Europe's Right Turn: A Threat to Trade?

On the latest episode of our Foreign Press Podcast, the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents (AFPC-USA) delves into the global economic ramifications of Europe’s growing tilt to the right and what it could mean for international trade. With far-right parties gaining momentum in elections across Europe, there’s rising concern about the potential destabilization of the European Union’s core values, such as free movement and multilateral cooperation. Key sectors like trade and the flow of skilled talent in countries like France, Germany, and Italy may see significant shifts as right-wing parties increasingly adopt pro-business stances. The growing influence of these parties in the European Parliament could further complicate negotiations on trade, climate policy, and immigration.

Keith M. Rockwell, Senior Research Fellow at the Hinrich Foundation and former Director of Media Relations at the World Trade Organization (WTO), helped us learn more about this topic, spurred by his latest research including a report which provides an in-depth analysis of this issue and its global ramifications for trade around the world. With years of experience managing the WTO’s engagement with media, civil society, and global institutions, Rockwell brings valuable expertise to the table.

Rockwell met with Alan Herrera, AFPC-USA’s Editorial Supervisor, to discuss this matter in detail, and the two engaged in a spirited and informative conversation.

This episode of the Foreign Press Podcast was produced in partnership with the Hinrich Foundation. AFPC-USA is solely responsible for the content of this episode. 

Alan Herrera: Hello and welcome to the Foreign Press Podcast! I’m Alan Herrera. This podcast is an educational program brought to you by the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents in the United States. That's AFPC-USA. This episode has been produced in partnership with the Hinrich Foundation. AFPC-USA is solely responsible for the content of this episode.

On today's episode, we explore the far-reaching implications of Europe’s shift to the right on global trade and economic policies. With elections across Europe showing growing support for far-right parties, this trend could destabilize the European Union’s foundational principles of free movement and multilateral cooperation, particularly regarding trade and the flow of talent. Trade policy in key countries like France, Germany, and Italy could be affected, as right-wing parties increasingly soften their rhetoric to align with pro-business stances. With the European Parliament playing a critical role in shaping trade policy, the presence of extreme right parties adds to the complexity of trade negotiations, climate policy, and immigration.

Our guest, Keith M. Rockwell, is a Senior Research Fellow at the Hinrich Foundation and former Director of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Media Relations Division. In this role, he oversaw the WTO’s engagement with the media, civil society, parliamentarians, and the United Nations. His experience with the organization has provided him with deep insights into the workings of the WTO, and today he will guide us through his latest research for the Hinrich Foundation, highlighted in the report titled “Europe’s rightward drift opens a riptide for trade,” that offers an in-depth analysis of this shift and its potential to disrupt global trade dynamics. Stay tuned.

Keith, thank you so much for being here with me today. It is a pleasure to have you here on the Foreign Press Podcast, especially after only collaborating before via email. So, thank you again.

Keith Rockwell: Alan, it’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AH: Thank you, thank you. So, I am very much looking forward to hearing more from you, just hearing your expertise, and we are of course here today to discuss your recent Hinrich Foundation research into just [how] this rightward shift ​in European politics, politics all across the continent, is impacting and will impact trade and trade relationships. 

My first question for you today, Keith, is: Given the recent gains of far-right parties in Europe, how do you foresee their influence potentially reshaping the European Union's trade policies in the near future? And are there specific areas within trade policy where you expect to see immediate pressure or immediate changes? 

KR: Well, as you know, trade policy in the European Union is made at EU level, the 27 member states operating through the European Commission. They jointly negotiate trade, they respond to trade actions, they use trade remedies. And the reason for that is very clear. They have a lot more clout as a market of 450 million in 27 countries than they would as even Germany, even as an individual country as powerful as Germany, could possibly have. And it puts them on pretty much equal footing with the US and China when it comes to trade at least. But that's a complex way of doing things because you have things that are done at the commission level, the executive, and then you have things that are done at the council level, that's the heads of state and government of the 27 members, and then you have the European Parliament. So, it's a complex matrix of decision making and it's a little bit like an oil tanker trying to turn around. 

