France, Germany, and the State of Europe – with Joseph de Weck

Danny Buerkli: My guest today is Joseph de Weck. Jo is a historian and senior fellow at the Institut Montaigne. He writes columns for various publications, has published a book about Macron, and serves as the Europe director for Greenmantle, a macroeconomic advisory firm. Jo, welcome.

Jo de Weck: Thank you very much for having me.

Danny: If we start with France and Macron specifically, what did Emmanuel Macron learn from Paul Ricœur?

Jo: Paul Ricœur was a very old man when Macron got to know him. Macron was studying at Sciences Po, one of France’s elite universities, and he helped Ricœur edit one of his last books. Ricœur is a special character in the French philosophical pantheon. He’s neither left-wing nor right-wing. He’s a Protestant, a liberal — a rarity in the French intellectual spectrum. One of his theses was that identity is created through narration, through performative acts — that identity is not something fixed but something that can be made through speech and the use of words.

This is interesting because Macron himself has said that perhaps one of the biggest tasks of his presidency is to create a European identity. He has said that his work is to do ideological work for Europe. He understands that for Europe to come into existence as a polity that can act on the world stage, integrate nation states, and become a geopolitical actor, you need democratic legitimacy. You need an identity that binds people together and makes them agree to have fiscal transfers or act together against a common enemy. He understands that right now there is no true European demos. There are elements of it — we can all feel European in certain instances — but it’s incomplete.

If Europe wants to make the big leap forward that Macron envisions, that identity needs to be created. What is really interesting is that he thinks this way, because most European politicians would say their goal is not to do ideology but simply to improve people’s well-being — the kind of third-way politics completely void of ideological content. In Germany, even the word ideology is very negatively connoted, because the last time someone tried to do ideology, it went very badly. One of the most interesting aspects of Macron is that he thinks he’s in government not only to solve problems — he very much has a technocratic mindset — but also that his job is to build a European identity.

Danny: Another person who’s written quite a bit about French identity, the question of ascendancy and decline, is Michel Houellebecq — controversially so. What does he get right?

Jo: It’s very easy to say what he got wrong. He said there was an imminent takeover by an Islamist party in France that would win elections. In his novel Submission, the Islamists should have taken over by 2022 or perhaps 2027. We’re obviously far from that. It was always a complete fantasy, because anyone who knows the French knows they are completely uncompromising on secularism. France without the croque-monsieur is unthinkable. There would be no France before there was no cheese-ham sandwich.

The idea that France’s Muslim population is steadily growing is also wrong. There’s always this hyperbole that immigrants would have many more children than the French who have been there before, and that is simply not true. If you look at the statistics, the children of people who moved to France have exactly as many children as everyone else, and polls show that their affiliation to religion is relatively weak.

What Houellebecq gets right in most of his books is that there is a sense of decline in France, especially perhaps for his cohort — white men. The red thread in all his books is a main character who is basically a version of Houellebecq, looking at the world and thinking it was better before. The French like these kinds of stories. There’s not only Houellebecq — Virginie Despentes, for example, wrote a very similar trilogy called Vernon Subutex, also about decline. The French like this because they’ve been thinking in terms of decline for a very long time. Peak France was maybe the late nineteenth century, so they’ve been in this mode for ages, and they’re very pessimistic. Polls show that the French are extremely pessimistic compared to other nations about the future of their country, while they are exactly as optimistic about their personal future as any other European. A German is as optimistic about his own future as a Frenchman, but if you ask the French about their country’s future, they’re pessimistic.

I think Houellebecq caters well to this. There is a demand for a pessimist, depressive narrative. Macron once said of himself that he’s a depressive writer, and that in his quality as a depressive writer he really resembles France. I think that’s right. In this French depression there’s a lot of self-narration, a way of seeing yourself through a pessimism that is a real problem in the country. There’s also truth to it — there is a sense of decline that you can see in statistics. But perhaps — and here we’re back at Ricœur — the narration is stronger than the reality.

Over the last ten years, on a lot of factors things have gotten better under Macron’s presidency. Unemployment is much lower today than when he came into power. Purchasing power has improved — there was a dip with the pandemic, but overall it has improved. There are many indicators that point towards genuine improvement. Not everything has gone badly.

