Interview with Tony Judt/ YOICHI FUNABASHI, Editor in Chief: Globalization will lead to a revival--not decline--of the state

Editor's note: This is the tenth installment of an interview series that appeared in the vernacular Asahi Shimbun under the title "Brave, grave new world."

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The 'success story' of European integration in the postwar era faces major challenges in an increasingly globalized world, where non-European nations are rapidly rising. Historian Tony Judt explains the potential and limitations of European integration, the future of U.S.-Europe relations and the lessons Asia can learn from European integration.

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Question: What kind of threats do you think Europe will face over the next 15 to 20 years?

Answer: The big threat is very simple. It is the danger that Europe will retreat inside itself, that it will close itself away from difficult problems. That retreat will become a kind of metaphor for looking inside, (with people saying:) "Europe is prosperous. Europe is safe. Europe doesn't have any obvious enemies, except maybe Russia."

There's a danger that each European politician and each country will say that Europe is primarily about self-interest. We saw this when they chose the president and the high commissioner for foreign affairs. While perfectly nice people, they're rather small. This was a deliberate move to say that Europe does not have big international ambitions.

Because Europe was not constructed "politically," but was constructed "institutionally" because there were no political choices, they built economic arrangement, a common agricultural policy, the European Court. The culture of each separate country is very hostile to Europe partly because politicians often use Europe as a target. They said, "We would like to do this, but because of European laws or Europe limits this is what we can do and so on," which is good politics in the short run, but bad in the long run.

I think we are likely to see, with increased economic difficulties, problems of migration, of cultural clashes and so on, the rise of nationalist politics. We see it already a little bit in England. We certainly see it in Italy. We saw it in Austria 10 years ago. We see it today in Holland.

The third challenge is that Europe is going to have to think collectively about two big countries on its borders: Russia and Turkey.

The Russian problem is easier for Europeans to think about, but they are divided. Particularly in Germany, they think that the way to deal with a rising semi-authoritarian Russia is to treat it as a "great power," don't worry about its politics, and simply negotiate oil and gas and so on. The Germans feel very much like that.

But the East Europeans, of course, the Poles, Romanians, Hungarians, still regard Russia primarily as a political threat, but also as an economic competitor. This will divide Europe quite a lot.

Now, Turkey is more complicated. I think the real tragic dilemma is Turkey because Turkey is the only very large Muslim democracy. It's not a perfect democracy. It has complicated internal divisions, but it's a secular country with a large number of Muslims. If Europe says, "Turkey cannot join because it's too big, too poor, too Muslim or whatever," the message becomes very clear--Europe is not for Muslims.

Turkey will turn away. This is already happening, actually, and will look for allies in Central Asia and in the Middle East. There will be deep bitterness among the Turkish educated class, who invested emotionally and economically in the idea of Europe. And I think the rest of the Muslim world will say, "Well, what this shows is that Europe is not open to a sort of post-religious, post-cultural membership and unity and expansion."

Q: A German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, recently wrote, "What unites people everywhere, not just in Europe but all over the globe, is a longing for a world that is just a little less compulsorily integrated." He seems to understand the popular sentiment rather well. Do you think that Europe may have to promote integration, as it is seen as connected to globalization?

A: I think the only country which for a long time welcomed this, apart from the little countries, like Luxembourg, was West Germany, or Germany, because to be integrated in Europe was to be rescued from their history. To become part of Europe was to stop being Germany, and what all that meant about Hitler, the Nazis and the war and so on.

But that's far away now. There are very few people left who remember the war. There are very few people left who remember the 1950s or even the 1960s.

I think the reality is that no one actually, today, wants more European integration. There is no one of influence who wants it. The big problem is that the one area where there is total integration is the euro, and we have, therefore, a paradox. You have an integrated currency in a non-integrated political space, and this works negatively.

The French were terrified of the prospect of German reunification. We know that privately, Mitterrand wished that Gorbachev would not allow it. He could not say that in public, of course. So the French wanted to say the condition under which they would allow German reunification was that Germany was tightly bound into a much tighter European project.

The best way to do this was to create a single currency, because then there would be a single set of political and economic policies so that the risks of a large Germany becoming too dominant would be reduced.

The Germans said they were frightened, that if this happened, their economic stability, their currency stability would be profoundly undermined because they would have the same currency as weak countries like Greece or Portugal and so on.

And so, the Germans said, "OK, we will join this currency union, but the currency of the euro must be modeled on our currency, the Deutsche mark. It must be strong and independent. There must be no political interference in interest rates and so on."

And so, the Europe of the 1990s and today was constructed on a political compromise. And of course, we see the problem with that today, in Greece.

I would say that the smart thing to do today would be to have a Europe which is no more integrated than it currently is, but with the focus very much on Europe's leverage in the world as a "collective force," but not as an integrated place.

You would need, for example, to educate Europeans to understand that Europe has enormous power in the Middle East, and I'll give you one example. This might change, but at the moment Europe is still much more favorably regarded by most Islamic countries than America is, for obvious reasons, in the last 10 years.