It's not going to be too nimble, but you are starting to see some changes in some very important member states that will inevitably have an effect on trade policy, particularly with respect to Germany and with respect to France. And what you get there. Italy, for example, Italy lurched in 2022, lurched to the right. The Brothers of Italy came into power then and people were expecting that Prime Minister Meloni and her government would become quite extreme. But that hasn't happened. They've been really much, much more moderate than people expected. In places like the Netherlands, the extreme right has not a majority, but that party has the most seats in the parliament of any individual party. Now, what is important to understand is that governing is different from campaigning. And governing at the extreme at the margins is very difficult because in many of these countries you have many parties that go into the decision-making process. You need to form coalitions, and if you're out there at the margins, that's going to be harder for you to do. It's going to be harder for you to find partners that can help you to govern. 

This is happening in Germany now that over the weekend the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) took the largest share of the vote in Thuringia and second in Saxony and that’s the first time that they’ve cracked into the upper echelon of the state parliaments. But they're encountering difficulties because the other parties don't want to work with them. So, this is a very long way of answering your question. It's difficult to say because the ground is shifting, but what is clear is that if you look at the numbers, even in the UK where the Tories were trounced, you're seeing that the far-right parties are gaining ground and this has been a trend now for more than a decade. So, it will eventually have an impact. The parties like those in Germany and in France, the Rassemblement national [National Rally/NR] in France, oppose any new trade agreements. And, if France says no to trade agreements, it's very difficult to negotiate anything like that. So, you will see an impact and it will take a little while, but if things stay on trend right now and the right continues to be an ascendancy, it will inevitably have an impact. 

Keith M. Rockwell

AH: Oh, yes, no, absolutely. And I really appreciate your point actually about coalition building because that's something that I've observed. It's like, okay, so they win, they get in, but does that necessarily translate into policy, the ability to enact it, the ability to just work with anybody or to get anybody to work with you? Well, on the subject of trade in markets, then my next question is how might the rise of these far-right parties, how might that affect the European single market, particularly in terms of labor, mobility, and immigration? What do you see as, or I should say, what are the potential risks for the free movement of people, which is a core component of the EU? 

KR: Well, they're significant. They're significant, and particularly on an issue, you mentioned immigration, and this means immigration not only from outside the Union, but even from within the Union. You see that the far right in France and in Germany, have issues with their European neighbors and certainly major issues with people coming in from outside the Union. If there was one issue on which all of these parties would agree, whether it's the Freedom Party or Alternative for Deutschland or whether it's the Brothers of Italy, they all agree on the issue of immigration and they are not in favor of it. So, what does that mean? Well, you see that you have these rules in place. I think it's the Dublin Agreement, when refugees come into a single country, that country has responsibility for managing, for example, the asylum process. But it's very easy to move around within the 27 member states and sometimes these folks get lost. This is what we saw in Germany recently with the terrible terrorist attacks of a couple of weeks ago, which I think in turn sparked the turnout for the AFD in those Eastern German state elections.

I think if you start to mess around with the single market and you lean in the direction of restriction, you're going to really, really undermine the single market and the Maastricht Treaty. And in fact, in fact, Marine Le Pen who heads the [NR] in France has made clear that she thinks that even the movement of goods as well as persons within the EU is something that warrants a second look, and that's like pulling on the string of a sweater. Once you start to do that, the whole thing starts to unravel. So yes, the answer is that that can happen and that's something that worries many, many Europhiles. 

AH: Well, we just mentioned, and you are of course very correct, and I appreciate the sweater analogy in particular. I'm interested now, since this will give you an opportunity to elaborate on things that we've already leaned into a little bit, but far-right parties are indeed improving their positions in several key European countries overall, like how you mentioned how the Tories got trounced, but that that doesn't mean that the right didn't make significant gains in the United Kingdom. So, with them improving their positions, what do you anticipate in terms of their ability to form or influence governments in future elections, and how do you see this shifting the overall political environment in Europe? 

KR: Well, that's the question really, and it's difficult to know, as I said a few minutes ago. For the moment, the political establishment is treating these extreme right parties with a great deal of disdain in France. The problem is that there's an extreme left party that many people find equally toxic. And so, the result is that they don't have a government, they don't have a prime minister. Well, they have a caretaker government, but since the snap elections were called during the summer, we haven't seen any real progress and efforts to try and form a government keep foundering. And that creates problems because, and this is something that you see in the US as well, the political landscape is so polarized. Instead of looking and trying to find areas on which people can agree, everyone just rests in their own echo chamber and comforts themselves with the presence of those who think exactly as they do. And this makes it very hard to try and find a compromise. It's a lost art, but without it, it seems very difficult to imagine how things will really get done. And we're talking about some very serious issues right now, whether it's climate change, whether it's the threat of another pandemic, whether it's war on the doorstep of the EU, not to mention in the Middle East, all of these things are creating a climate of anxiety and governments are being looked to by their citizens to provide solutions. And the track record at the moment is not very good because there isn't a willingness to try and find a compromise. And as long as that's the case, it seems as though we're going to keep spiraling around and not getting to the heart of the problem and being able to resolve them. And some of these problems are contradictory in a way because people are, for example, in the US trying to find ways to address climate change, but they don't want to trade. 