Danny: One characteristic of France is its reliance on a very small cadre of elite institutions to produce the leadership of the country — not just political and civil service leadership but also private sector leadership. ENA was the school founded after the sense of French defeat, founded to improve the state of affairs, and Macron closed it down in response to the Gilets Jaunes protests. Is it actually gone?

Jo: No, it isn’t. It still exists under a different name. The curriculum has changed. People who do this kind of school now have to spend more time in the provinces and less time in Paris. I know people who always wanted to do ENA because it’s the royal road, but they always wanted to be in positions of power and responsibility right away — they never wanted to spend time in the provinces doing less glamorous work far from Paris and its cultural life. By changing the curriculum and ensuring students spend more time outside Paris doing less prestigious things before they accede to prestigious posts, the type of people who apply is maybe a bit different. That’s a good thing. But the basic problem stays, and Macron is the pure product of it — this idea that you have to build an elite class of enlightened technocrats who can solve problems, deliver for the people, and run the country.

There are many problems, but two are key. The first is that these schools were supposed to be very republican, meritocratic institutions. There is an American dream about being able to rise from bottom to top, and there’s a French dream that is very similar — except it’s the state, through these schools, rather than the market that allows you to move up. The entry exams are highly competitive. There’s no way to buy yourself into these schools. On paper everything is super meritocratic; in reality, not at all. The reproduction of elites is getting worse. In the 1960s and 70s, the narrative of the school as a motor of social ascension was very true; today it is much less so. You can have elites, but it’s a real problem when those elites are just the children of past elites. It destroys the French republican dream and undermines the legitimacy of the state and the social model.

The second problem is that French elites have a conception of politics that relies entirely on output legitimacy — the idea that if you get the results right, if pensions are good, if all the KPIs in different policy areas are solid, then you’re delivering good politics and the people will reward that. This is a hyper-French conception of politics, one that was dominant in the West more broadly in the 1990s and 2000s. But it completely misunderstands that democracy and politics are also about political participation. As people have become dissatisfied with politics in France, the response has always been to centralize power even more, to give technocratic elites even more competences, in the hope that better delivery would legitimize politics. That has been the wrong response.

Macron is in some ways the climax of this tendency. There’s no French president since Charles de Gaulle who has centralized power as much or been as top-down and technocratic. And it has obviously failed in important ways. He managed to get results in many areas — unemployment, the economy — but he has lost a huge part of the population. The far right has risen under his nine years in power, because he misunderstands that politics is about results but also about political participation, giving people a voice, taking them seriously. The Gilets Jaunes protests and other protest movements were about concrete issues, but they were also fundamentally about political participation. As a Swiss person living in France, I can completely understand that. It’s hard to live in a country where for ten years one person decides everything, and then you think: the French Revolution — maybe it was about something else as well. He hasn’t understood that to this day. And it’s not only his problem but the problem of most of France’s technocratic elites. That is something France truly has to address.

Danny: Historically, what explains this extreme tolerance for centralization?

Jo: France is one of the oldest states in Europe. It has a centuries-old history of centralization. The kings were already centralizing politics. You had very early formation of centralized bureaucracies. French as a unified language came into being early. You have a centuries-old history that predates the Republic and the French Revolution, and that said you need a state, you need a bureaucracy, and it has to be run top-down.

There are lots of anecdotes that illustrate this. Take the history of the baguette. Why do we have the baguette in France — one piece of bread, clearly standardized, very recognizable? Whether you’re in Corsica or in Brittany, you will always get your baguette, because they standardized exactly how it should look, what kind of wheat is used, and so on. One explanation for this craving for standardization — and with it, excellence and the definition of what is French — comes from economic history. France had a protectionist, mercantilist economic policy even under the kings — Colbertism. One instrument of driving exports was the idea that France should always export excellent products, and that the state should define quality standards for the cloth, the textiles. You had all these standards being imposed while other places had no state enforcing product quality, so products were indeed worse — businessmen would cut corners, add bad textiles to make things cheaper. This standardization comes from an export-oriented policy driven towards excellence, which is funny because it still exists today. France’s export economy that works well is the luxury industry — high quality, selling the idea of superior quality.

