Let's try and bridge the gap a little bit between the respondent and operant conditioning stuff Because in reality, you know as we talked about and as you've read about they're not as separate as what we tend to hint that they are You know we break out these procedures Because they are different things, but when it comes to our everyday behavior that really just makes a match So let's take a look at it This stuff is working all the time, right? There's no question that both of these things are happening at any given moment Especially with regard to humans. We are extremely susceptible to the operant conditioning stuff unbelievably. So That's one of the reasons why our species is so successful on this planet is because our sensitivity to operant conditioning Now the respondent conditioning a lot of organisms are sensitive to that but it's our unique combination of these things that Gives us a you know a leg up so to speak. They're not really exclusive of each other of each other though In you know again with my examples we say okay, here's a condition response Here's a condition stimulus which leads to a condition response or we say here's a discriminative stimulus Stimulus that leads to a response that is reinforced in reality Those things can just mix and match and be on top of each other So we often have respondent conditioning and that's one big component of our behavior We also have operant conditioning which is another big component of our behavior But really what it is is that everything that this combination of these things It is the behavior that we typically see Both processes are separate, but but they're going on concurrently. That's the easiest way to think of it Let's look at some examples here to help this make some more sense So reinforcement and punishment so operant actions these things produce emotional reactions Right, we call that respondent conditioning, right? So the the emotional reaction is a type of respondent conditioning So if I earn a reinforcer for example, that might make me happy okay, so that had the the reinforcer itself as a condition state or as a Something that's going to strengthen a behavior, but it also serves to elicit a response of happiness Now is that happiness a conditioned response or an unconditional response is a slightly different question But it shows that those two things interact, okay? So a another example a conditioned response occurs All right, so something that's unpleasant and you respond operantly to decrease that conditioned response When that when that conditioned response is decreased Then you have a negative reinforcement situation whatever you did to decrease that unpleasant conditioned response Is then going to be strengthened through negative reinforcement. So let's look at an example So you've got a a spider that's going to elicit fear, right? So that's classical conditioning. So you have Cs which is the spider elicits fear. That's your cr But if you run away from the spiders in the future, that's going to reduce your fear You know as the fear is getting smaller.  Anyway, that's operant conditioning So there's your negative reinforcement So in the future you are going to avoid and or escape the presence of fighters at fighters Whatever that is spiders, which will then reduce your fear So here you see those two things respondent and operant working directly with each other And this is a good example of how Of how these things interact you can also think about it from the other perspective We're talking about negative reinforcement. You could talk about positive reinforcement What's something that produces something nice, right? So Maybe a particular store or something like that produces you know has food available that food is really nice So in the future you would access that particular Store so it's a positive reinforcing situation, but the food itself is an unconditioned Stimulus it's not fear it elicits happiness and satisfaction and those types of things So this stuff really is so integrated into each other and I kind of hinted at it hinted at it earlier when I talked about How Reinforcers are conditioned because this is some of that that process about how reinforces your condition And how these things just I've said it a bunch they interact, you know It's kind of interesting how it does so and it makes it very hard to tease any one behavior out And figure out is that a conditioned response or is that a Operantly conditioned response. What is it? You know, is it a cr? Is it an sd? Is it a? Behavior that's maintained through reinforcement punishment all those things it really becomes a challenge to see how all these things interact But that's part of the fun of it as well is figuring out what the result is and figuring out how to maintain and Modify these particular behaviors


Excellent. Well, thank you for coming. Am I ready, you kidding? Am I in time? I am. I'm late. Good. So, Calc, Calc Threading. So, this is what I'm going to say. So, it's not interesting. It's an index. But here's the disclaimer. Pretty much all of this was done by Tall Lil' Clist and Dennis Francis, who... neither of whom can be here today, which is a great shame. But I was partly irresponsible for them and helped too. So, here we go. It is a pretty interesting code base, obviously, like everything else. It's 30 plus years old. The data structures have improved a huge amount recently in the last three, four years. But there's still some significant scope for improvement there. We'll look at how they are in a bit. But the calculation engine has been left pretty much as is. We tried to tack another one on the side to do OpenCL calculation and compiling formulae to OpenCL. But it's been badly in need of love. And so, we'll look a little bit how it works and how we improved it to thread it. So, since LibreOffice 4.3, the data structures have looked pretty much like this. You have a document, which is, I guess, your spreadsheet. Inside it, you have a whole series of sheets, which are called tables. So, several tabs, I guess, along the bottom. And then we have column... column... Anyway, columns, which are stored something like this. So, there's a whole array. Actually, a fixed-size array, rather a large one, of columns. And then, down it, we have these wonderful multi-dimensional data structures that are sort of spans of contiguous types in chunks going down there. So, we have things like blocks of strings, or chunks of doubles, or, you know, various other things. But we'll really be looking at the formula cell... the formula cell stuff today. So, inside those formula cells, you have a whole run of these formula cells, bang, bang, bang, bang, like this. But we try and group information together about them. So, there's a token array. And the token array basically represents your formula, you know, so you have equals sum 1, 2, 3. And there's two representations of that. The first thing is a token array like this. And these tokens are the same tokens in a different order. So, this one would be, you know, sum 1, 2, 3. And the reverse Polish equivalent, which would be 1, 2, 3 sum. Of course, this is quite a simple example. There are, you know, a lot more twisted ways. But the nice thing about the reverse Polish is, you don't have to do any complicated stuff. You execute this stuff pushing and pulling to a simple stack as you calculate. So, yeah, there's a whole load of different things like this. But the key things, I guess, are things like single references, like get a cell from A1 or whatever. Double reference, getting a range of cells. And this can, of course, go three-dimensional ranges through multiple sheets. There are special cases for external references from other things, and of course, simple numbers, strings, and then operations like do a division or, you know, execute this macro with these parameters. And here's how it works. So, when we want to calculate a formula, we, well, there are several ways of triggering this. But one way is to just get a value out of a cell. So, you ask a cell, give me your value. And if it's just a simple double or something in this array, then, well, we just passed a double back. But if it's a formula, we need to check if we actually need to calculate the results. So, this maybe interpret stuff goes, well, maybe we should actually recalculate before we return the double. And that eventually ends up into interpret. And then there's an amazing recursion flattening thing here, which I'll talk about later. And eventually it ends up in a thing called interpret tail. And that creates an interpreter object on the heap, passes the code in it, which is the token array, where it is in the document, all those other good stuff, and does interpret on it. Interpret, then, of course, starts building this stack of these reverse Polish tokens, execute those one by one, and as part of that process, you'll recall that some of these things are go get data out of the sheets somewhere else. Yeah? As part of that, sometimes we recurse back up to here, and we find something else that needs another cell. So, if you imagine a case such as an entire column, and someone types 42 in A1, and then they type equals A1 in A2, and they fill this all the way down, so you have a million formulae, all of which refer to the last one.  