So, it's like, okay, in order to build an electric vehicle, you need to use a lot of components and materials that they don't have in the United States. So you have to trade, and if you really want to make these products available as widely as possible and as cheaply as possible, well there's a very easy solution to that. Buy them from China. Oh no, can’t do that. Can't buy from China because China is a rival. So, you have these contradictory policies, and you have it to a certain extent in Europe, although they're dealing with China in a more nuanced way than the United States, and people have different views. I mean, they're building electric vehicles in Hungary, for example. They will be soon, they've broken ground on a factory there and they're going to start churning out BYD electric cars in the next two or three years. 

That’s not going to happen in the US. So, you do have differing opinions on this. The Germans have a very strong view, for example about China. China's one of its largest markets. They sell a lot of cars there. Its big car producers make cars in Germany. They don't want a trade war with China. But some people take a different view and some of the far-right party folks do not like being dependent upon China. Having said that, you have Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, who's from a far-right party and he's very happy to have Chinese money coming in. He's very happy to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative. The Italians were also part of that, but they've pulled out, they cut ties with China on this. They're trying to find a new way to reestablish their relations. But so, it is very much in flux, and you have even within the far-right grouping differing perspectives on trade and particularly on trade with China. On immigration, they all agree, and they all have a very hard line, and that's really what unites them and I think it’s not going to change anytime soon. 

AH: How will this impact diplomacy? I'm spitballing here. That's just something that comes to mind.

KR: Diplomacy? Well, it's a good question. I mean, you heard Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission President, has announced her desire to see the EU, not “decoupling”, but she calls it “de-risking.” The US is just “severing” its ties with China as best it can. China's finding ways to circumvent this by going in through third countries, not least via Mexico. But by “de-risking,” what this means is keeping a close eye on Chinese trade that is perhaps subsidized unfairly. It means keeping an eye on supply chains to make sure that they are sustainable and viable. That's a slightly different thing than just saying we're not buying from China like they say in the US now, and they don't want to push things too far because as I said, some key members, not least the Germans, are very keen to retain a strong relationship with China. So, in terms of that kind of diplomacy, commercial diplomacy, it's a bit fraught because the governments are in differing positions right now. 

You saw when the Trump administration cracked down on Huawei and tried to get all of these ally countries, these European countries to do the same thing, and eventually they all came along, but some of them kicking and screaming because the Chinese were offering up a product which is a quality product at a price that was certainly very competitive. Whether there's spyware attached to all of these things or not, the Europeans seem to have bought into the idea that there might be or could be, and that's enough for them to be very wary of any of these kinds of products. Whether this same argument is going to apply to electric vehicles is a good question. The Americans are already throwing down the gauntlet and saying, these electric vehicles made in China are a national security threat, and they're telling this to the Mexicans and the Canadians because of course, if the Chinese decide to build factories in those countries and they've said they will do this in Mexico, then under the terms of the (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement)  USMCA, the US has to take these products coming in under the terms of the treaty unless they wave the flag of national security, which seems to be what they're considering. 

When you talk about diplomacy, certainly commercial diplomacy, all of these things are kind of merging together and at the same time, a lot of the stuff that people need to make the products of the future come from China. Do you want to make these products? You have the Americans saying to the Dutch. For example, ASML, which makes the lithography, I think they're called, the machines that make the advanced chips. You can't trade with China because you are the world-beating company with a technology no one else has. You can't do it. Now the Dutch went along with this a little bit grumpily and that has infuriated the Chinese. It's a very, very complex situation right now, and it's a time when there needs to be strong leadership being shown. I think Ms. von der Leyen has shown that. She's a very tough customer and she has to deal with a disparate clientele, but I think she's doing a pretty good job on that for the moment, particularly given the fact that she's not necessarily popular with people like Prime Minister Meloni of Italy. It's a tough neighborhood.