The other aspect is that the French believe, through the French Revolution and its three core tenets — liberty, fraternity, equality — that the state is the central actor to bring about these promises. And they continue to believe that. It’s a paradox I don’t quite understand. They are state-centric, and to bring about these promises they’re ready to give the state enormous power. We’ve seen it with anti-terrorism, for example. After the Bataclan attacks, the French state was given sweeping powers to read every email. There is very little sense of data privacy, because the French said: the state has to protect us, so we have to give them everything. To be fair, it worked quite well — there have been very few attacks since. But it shows the reflex: if there’s a problem, you call on the state.

Danny: If we pivot to Germany — the AfD, the right-wing populist or extremist party, is currently polling around 25%, give or take. That would make it the largest party by share of vote. The elections are a couple of years away, in 2029, but it seems like the system is between a rock and a hard place. The party might get banned, which would disenfranchise a large part of the population, or it might succeed at the polls. How does Germany get out of this conundrum?

Jo: I don’t know. The thing with the AfD is interesting because the far right in Germany came much later than in other European countries. Most European countries saw a far right emerging in the 1990s or 2000s. Germany never really had that, for historical reasons, and seemed immune to it — but now we realize it is not.

What is unusual is that the AfD was born in the Euro crisis, created by economics professors who were against a deepening of the Eurozone and fiscal integration. It came from an ordoliberal, bourgeois background, and then slowly morphed into a far-right, xenophobic, openly racist, denialist party. The main accelerator was 2015 — the Syrian refugee crisis and Merkel’s decision to take in a million Syrians.

Because the AfD formed so much later than most other European far-right parties, it hasn’t made the move towards the political center that we see elsewhere. It remains a party that is actually drifting further to the far right. This means that no centrist or center-right party in Germany can work with it, because disagreements are everywhere. On economic policy it’s completely unclear what the AfD wants: you have a radical wing that says we need to be Milei-type libertarians, and a more Rassemblement National-style wing that says we need a strong welfare state but only for Germans. On foreign policy, you have people who are pro-Trump and pro-MAGA, and others who are European sovereigntists saying we need to build a Europe that defends European civilization and our enemies are Trump as much as Russia. Some want to abolish NATO and close the Ramstein base. On migration, there are people who want to take away passports from millions of people and expel them from the country — “remigration,” they call it. On Israel-Gaza-Palestine, there are people taking extreme positions on both sides within the same party.

It’s a party that on most questions has no clear line, which is also reflected in the fact that it has a co-leadership with both presidents holding different opinions. The radical wings are perhaps not winning, but they’re not losing either. Those in the AfD who try to drive the party towards the center are not succeeding. They’re at around 24–25% in the polls.

Now, the election is only in 2029, and I would say two things. First, the AfD usually does a bit worse than the polls suggest, so perhaps the result is 22%. Second, there is no perspective for a coalition with the CDU by 2029. The AfD’s policy program is too incoherent, and most in the CDU simply don’t want it. Polls show that 60% of CDU voters say they would no longer vote for the CDU if it entered a coalition with the AfD. If someone from the CDU proposed that, the party would split. So it’s not a possibility for 2029, which also means there is no right-wing majority possible. The governing majority will be the CDU with the center-left SPD, and possibly in 2029 with the Greens to get the numbers. You don’t get political alternation, and that is a real problem for democracy. It creates further dissatisfaction. That is what worries me.

For Germany, I’m more worried about 2033 than 2029. I don’t see a solution to the problem right now. I don’t think the AfD is going to go away, but I also think it will never get above 26–27%. So there will never be an AfD government on its own. Perhaps in 2033 there will be an AfD-CDU government, but for this to happen the AfD would need to move further to the center, and the CDU would need to be dominated by its younger generations, who unfortunately are much more right-wing than the older ones.

Danny: A naive reading of the situation would say that the CDU is not close enough to the median voter position on migration — that it’s not reflecting what voters want. And the naive question would be: why can’t they just shift their position? There’s plenty of policy space between the CDU’s current position and some of what the AfD wants.

Jo: The CDU is doing this. There’s been a huge shift in Germany and in Europe in general on migration. Trump had two big domestic policy agendas — migration and deregulation. In a sense, Europe has done the same, but even before Trump. Two big things dominate European politics right now: what Brussels calls debureaucratization — massive cutting back of rules, climate legislation, and so on — and a huge change in European policy towards migration. There is no one in government in Europe anymore who is pro-migration, with the exception of Pedro Sánchez in Spain.

