe today can stand up for all that accumulated culture in a world dominated by states the size of the United States, Russia, China. And I fear that the analogy that I always draw is what happened to the tiny citystates of ancient Greece. There were hundreds of them and they fought for hundreds of years to maintain their autonomy from each other. each one defending its own the right to make its own rules for its own citizens. But the price of that was they could just be stifled. They could be gobbled up by a powerful neighbor, which is what the which is what the Romans did. And you know the equivalent of the Roman Empire staffling follow swallowing up those little city states. It could be America. It could be Russia. You know, it could happen to us. An EU nuke somewhere. Nigel Farage is frothing at the mouth. Um, Roderick Beaton, thank you so much for joining us today. My pleasure. Thank you.