This then potentially can recurse a million deep down your stack, and it's not a very shallow recursion. And so there is this, quote, amazing recursion flattening here, which goes, ah, you know, we've recursed quite a lot at this point. There's a lot of panic about how much heap we've got. Maybe we should do something creative, you know, and rearrange what we're doing in some way so as to defer work and come back and do some more later, and hopefully complete. So there's some fun stuff there that probably doesn't bear over much thought, but it's just a bit irritating. And of course, that's just a single column. You can imagine much worse situations. We have these very deep traces. So you recall that actually all of these tokens are changed into a formula cell group, and we know how big this thing is. We know it spans a whole column. So perhaps we could do better. So there's this thing called interpret formula group that in various cases is called, and should be called more frequently, but there are future plans for that. And this essentially can do something different. So the existing open CL and software cases then can try and interpret a great chunk of this group at once. And to do that, what we do is we call you this thing that can recurse as you recall on all of our input. So we can look at the formula group and we can go, well, this formula only operates on one cell, but as we go down the column that cell will actually turn into all of these other cells. So as it goes down, we should fetch all of this data at once and pack it away into a matrix. So this works nicely for simple string and double values, and we pack all of that into a nice flat uniform chunk of memory. So instead of looking at formula cells and doing operations for each of them, we have just array of doubles. And then, so first of all, we check that it's safe to do this for some value of safe, and we think that this is a formula that we can optimize, and that this set of tokens is safe to do this stuff with. We get those values, and then we can choose. We can send those to open CL, so we can push those across to your GPU. We can compile these tokens to some clever open CL kernel, and we can get the results back. And in some cases, that works really well and is really fast. In other cases, compiling the kernel is slower than actually executing it. So you don't win. It depends on the shape of your sheet. And so we have some stuff now that tries to judge the weight of a formula. How much work is it really doing? Is it a simple copy, memory copy, in which case, copying it to the GPU and back again is not going to help. Or is it a more complicated function? And then we got a software version, too, that does some kind of accelerated, you know, SSE accelerated summing across these things in some nice way. Yeah. And as we calculate these things on the software stack down here, we manipulate this matrix so that it looks different, but we don't do any copying. So we have a sort of abstract matrix that Kendi created over here very late at night before a deadline to make this work very beautifully. It depends out to be very efficient, as we'll see later. So why thread? Well, we need thread because, well, sometimes CPUs get actually slower. You know, the megahertz goes down, the IPC goes down, but hey, I've got another three cores that aren't doing anything, you know? Which is good for thermal management, perhaps. You can move to a cool core always. But anyway, the process clocks are anyhow stymied pretty much at 4GHz. You're not going to get much faster than that. So they're all going very much wider. And so if you want an IPC improvement because instructions per clock are pretty much, well, they're not improving hugely even with all this clever speculative execution that we're so fond of these days. So the good news is that AMD is really, you know, sort of stirring up this market and providing new high IPC widely threaded stuff. Laptops, you know, I think arguably have a, you know, four-thread sort of minimum. The mid-range stuff is eight threads. Workstations, 16 threads. I mean, it's cheap. I meet people that buy these things. Your new PC will have more threads than you know what to do with. And so, of course, AMD's been trying to help make sure that those are used effectively. So Marcus, my friend at the back here is a hero who created this crash reporting thing. And we were looking at the statistics the other night to see, well, how many cores do people have? And frustratingly, CPUs are very good at repointing their core count, some of these are hyper-threaded cores and some aren't, which is really irritating. So I wanted to show you how many threads people actually have that are spare. But the bad news is that some people still have one, one core, although I'd like to think it's hyper-threaded, so they have at least two threads. As you can see, there's a sort of declining number of people with two or potentially four threads. And then there's, well, there's really quite a lot of people here with four or maybe four cores that are weak, I don't know, but either way, you see the picture. This guy is growing more. If we enlarge the very small bit at the top, the trend is even more encouraging. So, you know, the 48 CPU machines, we even got some 80 core guys that seem to be crashing. So I don't know whether you can extrapolate from the crash data that more threads means you crash more often, it's quite possible. And maybe we get less reliable as we go, but either way, the idea is that everything is getting more threaded, so we should use that stuff. So threading interpret formula group. So what we really wanted to do was reuse the existing formula core. Rather than creating more special cases off at the side, we wanted to take that and avoid too much sub-setting, and ideally remove the software interpreter as well, so that it could be, you know, collapse everything in. So that's how we started out. So the idea basically is that we precalculate our dependent cells, much as now, but instead of stuffing them all into a matrix in a strange way, we just leave them where they are. We're confident that when we go to get them, maybe interpret will return false, and so we don't need to worry. We can just use the existing code. Of course, if maybe interpret actually calls interpret and we recurse, there's a big old assertion there that goes bang, and the whole thing falls in a heap. And we've been catching a few of these assertions in the crash testing, which is exciting. Then of course, there's some functions that we could parallelize essentially reusing the existing code, which is pretty nice.  Again, the amazing recursion flattening I think we actually implemented this time. And so then in interpret tail, you start to parallelize as you interpret this whole group, you can call it multiple threads after you've set everything up nicely at the beginning. So yeah, so that was basically the plan. And there's a nice big assert here that says don't do it if the threaded group calculs in progress. So that sounds good. The only problem is it turns out when you look into it, that the nice pictures of here are not quite as wonderful. So the SC interpreter, for example, mutates the actual formula as it calculates it. So due to a fit of cunning, the iteration variable is actually in the token itself. So we are actually in the token array itself. Of course, there's a whole load of complicated stuff going on, you know, there are macros being called that in theory can do anything. They can mutate the document, the table, the cells, the thing that you're in right now. Some of the functions mutate the dependency graph, which is again tied to the document and a disaster. And so yeah, so we were really rather keen to have simple locking that didn't require lots of highly granular locking everywhere, particularly if that's going to be in the common single threaded case that's also I still use. So we're eager to make it relatively simple. So we cleaned up this magic of having the current index inside the instance of the token array that you're iterating over. You're like this first, this is an iterator start, give me the first one and then you call get next, get next, and it's mutating the thing itself. So we now have a nice external iterator. We have mutation guards everywhere that are essentially designed to sort of crash and lock hard, you know, if they ever see a mutation that occurs while this threaded calculation is going on. And so we had those sprinkle those liberally in scary looking places. Yeah, so by turning various things off, indirect offset match and so on, and actually if you look up and each look up generate new dependencies as they calculate so turn those off. Macros we disable for now. I mean if you look at what Excel does they look at the macro code and go ah this is a pure function, it doesn't mutate stuff.  