In the last year, EU leaders and Parliament have passed reforms on migration and asylum policy that would have been unthinkable two or three years ago. Previously, Olaf Scholz and his coalition with the Greens were blocking a lot of hardening of migration policy in Brussels, and that is gone. Europe’s migration policy is really tightening. Everyone is moving towards the Danish model — the Social Democratic Party there and the Labour Party in the UK, but Europe as a whole. We’re already seeing it reflected in the statistics: fewer people coming, more money for Frontex, less rights for migrants and asylum seekers, development policy always linked to migration — you get development funds only if the country accepts returns. This is really happening. It’s not as extreme as in the US — we don’t have ICE in Europe — but we’re in full swing.

The question is whether it works politically — whether it has the intended effect of weakening the far right. The Danish example, people would say, did work: the Dansk Folkeparti has been decimated, down to around 5–6%. But there aren’t many other examples where it worked. I’m not sure it works in our current environment. Because of the way the media landscape is fragmented — social media and so on — there’s a disconnection between the reality of things and the perceived reality. Regardless of how low migration figures are, the AfD will continue to rant about it and lie, and this will resonate with at least around 20% of the population who have a more xenophobic mindset or care more about insider-outsider issues. So I’m not sure we can repeat the Danish success, especially since the Danes went very far with symbolically cruel measures that Germany isn’t doing, even if in substance the policy is nearly as harsh.

Danny: If we look at Europe more broadly, there’s a wonderful line — “everything needs to change so everything can stay the same” — from the Gattopardo. Macron has recently said as much, Mario Draghi has been saying the same thing for a very long time. Has anything happened?

Jo: Yes, a lot of things are happening in reality. Europe is in a very big shift. The problem as an analyst or journalist is that Europe is the cumulative coming together of many individual, piecemeal decisions. There is no big speech that says “Europe is independent today,” because there is no president, no person who has political responsibility for the whole continent. There is no single master plan. But it doesn’t mean a lot isn’t happening.

As I was saying on migration, politics has changed completely. On defense, massive things are happening — a series of firsts that would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago. For the first time, the EU has issued common debt to finance defense spending of member states — the so-called SAFE loan, €150 billion distributed to member states in ultra-cheap loans to finance their defense ramp-up. That was completely unthinkable, and it was decided in May 2025 under the impetus of Trump’s return to the White House and the questioning of NATO. That we issue common debt to jointly finance a European defense ramp-up is a huge change.

A second first: this money is tied to being spent on European defense producers. 65% of every weapon system bought with this money has to be produced in Europe. Also completely unthinkable a couple of years ago, because previously Europeans saw buying American arms as a kind of premium for American insurance. But since Trump doesn’t uphold his end of the bargain anymore, the deal doesn’t hold. So Europeans think: we have to spend more, we’re not even sure the US security protection will be there, so we might as well spend it on our own industry — it’s an impulse to the economy, and it creates capabilities that reduce vulnerabilities and chokepoints towards the US. That Eastern European and Nordic countries all agreed to European preference in arms purchases is a huge change. European preference was always just a French fantasy; now it’s becoming reality.

A third first: in December, for the first time, we prolonged sanctions on Russian frozen assets not with unanimity but with a majority decision. That has never been done before. We have understood that clinging to the unanimity principle just blocks and paralyzes Europe, and we have decided that in moments of geopolitical urgency we need to be able to act and be ready to erode that principle.

These are three precedents set just in the last year, all of which would have been unthinkable only a couple of years ago. So yes, things are happening. But there are two concerns. The first: do we have enough time? Europe changes slowly, and people tend to underestimate the cumulative effects of individual decisions. But it always needs a lot of time. Most Europeans say we have to be ready by 2029, but some argue that the build-up of Russia’s arms industry is so huge, so beyond what is needed to sustain the war in Ukraine, that it could come earlier. Europe’s problem is a timing problem. You see Europe moving towards more capabilities, but the question is whether it’s fast enough.

And then on a lot of other things, it’s not changing at all.

Danny: If someone forced you to deliver the steel-man version — the good-faith version — of the Trump administration’s argument against Europe, what would that look like?

Jo: Trump was completely right that Europe is not doing enough to defend itself. In that sense he has been successful: European defense spending as a percentage of GDP has doubled since 2015, and we’re at the beginning of something larger. By 2030, Germany will be the biggest spender on defense in the world. That’s a fact with enormous geopolitical consequences.