Europe could be a very active interlocutor, say, in the Israel-Palestine question because what Israel wants more than anything else in the long term is to be part of Europe, to be fully integrated into the EU. Why? Because it would rescue it from the Middle East, guarantee its economic future like a European country, which is what it feels like and wants to feel like, and permanently insulate it against what it sees as the risks of its neighborhood.

Europe doesn't use that lever at all, in the same way Europe doesn't use its influence in Arab countries at all.

Q: In a way, the European Project has been designed to overcome that German question. Do you think the European Project has fulfilled its mission?

A: In reality, Germany is the country which has changed the most in the last 20 years. I mean, I used to go a lot to Germany. I remember the first change came in the 1960s, with a generation that was obsessed with German guilt, German embarrassment and German responsibility. And for 20 years, we lived with a Germany which kept on saying "sorry," so to speak.

I would go to visit people in Bonn or give a talk in Frankfurt, and if I said anything critical about Israel or even about England, people would say: "No, no, no! We can't talk about that because we are disqualified. We don't have the right to take part in that conversation."

That started to change in the 1990s. If you go to Berlin today, the big debates are about German self-interest and what's good for Germany. We don't yet have a point where Germans feel comfortable behaving like everyone else on activity abroad, anti-Semitism, Israel. There is still a discomfort about finding themselves saying the wrong things. But on Europe, they're much more open and direct.

Most Germans are much more self-confident than they've been in my lifetime. But the people who are worried about Germany are not the French. It's the Poles, the Lithuanians, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenians, Romanians. They're the ones who are worried about Germany, because they see Germany making deals with Russia and they remember the 1930s. So that's the "new picture," I think.

Q: The European Project has been propelled forward by two European institutions, political parties and public intellectuals. The political parties, particularly the Social Democrats, have been the "mother" of welfare states. That certainly is basis of the model.

But looking back over the past 20 years or so, particularly in this age of globalization, the function of political parties may have changed or been transformed dramatically. What are your thoughts?

A: I would have said that Social Democratic parties have lost their sense of direction because today the institutions are all in place. They have no project. They have no ambition and they were founded very much to work within nation-states.

Notice, for example, despite the fact that their language is ethical and moral and egalitarian and so on, that all of the Social Democratic parties of Europe were very quiet at the time of the Balkan Wars. They had nothing to offer about Bosnia or the injustice of Serbian behavior. They were very provincial, very parochial, "looking inside."

But my real feeling today is that globalization is going to create, it's already creating, a political backlash. We have entered a "new age of insecurity," to quote Keynes, who talked about it in the 1940s. People feel insecure because of climate uncertainty, because of economic uncertainty, because of terrorism, because they don't feel that the government any longer can control the circumstances they find themselves in.

Globalization is an abstraction, but the loss of a job or the fear of terror or some unspecified climate change is very real and much easier to convert into politics.

And so, if I were looking ahead, which I should not do, but if I were looking ahead I would say that I think in the next generation we shall see a revival of the state, not a decline of the state.

Q: What do you think the future relationship between Europe and America will be like?

A: Europe mattered for America when the United States, for military reasons, felt a very strong need to have an alliance with reliable allies in a dangerous part of the world, when the dangerous part of the world was the Mediterranean and the frontiers of the Soviet Union.

Those are not the dangerous parts of the world anymore. The dangerous part of the world now, if you ask me, is the southern part of Central Asia, from Iran to Pakistan to India. That's the most likely explosively difficult area for the next 25 years.

From an American foreign policy perspective, Europe is irrelevant there. Europe can't help very much. Europe is not physically there and there's a big difference in perspective.

So I think, while Obama will treat Europe in a civilized way, the Europeans will make a big mistake if they assume that they are now still an important part of America's view of the world. The big change began in 1989, a slow change, but it's a real change and it's happened. Europeans cannot rely on America as their natural "best friend" anymore. They won't fight each other, of course not, but they don't share the same interests at all.

Q: The United States has treated European integration in a kind of benevolent way. NATO is the glue between America and Europe. But in Asia-Pacific, the United States has traditionally had a very hostile attitude toward regional Asian projects exemplified most recently in Hatoyama's proposal for an East Asian Community. How do you explain this difference?

A: Three generations of American foreign policy thinkers, both in the State Department and in the academic world as well, grew up with the idea that Europe was a single bloc, a single entity, that the great European powers--England, Britain, France, Germany--were no longer powers. So it was better to treat them collectively, but there was no threat and therefore they were united. In some way, they strengthened America because they gave it a solid "single ally."

You remember the famous remark by Kissinger in the 1970s? "If I want to telephone Europe, what number should I call?" But of course, the point of the joke was that he wanted "one" European number. No one was afraid of a "big Europe," because Europe has no strategic interest in opposing America on anything that America cares about.

And so, we now have no one left who goes back to before World War II, when America was against European unity because they thought it would make Europe too strong.

But when Americans look to East Asia, they only see countries getting stronger.

Japan is not so much getting stronger, but more autonomous, which is just the same thing.