What would be even nicer would be to parallelize the basic interpreter but that's quite an exciting problem. There are people out there in the industry that would love to have parallel macro execution because their quant uses these weird functions for pricing Greeks or whatever and they want that quick up. Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff. At the moment we allow external extensions to be called because well they're just as bad as macros but they probably don't exist so if they're, that's alright we should probably turn that off. There are even more nasties more global variables left than right. And as we started to look at these it's nowhere obvious to hang them that would actually be sensible. So we have a whole lot of thread local variables for the calculation stack current document being calculated, matrix positions and a few more. We had to upgrade the mac toolchain to make thread local variables work which is slightly unfortunate. And eventually we then thought we'd introduce an SC interpreter context that became more and more things that we wanted to hang somewhere to optimize and improve performance. And so now we pass an interpreter context through many of the functions and try to make that add up. So how did it go? Well initially it did quite well. So this is the single threaded calculation. This is the same performance with just one thread. So hopefully this would be reasonably flat. There's two things here. There's my Linux laptop and then there's some Ryzen 16 core monster. And there's several things you can see here which is probably better actually on a log plot. But if you draw the log plot you see this going very nicely linearly downwards until you hyper thread at which point it doesn't really speed up a whole lot. You can see this flatten off massively at the end because we're really hammering this thing quite hard such that the hyper threading doesn't work well so well in this. Of course this is because it's doing a big SSE. This test is just a large sum and it's doing a lot of double work. Hyper threading probably helps you more in other use cases. But at the moment we turn that off and it actually speeds things up. So to this point then we have had four sets of calculations. So we could do a plain old calculation, single threaded. We could have the software group single threaded calculation. So again aggregate, stuff in matrix calculate. We have the open CL thing and now we have the new threaded calculation. Look at these nice acronyms I've added. And then horror of horrors on benchmarking it we discovered that sometimes the new threaded calculation which is all shiny and pretty and doing no locking really at all and absolutely wonderful was slower than the single threaded calculation with the software group interpreter. So that's pretty depressing after some month of work. And it turns out that actually the process of collecting all that data from the sheets checking its types, fooling around looking at format types and so on and so on. For each formula cell it's really expensive and often it's done again and again and again for these things where you have an N squared so you're doing a big operation on a column and then you're doing it multiple times as you go down. And yeah and A of course collects it once and then it's hyper optimized as a C goodness you know really whipping through that. So we then threaded the A version as well. So instead of having a single threaded software group interpreter we threaded that as well and then suddenly life was was good again. So I got a picture of some of that in a minute and how the stats looked. So then we sit there and we're going well it's all very well getting a 6X but we've got eight threads. Why aren't we getting an 8X or a 9X ideally? You hear about these sort of super linear speed ups due to extra cash use. They read well in the textbooks don't they? So we start looking on Windows and there's absolutely terrible profiling tools there but on Linux we use Perf but looking for thread issues is not entirely obvious. Of course if you've got lock contention you know there's a lot of time spent sleeping but it's not real time you know like the kernel is going off and counting sheep instead and that doesn't really show up easily on many of the profiling tools. So there are a whole lot of different events you can look at and you can look at sort of bouncing of kernel a few text memory locations between threads I guess and there's various things like that but we spent a lot of time and eventually Perf turned out to be probably the best thing to help with this and looking for things like false sharing where you've tried to separate your memory but because your allocator is smart it shoves all the same size things in the same place next to each other and they all end up in the same cache line and then this bounces between all your cores. So we tried looking at a lot of these things and with not a vast amount of success but here were some of the horrors we found so most of the threading things that we were looking for didn't turn out to be terribly you know findable but the other stuff was pretty silly so as you operate on this reverse polish stack we were regularly just allocating and freeing things all the time as we did it and yeah using the actually using the system allocator instead of Matthias Herschwan here really sped things up particularly for parallel use there so we dropped the custom allocator and after that we also reused these tokens where possible so why bother allocating and freeing hundreds of double tokens when you just did that just before so we have a little a little stash of some so there's no need to take a lock you can just reuse the thing another particular folly that people like is to use standard stack because it sounds like if you're making a stack that's what you want right but let me tell you if your use case is to extend and grow a stack like this you know you exactly don't want a stack because underneath it uses a DQ which has got a list inside it so every time you push something on it it allocates a new node and when you're multiply threaded what you really don't want is to be constantly hammering your allocator left and left and right to allocate and free all these tiny nodes and chain them together just use a vector very nice a win just comes out of that and then of course the interpreter context which starts to cache these things as being freed and reallocated so just by saving some of these things we got a lot better so there are some other particularly awful things so we see the SFX item set which is a favourite of Bjorns and many others appearing right in the middle of the interpreter so you know people are doing get number format on cells as they do this arithmetic shouldn't need to be used at all so this get cell value will zero is inside the get value get value function and it just does some really crazy stuff and it's really unclear why it needs to do this and you start looking into this and it's rather frightening so anyway here's a sort of performance story so as we threaded your time wants to get lower if you want to get faster so we do all this nice threading work and this is the first step of a recent master I guess and some sheets got massively faster so we're going from way up here to way down here maybe twice as fast which is great but at the same time a whole lot of other sheets got slower which seems strange the reason they got slow was that we turned off the software interpreter so that was doing this nice pre-gatherer