But be careful what you wish for. With all these European preference rules and defense procurement changes, Americans are now waking up to this. If you look at the national defense strategy, they’re pushing against it, saying it’s a problem that only 8% of Germany’s procurement goes to US arms. What Trump and Putin have actually created — both of whom agree that Europe as a unified entity is a bad thing, both wanting the EU to fragment so it’s easier to play off the parts against each other — is that so far they’ve actually brought Europeans closer together. We have integrated more, we’re doing far more, and we’re laying the foundations of an independent European defense, which is something Russia certainly doesn’t want, and which the US never really wanted either. US elites always said Europeans don’t spend enough, but they were also thinking: it was quite a cheap colony. It wasn’t so expensive to make sure Europe always remained dependent on us.

Most of the US foreign policy and national security establishment would say that Trump’s policy is backfiring. It has implications not only for defense but for other areas. Think about our dependency on US tech. That was never a problem because we were America’s junior partner. We didn’t feel it was a vulnerability because we had this deal that we are together no matter what in terms of security. But if that deal doesn’t hold, suddenly you start looking at your vulnerabilities in other areas, and that’s exactly what is happening. Germany’s government is looking for alternatives to Microsoft because they’re afraid of it being used as a chokepoint. The French are doing the same. We’re at the beginning of a digital sovereignty agenda that would never have existed without Trump.

In ten or twenty years, historians might look back and say this was the beginning of Europe’s self-affirmation and long road towards self-determination, with huge implications beyond defense. Or they’ll say Europeans didn’t manage to get their act together and didn’t solve the timing problem. The key year for that question may be next year. 2027 is a super election year in Europe — French elections, Italian elections, Spanish elections, Polish elections. If the far right wins in France — which is perhaps the most important election next year and indeed for the years to come — then this below-the-surface progress in building a common Europe grinds to a halt. The two key elections to watch are France and Poland.

Danny: You mentioned the technological dependency of Europe on the US. It seems increasingly clear that developing frontier AI and putting it to good use will be an important — possibly the most important — contributing factor to economic growth and prosperity. While there are European attempts to catch up, the political economy of Europe seems to work against the continent: this is a technology that requires really concentrated investment, whereas the EU decided for political economy reasons to spread its AI gigafactories across the continent. What should Europe do to avoid becoming terminally dependent on the US? Or maybe it just matters less — maybe we just let American capital markets invest a lot of money into developing the technology, and then pick it up once it’s mature and ready.

Jo: There is an argument for that — that the value AI ultimately creates is in the application of AI, less in the companies developing it today. There’s an economic history argument in that direction.

But there’s a caveat to the narrative that Europe’s economy is really bad and lagging the US. Since 2010, real GDP in Europe lagged the US by about 8%, which is a lot. But if you strip out demographics, Europe lagged the US by only 2.4% — a huge part is just immigration. Foreign-born population in the EU is roughly 9%; in the US it’s 15%. So GDP per capita in Europe has grown about 16% since 2010, and in the US about 19%. The gap is not huge.

If you look at what explains that gap, there are four factors. First, Americans work more — roughly 12% more hours than Europeans. Second, Americans have cheaper energy because they’ve become a net energy exporter — that is a genuine problem for Europe. Demographics and work hours are political preferences. Energy is a problem Europe needs to fix. Third, the American budget deficit is much higher — around 6% of GDP versus the EU average of around 3%. Europeans could also spend more, and that’s a big challenge. We’re getting there; Germany is making a huge shift in fiscal policy. The fourth factor — only the fourth — is productivity. And this is where the question of technological leadership comes up.

In reality, the gap is much smaller than people think. If you look at which sectors drive higher US productivity, it’s the tech sector. The rest of the US economy is often less productive than in Europe, but the tech sector is far more productive. And you can ask: does this really trickle down to the economy as a whole? Much of the productivity gains in the US don’t really trickle down because they’re often monopolies, so the money goes to shareholders rather than spreading through the economy.

So there’s a whole argument that this is less of a problem than we think. I think Europe’s prime problem with these technologies is less that we’re missing out on growth potential — though we are — and more that we lack capabilities, which makes us geopolitically vulnerable to the US and China. The problem is less about growth and more about sovereignty and capability.