AH: To say the least. What you said, actually, brings to mind another question that just came to mind for me. So how significant then is the role of the European Parliament in navigating these political changes? We know that there have been increased powers, right? So, could we see more friction or cooperation between the Parliament and the European Commission, especially on trade and immigration? That's just something that comes to mind right now, and I'm sure you have a great answer for that. 

KR: Well, it's a very good question. The makeup of the European Parliament mirrors the makeup of the member states, and you've got the sort of center, right? The conservatives have the largest number of seats, not a majority by any means. The social democrats, the center left have the second most, and then you've got two or three parties, two parties that are third and fourth that are right wing parties. One is the party of Viktor Orban and Marine Le Pen and the other is Giorgia Meloni. And then as you go down further, you start to get the very far right parties like Alternative for Deutschland and some fringe parties from Slovakia, for example, who are very much at the extreme margin of right-wing politics. It's funny how our definition of this has shifted. A center-right person, a Christian Democrat example, which might've been considered right-wing before, is now very much considered to be a centrist. 

Such is the movement to the right, something which in a place with its very troubling history, a place like Europe, you thought this could not happen, but here it is, it is happening. And so, you will have these arguments in the Parliament about trade, about the internal market. and certainly about immigration. And what you've seen is on immigration, at least the very strong position of the extreme right is bleeding into the mainstream of political discourse. And you're seeing even Olaf Schultz, whose party is in terrible trouble—this is the German Chancellor—his party is in terrible trouble, and he has to have an election in, I think, a year or two. He has shifted his position on immigration as well, because he's vulnerable there. It's the same thing everywhere in the US, it's the same thing. It's the number one issue for many, many Americans, and it's very much the same thing here, even here in Switzerland where I am, the biggest party is a party that got into power by an anti-immigrant platform. So, you can't escape it. It's everywhere. 

In the meantime, of course, the irony is that these economies without immigrants wouldn't be able to function. I mean, a lot of the jobs that are being done, not least in the agriculture sector, are being done by people who are immigrants. And if they weren't there, this stuff would rot on the vines, which everybody knows, but nobody really wants to make the tough wrestle with this conundrum. You need to have borders, you need to have an orderly process of immigration and of asylum seeking, et cetera. Having a chaotic situation is not in anyone's interests, but you also have to accept that immigration, particularly in countries like in the European Union where the demographics show the population is shrinking. I mean, there are parts of Italy and parts of France in the countryside, which are like ghost towns, and you need to have people coming in and helping out. But that's an economist's argument, which doesn't necessarily cut much ice with extremists who play to people's baser instincts, I'm afraid. 

AH: I was just about to mention that it would be very difficult to communicate these issues and the intricacies, the nuances to the average person considering how much, or rather I should say, how successful the far right has been in reshaping the narrative around this issue, around immigration in particular. 

KR: You're absolutely right. Absolutely. I mean, a lot of this goes back to, in my view, the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009. We have an absence of regulation in many places, certainly in the US, and when the US markets and banking systems start to wobble, it's felt everywhere. The inconsistencies of the Maastricht Treaty on fiscal discipline without a common budget, you could see. I was a journalist in Maastricht, and I can remember talking to German friends who said, “This is not sustainable. What's going to happen is Greece is going to fall out.” And I said, “Oh, come on. This is a great day. It's unity and whatnot.” And sure enough, it's exactly what happened. And at the time, it seemed like a theoretical discussion, but it very soon emerged that this was anything but so you have a situation in which regulation is not kept up with the changes in the economy in the society, whether it's environmental regulation, whether it's digital regulation. 

The EU is actually leading the world in terms of regulation in those two areas, the US is unable to regulate because of its polarized Congress. They can't pass laws on digital trade or on data privacy. They can't pass laws on anything like a carbon border adjustment measure. There is no common price for carbon in the US. You've got, I think, 11 different prices inside the US and in Europe they've been able to regulate more freely, and they are now the rule makers and all of the rest of the world, including the US, are rule takers. But people were so… because of this absence of regulation back in 2008, 2009, and the massive disruption that was caused by the financial crisis, by the markets’ gyration, by the fact that you had countries like Ireland, which had been very economically strong, Portugal, Greece, all of those countries were reeling, and they've only recently got back up on their feet. And people remember all this, and rather than explain to them, well, you see, the problem is that with the Maastricht Treaty, you have this set of fiscal rules, but you don't have any way of trying to get a common position on this because budgets are all handled largely at national state level. That’s a very complicated thing to explain to people.