and then some and then push it back so by threading the software interpreter then we managed to get back you know some of this stuff stopping thrashing the token array halving the number of threads so getting rid of hyper threading took us to here so flat for some loads and big wins for others so getting rid of hyper threading we just use half the number of threads and the OS knows what to do on its own custom allocator again big wins for some maybe a slight win loss for others caching formula double tokens lots of commits that don't do anything isn't that nice you know it's good to know you're making a difference as you do these three factors and what else C++ threads and it's still overall pretty good coming down from you know 600 milliseconds down to 150 for this one and you know 1600, 1.6 seconds down to less than half a second or around half a second and so on so yeah so that's pretty much the thing and what should we next well yeah the crash testing loads these 100,000 documents and it asserts liberally left and right almost suddenly implicit intersection is killing us so implicit intersection is a clever way of writing formally wrong and Calc noticing this and correcting them as it calculates I simplify but yeah people can deliberately use it I suppose but I don't know why they would and so the reason is that they write a smaller range than that is actually ends up being used and so when we look at our dependence we don't pre calculate stuff and then multiple threads get caught and this assert of oh dear we're fetching this data and it's not calculated yeah I'd like to kill those global variables that's actually relatively easy for a newbie to do maybe it should be an easy hack now because we've got this nice context to put them on yeah big stuff like killing the formula cell and making it a formula cell group one of these groups that just happens to be one long would be kind of nice and then maybe be able to simplify some of these pieces and making the plain old calculation just a single threaded threaded calculation and finally getting rid of this format type stuff that should never be happening at all during calculation I think so that's about it the other conclusions they're kind of obvious yeah one point here is that it's actually just an economic problem unfortunately technology is fun and all that but you know just being able to invest in optimizing this thing as soon as you open the profiler you start thinking why is it doing that that's really silly so yeah just thanks then to AMD for supporting it that's my talk, any questions sir you have a finger up no you're trying not to look like a questioner okay anyone else the first person has to be brave but after that it's easy how many threads do people have I'm going to do a poll since you're all static does anyone have a single threaded laptop or CPU they're using at all okay it's your main work PC oh you do okay it's the Raspberry Pi 1 yeah okay I thought it would be excellent oh yeah your phone is ancient yeah the 4k phone so how about two okay okay so I'm talking threads so let's do two threads so two threads anyone with two threads and that's what you actively use in your day-to-day work okay for enough so it's not I once had a BBC Micro 65028 bit I'm talking the you know sort of um so 4 who's good for 4 4 yeah there's some more 8 16 okay it starts to top out at this point anyone can do better than 16 on their workstation beyond tell me you know 64 yeah 12 yeah yeah yeah yes so that is true so there's thermal management in these things um yeah however arguably it is better to be more efficient and get it done quicker and then idle the thing we'll only have it going for a long old time arguably raced to idle so they say who knows raced to idle well yeah this is the hurry up and wait it's like the military approach to power saving you know that was not a question but that was a good statement anything else we got another 3 minutes sir okay wow could we integrate LLVM to compile the formulae yeah I think so so there is in fact an LLVM compiling the formulae solution already built in but it's typically known as software OpenCL and if you look under the hood of these OpenCLM so what you rapidly discover is that it's pretty much that the problem is of course it's not a perfect match for what we do and in terms of our formulae engine is heavily built around a lot of the concepts I've showed you it turns to the stack and how these things are passed and so you know the sine function is not a C function that's like double do the sine say double it's like a have this hammer bag of hammers of things you could get and what if you pass a boolean to it and you pass a string you know it's sort of all shoved into that formula and so in terms of code reuse and simplification it's not an idea but Marcus is our calc hero maintainer, wave a hand Marcus so people harass you afterwards and so he probably has a more detailed view but yeah it's a good idea perhaps but we like to simplify yeah yeah see there's a whole load of refactoring we can do to carry on this improvement and make it to the point that we could have something much much sweet here but yeah I think the wins LLVM will give you a small compared to the refactoring the core fun good well if there's nothing else thanks so much very good


The Crowing County Sheriff's Office is investigating a drive-by shooting that happened east of Brainerd on Saturday. Deputies responded around 8.45 p.m. to a house in the 18,000 block of State Highway 18, where they were told several shots were fired from the highway towards the house. Deputies confirmed that rounds hit the occupied home, but no one inside of it was injured. Anyone with any information is asked to call the Crowing County Sheriff's Office. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


My name is Brian Ceballos. I'm from Pasco, Washington. My life before Christ was a roller coaster of ups and downs, mostly downs.  And when I was 11 years old, we moved to Mexico to start a mission in his hometown. We built it with our own hands. And by the time I was 13, it got to a point where we had to support each other and support ourselves with work. So I decided to move back to Washington and go to school and support him by that means. Ever since then, I went through a lot in my life. I started straying away from the path of righteousness and started going down a deep and dark path that was leading nowhere. But, you know, eventually it got to a point where I was just in the bad place, you know, drugs, gangs, crimes, violence. My life got into a really, really bad place. And as time passed by, I kept on straying and straying away from the path of God. It went to a point where I had my son and I was just a horrible father. I was a horrible person to my family. And I knew that wasn't the place to be. I knew that wasn't the real me until I got to a point. It was February, April 22nd.  And he was always there patient. He was always there waiting after 12 years of just me doing my thing. He was still there and when I called on him, he reached down and he pulled me out of that deep and dark place that I was at. And ever since then, my life hasn't been the same. Ever since I rededicated my life and Jesus saved me in April 22nd, 2016, my life has never been the same. I was searching for God and searching for a place where I could feel like home until my friend invited me to Hungry Generation. I was invited by my friend Marvin to Hungry Generation. And ever since then, I looked around and I saw all the youth, I saw everybody and the love that they had for God. And I knew that this was my home. I knew this was the place for me because I felt the same way. And now my calling is just to reach out for the youth, to reach out for all those troubled youth that are lost and that need Jesus that feel like there's no hope. And to reach out for them and tell them that there is hope. And the same God that helped me and changed my life can save their life and change them completely. And tonight I want to get baptized to show my commitment and to show everybody that I am going to be born again and I'm going to start my new life and start a new life, a new path and the righteous way of Jesus Christ. Alright, Brian, do you believe in God or do you believe in Jesus Christ as God's Son and your personal Lord and Savior? Oh yeah. And do you promise to follow Him with good and clear conscience for the rest of your life? Yes. Based on your faith, confession and your commitment will baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.