China is getting bigger and stronger, obviously. Even medium-sized economies like Korea become seriously threatening in some ways.

And Russia, of course, is the country which poses a problem. Because it's so big, it's part of the European debate and it's part of the Asian debate and it's part of the East Asian debate as well.

The last time I was at the State Department, the impression I got was the attitude of American diplomats towards East Asia very closely resembled that of American diplomats towards Europe in the 1920s, which was that these are dangerous competitors who are also unstable and unreliable. We need them, but we must keep them separate from one another. And I suspect that it doesn't go much more than that.

And I think that this sense that we have suddenly woken up to a new problem of the sort we used to have in Europe is, quite frankly, for American diplomats. Remember, if you want to be cynical you could say that Americans got very lucky in the 1930s and 1940s. It was basically Europeans that destroyed each other.

Britain's economy was destroyed by the Second World War. Britain lost its empire because of the Second World War. France was humiliated by the Second World War. Germany was discredited by the Second World War.

But America cannot hope that there would be a nice "convenient" war between China and Japan and Korea to make them all small and friendly countries. So they don't quite know how to deal with it, I think.

Q: Europe has succeeded in overcoming its difficult legacy of the past while Asia is still struggling to do the same. Do you have any advice for Asia on this point?

A: I can give you advice, but I can't give you a reason why anyone would take it.

The obvious thing to say would be it's precisely because there is such a difficult history between Japan and Korea, Japan and China, and China and Russia and so on, that you'll have no choice but to acknowledge those difficulties in all conversations that take place, rather than, so to speak, insist upon the heritage of discomfort or past suffering or past victim or past guilt.

But if you wanted to do that--and this is where I'm not sure one would take the advice--it has to be understood that there's greater benefit to institutional collaboration than there is to political distance.

That was only possible in Europe because of World War II. If someone had said in 1935, "Let's build a European Union, where Germany will blend its currency with France, where there would be a single military alliance and we will all shrink our expenditures, where people will not try to devalue competitively and so on," people would have laughed.

The problem in East Asia is that the instance you've not had is the combination of Hitler and Stalin, which made Europe possible.

But I do think there's one piece of advice, I suppose, and that is the European tradition of taking advantage of alliances or interest between two countries to benefit yourself at the expense of a third country almost eventually failed. And that the prospect of a stable East Asia rests, above all, on not being competitively engaged in trying to get someone else with you against someone else.

I also think that something Americans have talked about a bit, the idea of being competitive for American friendship, is something Europeans used to do a lot. And the result is almost always negative. It's not clear that it could possibly benefit anybody in the long run.

Q: It has been generally assumed that the 21st century will be increasingly Asian, but some people have challenged this conventional perception. I am very interested to hear what you think.

A: I think Europe is still the best model for transnational structures of independent nations. No one has come up with a better model yet.

The very decisions that are taken in Brussels and obeyed in the member countries are a consequence of a kind of collective willingness to suspend formal autonomy, which is an original concept in international politics. But Europeans are too weak to make it serve as a model, which brings me to your first question.

I don't get the impression that there is anything called an "Asian model."

China is not a "model." People talk glibly about China being so important because it's a low-wage authoritarian capitalist system combining low costs, strong authority and a free, sort of, competitive market. But that's not the most important aspect of it.

The most important aspect is that it's a low-rights system. There is the combination of capitalist markets, but with the absence of the social structures of liberal capitalist societies.

In the short run, that works very well. We saw that in other places. We saw it in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. To some extent, you see it in some places in Eastern Europe today, where you have an open-market system and nothing to stop it in the form of social regulation, the wages, the conditions, the rights of speech or movement, and so on.

But in the longer run, I don't see China as a workable international model.

I know very little about Japan, but I know enough to know that Japan and China are very different places and there is no such thing as a sort of "Sino-Japanese model."

The geopolitical relationship which will matter for the next 25 years is the one between the United States and the major countries of East Asia. Paradoxically, this will not be because of economics, because economically speaking, Europe is still a very important model.

Notice that when, for example, Boeing or IBM or Microsoft develop a new product, the first thing they do is to make sure they conform to European rules, not to Chinese rules or even to American rules, because Europe sets the most demanding rules on everything from health issues, to safety issues, to monopoly issues.

And also because Europe is not a big economy, but it's a wealthy economy, so Europe matters.

But what we are going to see is that what matters economically and what matters geopolitically would split, and the geopolitical center will be the Pacific, but the economic center will be multiple, I think. It's not a single model at all.

If I were putting all my money, so to speak, on the East Asian model, that some time between now and the next 50 years, China will become a very big problem, internally as well as externally. The question of how a developing country can sustain both capitalism on one hand, and authoritarian structures on the other has never been solved, historically.

It's not likely that it will be peaceably solved now, either.

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Tony Judt, who was born in London in 1948, earned a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University. He has been a professor of history at New York University since 1987. He has also taught at Oxford University and the University of California at Berkeley. In late 1989, he visited Eastern and Western Europe and was shocked by the gap between them. This led him to write the highly acclaimed "Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945," published in 2005. The book was translated into more than 20 languages.