You have, in a country like Greece where you had widespread corruption, trying to explain this to the poor people who were left destitute is very difficult to do. It's a lot easier if you are a far-right person to come over and just say, “Look, foreigners, it's their problem, their fault. They have brought this misery to us,” and because they don't vote in elections, it's much easier to be able to point the finger at them. It's of course, in many respects, nonsense. But that's the message that trickles through because in reality, the problems, whether it's climate change or whether it's economic stability or managing digital trade, the problems are so complicated that you can't reduce it to a five second soundbite. And you need to find a way to find compromise, as I said, and to put in place a structure that provides people with a little bit more certainty that governments are looking after them and their futures. And right now, people don't have that confidence, and that creates this vacuum into which these right-wing extremist parties can move. 

AH: I think a “vacuum” is a very good word for it. I was about to use the word, well, I'm going to use it now, I'm going to use it now. 

KR: Go ahead. 

AH: A communication gap. I see this, there's this gulf, there's this gulf. Actually, I'm going to link it back to something that you just said regarding how the European Union is leading in different sectors like, “Okay, the EU is tackling issues like data privacy and the US is not, et cetera.” And it's very interesting too that the EU has been making efforts, for example, to regulate artificial intelligence. We're living through right now, I've referred to it in conversation with friends and others as the, it's a second Industrial Revolution that we're living in, and the United States is definitely lagging. 

And a major issue that I see here that did come to mind while I was reviewing your research and thinking about this interview was, well, artificial intelligence offers a really easy, excellent, wonderful way for bad actors to exploit this communication gap. And if you don't have, I mean, it's of course good though, of course, we're nowhere near where we should be, right? It's of course good that the European Union is working to address these issues, but when you don't have US leadership on the same side, I imagine, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, that it just makes it even more difficult to just get the people behind these issues that we're talking about. 

KR: I think you’re absolutely right, Alan, and this is particularly true since the vast majority of the companies that we're talking about here are American companies, many of which are chaired by immigrants, by the way, interestingly, or founded by immigrants. You think about the jobs and the wealth created by those people, and you realize that there is a huge contribution being made by people who move to these rich countries, and the contribution that they make is phenomenal. Anyway, you're right. Even though the US has these big behemoths, these big tech powerhouses, they are unable to regulate because, and it's interesting to see what's happening with Kamala Harris now, because she comes from the Bay Area. She knows a lot of these tech guys, a lot of people in her party are extremely wary of the tech industry and the government has been unable to keep them in check. 

They actually, now what they do, they're North Star in terms of how they orient themselves from a regulatory standpoint is the European Union, the GDPR, general data privacy regulations. That's what they follow. And most of these people say, “Look, we are ready to be regulated.” What they don't want is 15 different types of regulations all around the world. The Chinese regulations are very draconian. No one's really going to use that as a model unless they're some sort of authoritarian government. But the Euros carefully put together their system in the same way they have for environmental measures they’re putting in place. And the US can’t agree.

They can't figure it out. They can't. There is this concern that over-regulating stifles creativity, and I think that's true. By the same token, if you have no regulation, you leave the field open to all kinds of, as you said earlier, bad actors, and people will take advantage of this empty space to create mayhem. And so it really is for the governments to try and decide how it is that they're going to do this. And if you don't, and this is a case where the US is just not able to get its act together, and the Euros have stepped into that void and are now the ones who are calling the shots in terms of regulation. And if you look at what they've done by and large and their willingness to adapt things, if and when there is a difficulty, well, I'm not sure that that's a bad thing, but it's certainly not a bad thing if the alternative is no regulation.

AH: Are there historical parallels then, Keith, that concern you and well, I'm curious then, what lessons should Europe learn from its past to avoid repeating these same mistakes, particularly in the realm of trade and diplomacy?