The American Association of University Women in Sheboygan, and we are very pleased to co-sponsor this great decision series with the need public libraries. I've been attending some of the great decisions programs and managed walks over the last couple of years. They have a hundred people at their programs. And I thought, wouldn't it be great? I didn't have to drive to Manitowoc. We can do it in Sheboygan. And our library director, Gary Erickson, was on board right away. So here we are. We are indebted to Jeannie Gartman, Mead librarian, who's been very helpful in putting this program together, and to the need public library foundation for funding the programs. There are eight programs in the Foreign Policy Association series. We are only going to do four of them. And depending upon the response, we hope to expand that next year to six or eight. All of our professors from this series of four programs are from the University of Wisconsin here in Sheboygan. We will take questions and after the presentation, we will take our last question at a quarter to eight because we have to be out of the building at eight o'clock. There are guidebooks which you can check out at the back of the room before you leave if you'd like. They contain reference information for all of the programs in the series and before that we're not going to do. They're all very timely topics as you have noticed from the series that we are doing. So it was my pleasure tonight to introduce Dr. Elise Cohen, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UW Sheboygan and UW Mandatois. She received her PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Delaware and her BA in International Relations from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her current research focuses on global governance, refugee policy, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. And so Dr. Cohen is going to talk to us about the future of Europe. Thank you so much. I'm really grateful to the series for having me and I'm honored to be here. It's a really great turnout, by the way, so thank you all for coming out on a warm October night. I want to begin by letting you know that I definitely don't choose the title of the future of Europe. This is the Foreign Policy Association official title because I would never be so bold as to stand out crystal long. And I can just tell the entire future of an entire continent. So what is mine is the subtitle of the presentation. And this is really bringing my own scholarly research into bear on the broader topic. So I'm going to define some of these. So if these look like jargon, foreign language words to you right now, no worries because I will let you know what is nativism, what do we mean by populism, and then the really fun one, what is Europe skepticism. So to begin, I just want to provide a little bit of background. We're talking about the European project as a whole when we think about what is changing in the region of Europe and how US foreign policy should change or how perhaps US foreign policy might even affect and impact this project. And this really has its roots historically in the post-World War II project of rebuilding after the war. So this sort of got its start, what you now know as the European Union. Got its start in the 1950s with the so-called EEC, European Economic Community. This was originally six European countries that were in Western Europe and really focused on trade regarding coal and steel. So it was especially an economic union to begin with. And then we saw it enlarge throughout the 1970s and 1980s. So we had more and more European countries that wanted to be part of this project of sharing trade and working together. And so this was the very origin of what is now this really impressive major international organization called the EU, the European Union. It started in 1950s just with these original Western European countries. By the time we have more of European countries wanting in on the deal and we get to the 1990s, there's something called the Master Tree in 1993. And this is really what paved the way for what we now know as the European Union, where we will have not only trade cooperation but policy cooperation, creating free travel without what we think of as borders and the EU for border control within this new community. And so that gets us to today what we now know as a 28 member international organization called the European Union. And this is the flag of the European Union. So you may have seen this before as kind of a symbol of Europe united. And that is the symbol of being united together as part of the project at its start. So this is how it looks today. We've grown from those original six Western European countries really focused on economic cooperation to this amazing project for creating unity and peace and stability and economic prosperity as well as this idea of being able to move freely. Not just goods, trade in terms of free movement but people in terms of immigration, for example. You may notice a couple things that jump out at you like that little white blob between France and Austria. Oh, I don't know. I should think of a nicer geometric statement. That's Switzerland. So Switzerland is not in yellow because they have had a couple of referendums on whether to join the European Union formally and the people voted no. They have a very strong economy and they feel like with the bilateral trade agreements they worked out over time but at this point they are happy just to partner in some trade negotiations without actually being a member of the European Union. And then you may notice up in the fingers of the northern Europe, Norway is the one in white. So that's why Sweden and Finland are part of the EU. But Norway actually is part of the European economic area. So in a lot of ways it almost is a member already. They have absorbed a lot of the EU laws into their own Norwegian laws and they have already the sort of trade benefits that come with being part of the economic agreement. But they have a history of sort of feeling dominated by their neighbors Denmark and Sweden. So for sovereignty reasons they haven't officially joined the European Union. There's also something just related to the free movement of people and that's called the Schengen zone. And so the Schengen zone countries are now showing up to you in the sort of turquoise, I guess you call it. And you see the darkest turquoise, those are the current members of the Schengen free movement of people. And then you have even some Schengen in the light, like Norway and Switzerland that we were just talking about. And up there Iceland, right, the island country, they're not members of the EU as you may have remembered from the previous map but they really wanted in on this free movement. And so this is sort of like the common borders. And then within this area there are no internal country borders. And so you can move freely. If you are a European Union citizen you can be a resident of one of those countries in green and just travel to another without needing to worry about a visa and border control, border check. You could go for work, for education, whatever family visits. And you don't have to worry about going through the entire process of like you're traveling to a foreign country. Then you may notice there are some in grey, like over here, there we go. The UK, which has been a member of the European Union, we'll talk about it might be moving out. But even though it has been a member of the European Union, it opted out of the Schengen so it does have its own border control. And you would need to indeed get a visa and go through the sort of border control process to go to the United Kingdom. Well, I was going to say Q&A for the end but let's just wait because I may answer some questions as I go too. That happens in classes sometimes also but we'll see. I promise I'll get to questions at the end. And then this is the Eurozone for the money. This is the currency and these are showing you the countries in yellow here that use the Euro as their currency. So you see there are again some countries that opt out that are a member of the European Union, again like the UK, right? But they don't use the Euro, they use still the Sterling, the British Pem. So there are some of those that it's not like you have to use the Euro, right? Some of the economies they chose to keep their own currency, they're still in the European Union. They may even be a member of the Schengen free movement of people within those borders but they can choose, you know, did they want to adopt that as their currency or not. But you see most of those countries have adopted the Euro, we have 19 of the 28 EU members that did adopt the common currency. And the idea is like a unified financial market with the exact same currency with the same rate so there can be planning accordingly. There's criticism of that but then if there's an economic recession like we saw a few years ago, each country has a very different economy but they won't be able to tweak the response as well because they have a common currency. So again we might get into some more of this in the Q&A. We're just trying to provide some background in case the EU concept is maybe new to some people in the room. The other big part of this is why. Why even try and have this shared borders with free movement of people and free movement of goods and a shared currency among some members. And we really have to again look to history and understand how dire the situation was after the Second World War. The people really felt that these rival nationalist movements were a source of