Then the question is how to address that, and as you said, the political economy of Europe is very unfavorable. We don’t have EU-wide industrial policy. We don’t have EU funds large enough for the kind of subsidization required. We don’t have European capital markets sufficiently integrated to allow European companies to get private money in the massive sums needed — the kind of enormous CapEx investment that only works because of American capital markets. We have fragmented markets for the application of AI and technology, with each country having different rules, making it difficult for a startup to become pan-European.

There’s a lot Europe needs to do on this front. Using the quote from the Gattopardo — in the economic domain, I think it’s really true. We see more happening than is apparent from a high-level perspective in defense, but on the economy — full market integration, creating a true European market for capital and digital services — we’re not seeing real progress. European industrial policy with both subsidies and buy-European public procurement to create demand — we’re seeing some of that, but not enough. This is where the frustration is greatest.

Danny: What should we learn from history about falling birth rates?

Jo: Falling birth rates are a relatively recent phenomenon in the grand historical narrative. What we Europeans need to learn is to look at Japan — how changing demography has created problems there. What does it mean for an economy to be so old? What does it mean for fiscal transfers and the welfare system? The Japanese answer was ultimately to print a lot of debt and to have very expansive monetary policy. It’s not the worst approach, but it creates a lot of problems.

Europe has an advantage over Japan in that despite the migration backlash, we’re still more open to migration than they are. Japan is now slowly pivoting on migration, but it’s very hard. European societies, despite all their faults, have some capacity to integrate foreigners. It’s interesting — look at Meloni, for example. She is completely anti-migration, but at the same time she regularly takes foreigners who already live in Italy illegally and legalizes them. We see that in Greece as well, where a right-wing government is doing the same thing. Within this paradox of a hardening migration policy, you see politicians sometimes doing different things because they have a problem they can’t otherwise solve.

Danny: What’s your theory of history?

Jo: There are many theories of history. One I believe in is the law of unintended consequences. For example, did Trump intend, when he invited Justin Trudeau to Mar-a-Lago and completely humiliated him, that he was in reality ensuring Mark Carney would win the Canadian election — someone who at that point had absolutely no shot at winning? Things always play out differently than intended.

The other thing is that most government action is not always part of an overarching strategic framework. As a journalist or analyst, we’re always looking at government decision-making trying to find logic, trying to see the red thread, the coherence. A huge mistake to avoid as an analyst is thinking that everything makes sense. It doesn’t. Politics is a human affair, and there’s a lot of room for misunderstandings, miscommunication, competing interests, competing strategic visions. I have great sympathy for chaos theory in history, to some extent.

But what is interesting about history, and about thinking in terms of historical analogies, is that it is the only discipline that is truly interdisciplinary. To make sense of the world, you have to understand financial markets, macroeconomic developments, societal changes, values and norms shifting, domestic politics, geopolitics — everything comes together. All these factors are different vectors, and there’s always an interplay. Sometimes one vector is more powerful than another. History is the study of how in the past all these different vectors came together. By definition, then, you don’t have one theory of history — you have many. But that’s what makes it exciting.

Danny: What should I have asked but didn’t?

Jo: What is also interesting about the study of history is that as a historian, you study change — that’s the subject. And if you look at change over time, you realize that you have these abrupt moments of rapid change, but usually it’s a much longer-term process. What we need to understand, especially as Europeans, is that change for Europe comes slowly. We’re dissatisfied because we think Europe moves way too slowly. But in a historian’s perspective, things are moving nonetheless.

As an analogy: the euro, the common currency, came into existence in 1999. But the starting gun for creating the euro was Richard Nixon killing Bretton Woods in 1971 — the system of fixed exchange rates and the gold standard. Europeans were appalled, saying: the US has become unpredictable, they’re unilaterally putting tariffs on us and killing exchange rates, we have to create a common currency if the US is no longer assuring stability. In 1971, everyone started writing think-tank papers about a common currency. But leaders weren’t courageous enough — they decided on half measures like the European stability mechanism, technical fixes that never really worked. It took thirty years from the Nixon shock to the euro.

In a sense, I think from the first Trump shock nine years ago to Europe becoming a power that can more or less exist on its own is maybe a thirty-year process as well. Maybe we’re ten years into that process. It’s slower, it’s iterative, it goes back and forth. It doesn’t mean at all that an independent Europe will exist in twenty years — it can reverse. But just because it’s not here now doesn’t mean it won’t be there in twenty years.

Danny: On that hopeful note, Joe — this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jo: Thank you very much for having me.