KR: Well, they say if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers do. I think that that’s true. I think that that's true. We can no longer say that the trading partners will always remain friendly. We've seen that that's not the case. But it is largely true. It is largely true. And if you are trading with someone, you're much less likely to enter into a full-blown conflict because it's mutually advantageous for you to have a commercial relationship, a two-way relationship. I think that certainly economic thinking has advanced so far from where it was a hundred years ago that we know what it is we have to do. But here's a problem. One of the things that was done as a result of the horrendous events of the 1930s and 1940s was the creation of the multilateral system, whether it's the United Nations, whether it's the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which morphed into the World Trade Organization.

All of those things were basically about regulation, certainly, and that's what the WTO is about. It's about rules. This is the way they've been agreed by everyone. This is the way in which we should be operating. But now, people have lost confidence in that they find it to be restrictive, and they would rather be able to take decisions on their own. The problem is, if you have, I don't know, 30, 40 actors taking various and sundry decisions that might be in conflict with the others, you're going to set the stage for some kind of disruption that could have very, very adverse consequences. Now, you can say this till you're blew in the face, and this is another example. The US is really not showing much leadership in the multilateral realm. Euros are trying, even the Chinese are trying at least on trade to strengthen the global trading system. But the Americans are wary, they are not keen to get in there and push an agenda that is forward and positive, and that's creating, again, an empty space that can be filled by bad actors.

AH: There are some far right parties, of course, based on my understanding, that are softening their rhetoric a bit. So how sustainable, Keith, do you think this shift is? And could this lead to, this is what's coming to mind for me right now, could this lead to a more complex relationship between these parties and traditional business communities?

KR: Yes, yes. Well, for example, look, I mean, Italy's a very good example of this because the Brothers of Italy was considered to be, well, the party of Mussolini, which obviously sent a shiver down the collective European spine when they were able to form a government. But Prime Minister Meloni has shown a great deal of skill at coalition building and at running a government that has been by and large, by and large, responsible in the way they act. Having said that, look at the way she deals with the media, the press. She has decided that it's a good idea to take on the press and sue people who write stories about her being short, for example, which is pretty, we haven't seen anything like what's happened in Hungary where the free and independent press has been largely gutted. Italy has a strong tradition of a very powerful news media, and they have up until now, not been too adversely affected. But when you start beating up the press, that makes people a little bit worried that there may be something else going on there that could portend a more hardline approach to society in general. 

Now, what does that mean for business? Well, business is a broad category. Regulation I think is something that's extremely important for all businesses. We've seen under regulation in the financial sector led to a giant economic spasm that has still got people reeling and I think has opened the door for a lot of the extremism that we're seeing, certainly here in Europe. If you don't have this, have rules, guidelines that people respect, then you create a circumstance where people say, “Well, I'm just going to do what I want.” And then that builds a lot of resentment, and it's a domino effect. So, if you have sensible regulation in place, and I think the new Labor government is trying very hard to do this sort of thing now in Britain, that can be a very good example to others. But if you don't, and if you have extreme positions, and if you are thin skinned about criticism and unwilling to compromise, the fallout from that will certainly affect business.

AH: Well, I think that that's an excellent point. I mean, in Spanish we call that una falta de respeto, which you never want to have anybody tell you to your face.

KR: And what does it mean?

AH: Well, essentially a lack of respect. So, if somebody is, of course, talking about this in the context that we're talking about right now, that's bad enough. Now imagine if your family member says it to you, that is bad enough. And I can imagine, of course, considering that we're on the topic of politics and coalition building and everything, these people, they all know each other. They have to work closely with each other, very closely with each other day in and day out. And I can imagine that it gets as heated as it does between any family member at the end of the day. Yeah, at the end of the day, we're talking about people who are, in different ways, fighting for the soul of their respective countries. 

KR: This argument, you're absolutely right. This argument plays out around the family dinner table in families around the world. Certainly, in my own family it does. And such is the polarization that the kind of guiding star that people used to have of common values and beliefs around which we could all rally, these don't seem to be there.

People are not embracing the things that have made these countries what they are. And these are great countries. They didn't just sort of emerge out of the ether. They emerged because people were together and because they worked towards a common goal, they believed in public goods and they believed in unifying around the kinds of things that made their countries great. And a lot of this is about trust, that trust has been shaken. And it can only be governments that bring this back because as much as you can appreciate heroic business leaders and whatnot, and the innovation that they bring, they are not responsible at the end of the day for all of the people, including those who are less fortunate and who need help from others. And that whole concept of a helping hand, I'm afraid that's another thing that's been lost, and I find that to be quite worrisome.