violence and a source of self-harm. So if there was a way to overcome extreme nationalism, instead of thinking of we're French and we're German and we're British, if we could all identify as one like well we are those things but also we're all European then maybe that would help prevent war in the future. So that's a really important part of the story and I think it's easy to take that for granted because we're so far removed historically from the major world wars that it becomes easy to fall back into taking for granted the idea that we don't have arms races between the European Union member countries. We don't have a nuclear proliferation crisis among European Union member countries. And so people that support the European project would say there's a reason for that. There's a reason we can sort of take that for granted because the European Union helped overcome the causes of sort of nuclear proliferation or causes of invasions and conflict between nations. There's also a theory that's really prevalent in international relations that a lot of people point to for why those European countries felt like this was in their best interest to join together. And that theory holds that if you can get countries cooperating on things like trade and they realize it's good for them financially to work together, keep the trade flowing then you can prevent them from fighting and going to war. So it's this idea that there's like a spillover effect. If countries are working together and cooperating in their economies they can also better work together and cooperate in their politics. And so that's another idea that this will foster political cooperation and help prevent war. And then when we think about what it means to identify with the European Union, there's also been a project to sort of build the sense of being European as an identity on top of whatever each individual national identity is. And that's another idea that if you have common values and common identity then those countries will be less likely to fight. They will feel less threatened by each other because they feel that they share some common values and principles. So the European Union has really tried to foster that. They focus on democracy for example and human rights as some of the key components. And when a country joins they really have to work to get their own human rights laws or the way they run elections in accordance with the sort of standards that the European Union will set. Okay so now that we get to kind of where my research has focused a bit more, the pushback to all of that. And so the first area of pushback is what we call Euroscepticism. And if you write down the words it kind of sounds like just what it, or it kind of means like just what it sounds. You've got skepticism, right? So being skeptical of this European project. So Eurosceptical. So these are political actors. This could be political parties, people, leaders that feel as though the European project for unifying Europe into a broader political entity is somehow misguided. There are different versions. There's like they call hard Euroscepticism where they say the country should just exit the European Union. And maybe you've heard of that in recent news, right? Exits completely pull out. And then there's a soft version that well maybe it's too radical to completely pull out of the European Union, but from within it we should push for all these reforms and all sorts of change. I would say that the biggest manifestation that comes into a lot of the domestic politics of the countries in the last few years is more the hard version. And so you see vivid symbols like this one of the flag with the European Union symbol and this big red X through it that no, we actually are so opposed to the European project that we don't want to be part of this shared union anymore. A lot of the countries where you see those movements of grown and power articulate them in what they call sovereignty concerns. And well I don't know if you're watching even our president Donald Trump when he gave his speech to the United Nations a couple of weeks ago in New York City. He made history because he was the first American president to use the word sovereignty a record number of times. He said it 19 times in just the one speech to the United Nations. So this is not something that's unique to the European political context. It's something that we see those who study this sort of reassertion of national sovereignty happening in different parts of the world. And so we have it as part of our own current sort of foreign policy approach with the new administration. And these are some pro-Brexit people. So these were people associated with the UKIP, the UK Independence Party. And really the main platform of that political party in the UK, the British political party, was that they should leave. So a hard Euro skepticism that Great Britain should not be part of the European Union. And you can see some of those national sovereignty phrases like we want our country back vote to leave the European Union. Other part of Euro skepticism brings in another concept that we study in political science which is this distaste, dislike for any quotey elites. And so what is an elite can be varying? It could be a political elite, someone who's in political office and is able to control the budget and easy to criticize the people that control the purse strings. It could be a cultural elite, like a professor, right? Because I'm definitely not elite in any other way than that. But in that way, in terms of knowledge, because I have these fancy degrees as anti-elites would say, maybe I think I'm an oil and I try and tell the government what it should do because of my long line of education. Or it could be, you know, just wealth-based elite, someone that is very wealthy and has a lot of money financially. So in general though, those kind of get lumped together. And we see the Euro skeptical movements articulate also like anti-elite, and instead we should fight for the ordinary man. And they kind of juxtapose, they contrast and put against one another the elites that are running the government or maybe have a lot of education and training and something, and just the commoner who may be suffering and the elites don't hear their voice. And so this brings us to the most famous example we have in the last couple of years and that is the Brexit vote. So Brexit is British exit from the European Union. This is a map showing you what the breakdown of the vote looks like regionally with those voting to leave in red and those voting to remain in the European Union in blue. And you can see, and of course that's Ireland over there, so just the north is part of the United Kingdom, northern Ireland, and then the grey is a separate sovereign country or a public of Ireland. So you can see the country was quite divided and this is actually breaking it down because the UK is a union of four different nations into one political sovereign. So in England that's where we saw a majority a little bit voting to leave and that one made a big difference. So 47% of those living in England wanted to remain in the European Union but 53 voted in the referendum last summer to leave the European Union. And then we see, if you look at Scotland, they actually quite strongly wanted to stay in the European Union. So the Scottish part of the UK, 62% wanted to remain, a little over third wanted to leave. The Welsh, we see was really close but slightly the Welsh vote went 52% to leave the European Union. And then Northern Ireland over there on the top of the Irish island was much more strongly favour of staying, 56% to remain. So that's why when statistically you know you crunched it all together, it was very narrow but it was 52% voted in the referendum last summer in 2016 to exit the European Union. And Theresa May, the current Prime Minister, went ahead and activated that back in March and so if all goes according to the way this would play out, the plan would be that by 2019 the UK would no longer be part of the European Union. That would be the first time someone's left rather than joined because the trend has been growing, growing, enlarging, enlarging. How did we get there? What kinds of propaganda and rhetoric and campaigning did we see to push the vote that it's a good idea to leave the European Union? This was a really prevalent poster that the UKIP, again that's that political party I mentioned that was really favour of leaving, saying we want our country back, national sovereignty. And this was one of their most prominent campaign ads. The EU has failed us all. We must break free of the European Union and take back control of our borders. So then they have a little message, vote to leave the European Union on the 23rd of January. By the way, can anyone tell what does this look like? Right, so this was the poster, they're not named, there's not like an arrow saying here's who these people are, you know this guy's name is that or something or here's their story, but just sort of this flood, this wave, a tide of migrants and refugees, you know, swarming, coming in, pouring in to the borders. And those aren't my words, those are the words of the campaign rhetoric. Swarming, flooding, overwhelming. And some of the campaigns and rallies and marches became very explicitly focused on that issue of immigration and refugees. And you can see some of these, they were not only burning the European Union flag saying we're Euro skeptical, we don't like the European Union project, we want out. But then also specifically saying the refugees are not welcome here. And we don't want to be part of something that might pressure us to take in refugees as a part of an EU refugee sharing arrangement. And so that was actually a very prominent sentiment for why a lot of the people that supported UKIP said that they supported that party. They just felt so strongly about immigration and not wanting to take in the refugees from the crisis. This was a really fun one and I can go back to it during Q&A if people want to look a little more. But really it's just showing you some nice data on how education and location really matter. And here we can see the London area people are the pink bubbles. Those are the voters from London. And then they're also showing you the blue or the Scottish voters. And then the green, you know, other parts of the country. But if you look at the axis on the bottom there horizontally, it's showing you the percentage of people with a college degree. And so as you move right on this, it's showing having more education. And as you move left, having less education. And then what we have with the y-axis is how many people were voting to leave. And as you move up, those are people voting to leave. And as you move down, those are people voting not to leave, but they wanted to remain. And so what we ended up finding with this one, like a lot of other similar movements that are your skeptical, is education is negatively, or was negatively correlated with wanting to leave the union. So that means, you know, people that had more college education, had more years of education, were less likely to want to leave the union. And they were more likely to want to remain. Now the other thing that I've been studying in my own research is what we call PRRs. And I'm going to define that for you. It's populist radical right. So these are the political parties themselves. So I was talking to a moment ago about the UKIP, the UK Independence Party. They were really the one pushing the Brexit vote. And that is absolutely the kind of label that scholars put for parties like that. Very nationalist, Euro skeptical parties. But they also talked into what we're going to call populism. And so not only are they anti-elite and Euro skeptical, but they are very anti-immigrant. And that's one thing that unites them. You can look at a PRR in Germany, and you can look at a PRR in Spain, and you can find these commonalities, which is really fascinating for researchers. In very different contexts, maybe very different unemployment rates, or economic contexts even, still they will have the same messages, which are really focused on being against the European project, Euro skeptical, and being anti-immigrant. And so what's fascinating for me, because I really look at this a lot in my own research, is how the anti-immigrant, especially today, gets conflated with an anti-Muslim sentiment. Because a lot of the refugees from the refugee crisis are coming from Muslim majority countries. That ends up linking together being a foreigner, being an immigrant, or a refugee. And maybe then being this religion that is you just threatening. So this is one of the ads that was used in Denmark. I'm going to just tell you the exact meaning here. Okay. So this one is saying, Well, here we go. Is this your Denmark? It needs Denmark. Is this your Denmark? And then below, and I know it's kind of blurry too, but all the while I'm just going to read it to you. Translating from Danish. A multi-ethnic society with mass rapes, crude violence, insecurity, suppression of women, and forced marriages. So is this your Denmark? And then it lists all these awful things, about rape and criminals and forced marriages and oppression. And you can kind of see the picture that the explosion is supposed to be a woman in a burka, meaning that she's Muslim and she's like very religious and wears the full burka covering. And so then at the bottom it says, Is this what you want that's in the yellow? Do something. Be a member of the Danish People Parties, the youth for a new future. So the Danish People Party is like the UKIP, it's one of those populist radical right parties in Europe that really focuses on we need to leave the European Union, they're Euro skeptic and very anti-immigrant and that's where they found the most success is by articulating an anti-foreigner lens. This one is taking us to France, so we're going from the Danish context into France and maybe some people were even following the French election. I don't know if people noticed that for the first time they actually had someone from a PRR, a populist radical right party, Marine Le Pen, who came very close to winning the presidency of France. She ended up losing to Macron, but it's the first time that France had as a major presidential contender and second place, someone from a populist radical right party. And so this was one of her rallies a year ago and it says no to Brussels and it has the European Union flag and because the EU is seated in Brussels, Belgium, that's where that no to Brussels comes in, so saying no to the European Union and then yes to France. So reassertion of French sovereignty, right? French sovereignty first, not this international cooperative organization. And they really use the symbol of Joan of Arc to try and also have this power of like, Marine Le Pen is like the Joan of Arc of today and she's going to fight for us and fight for Western civilization and Christianity instead of Islam and so vote for her will be like returning who we are in our heritage. And then this one is taking us to another Danish people and I like this because of the visual, it just says ask the people right there referendum on the European Union now. So it's like they didn't have a referendum but they were calling for almost a Brexit but in the Danish context and I like the visual because it's the hand with the EU flag on it and it's strangling the Danish flag. So you really, it's not subtle, it's like the European Union is killing us. It is choking us and suffocating us. So we should have our own referendum here to exit and leave for Denmark, for the Danish people to leave the European Union. So I talked before on my first slide about nativism and there are lots of definitions that kind of relate to it and so this is one that I'm using to help you understand this concept. The basic idea with nativist movements and philosophies is that the country's people should be the native group, like they are the native inhabitants of that country. So what this often looks like is really intense opposition to foreigners like immigrants or what's really interesting to me even internal minorities. Like we have a lot of nativism in this country that's not only anti-immigrant but geared at American Indian, you know Native Americans or at African Americans. So it can be any internal minority. They don't have to be an immigrant. But in some way they're viewed as foreign and they're viewed as a threat to the way of life of that culture and of that country. So that's the key to remember with nativism that they are viewing some group as a cultural threat. In our context it would be if we said this group is un-American and they're threatening the American way of life but in the British context it would be they're threatening who we are because the English people and our English customs. So I have another one for you here that I'm going to translate. So this is showing us an FPO, another populist radical right party but this one is in Austria and this is an ad from 2006. Is this our future? Austria says no. Austria will remain free. And then at the bottom it says sign up and sign our petition. So what strikes you here? What is the message here? Anyone notice what the message might be? The woman is wearing one of those burqa type things right? Which if you don't really know about Islam then it doesn't matter. You get the message even though it's not correct. It's like oh right, she's supposed to be Muslim. She's wearing a flag. That's it. The European Union flag is her burqa. So oh my goodness, it's so powerful. That's why I'm so glad we got a computer projecting so that I can have images. Because the images are worth a thousand words. It's not only the question of if we allow all these foreigners in or even maybe they are our own natural Austrian born citizens but they are Muslim which is like a foreign religion to us. Yeah, she has little eyes probably this is an actress, this is someone in our model and then they said oh we're going to put you in this thing and pose for the camera and then this will be the freedom party of Austria which is their populist radical right party. I keep mentioning populist party and populism and so this is what we refer to as the anti-elite kind of sentiment. So the idea of populism, this philosophy or I should say ideology really, it's that the people which the ordinary common people are betrayed by, again that could be a political elite in someone in government, an economic elite very wealthy or a cultural elite, someone with a lot of knowledge or intellectuals, something like that. And so the populist radical right movements they combine the two. They do the anti-foreigner we have this internal group or this immigrant group that's really a threat to our way of life and then we have these elites that work for the European Union that are not recognizing what a threat this is and are actually aiding the enemy to take over our society. So here's one that the UKIP ran in support of Brexit, this is one of their campaign ads. On the left is the common person you right, you're the commoner, you're the audience your daily grind sitting on a bus, working hard long hours, it's