AH: I guess this, it is very much worrisome. And I guess that this brings me to my final question, and again, I'm spitballing here, by the way. I love how naturally we've been able to discuss all of this, so thank you very much.

KR: Sorry if I start riffing in the other direction. I have this habit where my brain works in such a way that I, but keep me on the straight and narrow.

AH: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. You are making wonderful points that in my opinion, certainly it's helping to facilitate my own understanding of this research. I can tell you that since working and partnering with the Hinrich Foundation, this has been such a very, very dense topic, a very esoteric topic often. But we are of course, on the subject of communication gaps, communicating these issues to the average person in general. And as a member of the press myself, I always try to remember that I am an average person. All I'm doing is trying to communicate with people like me. So, this is, yeah, this is wonderful. So, thank you.

KR: And you’re trying to understand as best you can hugely complex topics and then explain them in a way that a broad audience can comprehend. It's a very important job.

AH: And the fact that there's this disconnect now, I see that as, and this loops back to everything that we're discussing right now, right? It's severely impacting people's relationships with the fourth estate. It's impacting people's relationships with their political leaders, with each other, and it's certainly impacting trade and diplomacy.

Hinrich Foundation

KR: It is. All of those things are interconnected in the kind of societal matrix within which we have operated for the better part of the last century. And now, a lot of these things are being shaken. And of course, that affects trade and diplomacy because as I said earlier, when you're dealing with very complicated problems that really affect people's lives, it's not easy to explain to them Why is this happening? You can talk about M1 and fiscal deficits and all this other stuff, but that goes over people's heads. And if someone can come in there with a simple, simplistic message that is based on fear and hate, then they're going to do that. And that is what they're doing. And people buy into it because they don't get a satisfactory explanation for why things have turned out as they have from people who are invested in a positive, productive, balanced outcome. What they get is a simplistic approach that is easy for them to digest. It builds on tribalism, which people fall back into when they're uncertain about the future. And it says it's us against them. And that's a very dangerous dynamic.

AH: Absolutely. And I suppose to close this out, I would love to hear your thoughts on what you believe are the long-term implications for the European Union's cohesion and the viability of its single market. What does this mean? We're of course, sitting here in 2024, and it has been a very chaotic year, to say the least. So, I mean, I wonder, given your expertise, what do you think we can even expect a year from now or more?

KR: Well, we talked about very complicated things and how people can't get their heads around why something has value. And a very good example of that is the European Union. But we have, in the case of the European Union, a counterfactual. We have an example of a country that decided to hell with this, we don't need this. We're pulling out, and that country, of course, is Britain. And look what happened to them. None of the other European countries are sitting there going, “What a resounding success Brexit has been.” They’re not saying that. The Brits aren’t saying this. Two-thirds of people in Britain think this, and have buyer's remorse. They have decided on their own back to make themselves poorer. Now, the rest of Europe's looking at this and saying, “We don't want to go that way.” 

Even Marine Le Pen, she doesn’t talk about destroying the euro anymore. She doesn’t talk about pulling. She doesn’t talk about “Frexit” or pulling the French out. What she talks about, and we talked about this a little bit earlier, is messing with the internal market in such a way and to give advantage to French companies over and above other European companies. But she's toned down that rhetoric. And I think you'll see, and I think the EU has done a very good job on things like managing the pandemic.

You can argue whether their approach was better than the American approach, but in fact, they both did compared to many other places really quite well. So, I think for the moment, and this can always change, the next crisis is just around the corner. I think people look at the European Union and say, “This is an idea. This is a structure that has brought us a lot of value.” And you can talk about this on any number of levels, just young people being able to travel all around without a passport, without changing money at every rail station or airport. All of these things are a benefit that people appreciate and that the British have lost, and these other countries are saying, “We don't want to do that. So, we do have that, and I don't think that we're going to see too many other people becoming too keen to break up the EU. And I think if you move those ideas, we try to move those ideas into the mainstream, you're not going to succeed.

AH: Thank you so much, Keith, for all of these insights. This has been a very engaging conversation, and I really loved just coming away from just reading this research and learning so much more. And I know that our audience of foreign correspondents will absolutely appreciate it. So, I really appreciate your time, and thank you so much for joining me today on the Foreign Press podcast.

KR: Alan, it's been a great pleasure. Thanks for taking the time. I enjoyed the conversation a lot. Let's do it again sometime.