not fun funds his celebrity lifestyle and that's supposed to be a European Union official so it's got the little EU flag above funds his celebrity lifestyle it's very small and then at the bottom it has what's actually an exaggerated number it's not accurate but so the UK pays 55 million pounds a day to the European Union and it's Eurocrats taking bureaucrats which come on nobody likes a bureaucrat and then combining it with European Union and he's in his limousine so life is easy for him he sits back and makes these policies that destroy our country and let it all of these foreigners and they really start taking over from the inside out this is another one that was run for Marine Le Pen in France and so there you have choose your neighborhood and vote for the front the national front the populist radical right that equivalent in France and that's it, choose your neighborhood it's either the nice French girl with the French flag stickers or paintings on her cheeks or again it's the burqa the burqa is ubiquitous and then my research into these populist radical rights that was like the most common tool used in their ads across different countries in different languages was just some woman in a burqa and in addition to the anti-immigrant and sort of nativist sentiment where what these Muslims are threats these foreigners are threats we also have the economic so combining here's your European Union policy of work this is in the British case British workers are hit hard by unlimited cheap labor now you may recognize this in our own country because we have similar narratives that link unwanted immigration with job competition and so that's maybe one that's really familiar even in this room that you've heard that and so really what the populist radical right parties do is they combine them they use the economic fears combined with the fear of something foreign or culturally threatening to mobilize people that the European Union is the root of the problem if we leave the European Union we can reassert who we really are and our own national sovereignty and deal with these threats or ourselves of these Muslims who are threatening I'm gonna maybe skip over this one just for time because during Q&A I can always go back to things okay so what are the PRRs doing politically this is what gets really fun for me as a political scientist fun in quotes first of all they're using the fact that there's been a refugee crisis for the last four years the biggest one we've seen since World War II and they're using it for political gains and what's happened one kind of cost of that is there's been a lot of confusion of the difference between what's a migrant and what's a refugee and so in the campaign rhetoric of these populist radical right parties in Europe they don't make any distinction and they don't recognize the official legal definition of a refugee is someone fleeing from persecution so this is an international human rights law a refugee must be based on a well founded fear of persecution it could be their political opinion their nationality their race, their religion but something about who they are has led them to be a target of intense persecution so they're really fleeing the country but is their home country to survive that's a refugee that's very different than a migrant a migrant is someone who chooses to move maybe they're looking for a better job or reuniting the family that lives in another country or maybe it's for education they're moving to pursue a better life and so it's voluntary not something where they're actually fleeing for their survival because they fear they may be killed or harmed but what's happened in the rhetoric about this crisis and how they're flooding the country and overtaking us is that the station has been lost and so people that are really qualifying as refugees under international law and if you're a foreigner you're another migrant so for someone like me that studies refugee policy that's a really troubling aspect of all this the other thing is we sort of have a scapegoating of whatever crime or social ills are happening in countries kind of trying to link it to refugees and this is a sign where they actually were calling them rape fugies and there was even some fake news that was going around of false stories of rape by gangs of refugees and then some fact checking websites came and said those things were not substantiated but as you may know from social media fake news can move very quickly it's very hard to stop so some people were also really afraid that oh these refugees again maybe not even knowing what a refugee is compared to a migrant are harming our women or somehow contributing to crime really disconnected from people that work on the ground that actually work with refugee resettlement programs that heavily vet a lot of those people applying for asylum so the reality of who are the refugees is kind of lost because the populist radical right parties don't care about accurate depictions for who the people are they care about using that fear for political gain and the other scapegoat aside from the refugees themselves are the European Union officials and sort of the European project as a whole and so the EU becomes its own scapegoat if only we weren't part of this EU then we wouldn't have to worry about taking in these foreigners here's another UK idea who really runs this country 75% of our laws are now made in Brussels and they have the EU burning a hole through the British flag like Brussels and Belgium is making our laws from British lawmakers the refugee image has also become really securitized meaning refugees are seen not just as a cultural threat because a lot of them may be from Muslim majority countries but as a national security concern in the wake of terrorist attacks so if you go back to 2015 in Paris we've really seen a stream every few months in a different European country maybe there will be some knife attack or what like the London bridge attack happened more recently or just two days ago in Marseille in France there was a stabbing and in some cases there would be either ISIS claim responsibility or the people themselves had some ISIS literature or sometimes maybe that wasn't even clear if it was linked to ISIS but they were Muslims and so that was part of the identity and they linked that and so that only kind of gets the cycle going further because as people fear refugees and migrants and people they think maybe from the East or Muslim it reinforces the sense that they are a danger and they are bringing terrorism into the country and so as part of this sort of cycle of violence we've also seen tremendous spikes in European countries of violence against refugees and violence against people that are perceived to be Muslim there are so many and just for time I selected a couple but this is one after the London Bridge attack in the British context they had this big spike in physical assaults and attacks and hate crimes against mosques in the UK and Germany and Austria both have seen a series of attacks not just a few but arson attacks on asylum centers where refugees are living and so some people were setting those on fire and sprayed painting like Nazi swastikas and so it's like we kind of see this violence manifesting in different ways terrorist violence that contributes to this fear that maybe all refugees or all Muslims are to blame and then what I call nativist violence which has been targeting people that are viewed as foreign or culturally threatening with arson attacks or assaults as we think about the future for the US and Europe it's really interesting to see what's happening with Brexit so this was something that we saw in the immediate aftermath the British themselves were questioning did we make the right decision did we rush into the vote to leave the European Union so this was a headline grab more than one million people just a couple weeks later wanted to change their vote when they were interviewed when they did a nationwide survey from leave to remain maybe after they saw the effects the media coverage and talk to people this one to me is maybe the most disturbing and that these are the Google results the day after the Brexit vote this is what people in Britain were searching on their computers the day after they voted number one what does it mean to leave the European Union number two what is the European Union that I just maybe voted to exit from which countries are in the European Union I'm supposed to go to college in another country a year from now oh wait that is impacted if we're in the European Union or not can I go there for less tuition and for free travel what will happen now that we've left and how many countries the Google results were suggesting that a lot of people also just didn't know basic things about what they were voting on which again maybe you can relate to democracy that's kind of a universal problem and then we also have some interesting discussion about what does this mean for the new U.S. administration and that's a Trump meeting with Theresa May because the bilateral trade agreement we would have to work out with just the British economy right instead of the European Union as a whole that we've had in our transatlantic partnership there's some economists saying if we just have the U.S. U.K. there might even be some labor shortages in that trade agreement once they leave the European Union so kind of the future of U.S. U.K. trade is also a big question right now one thing's for sure regardless of Brexit the European Union is not doing a good job regarding the refugee crisis and we call that burden sharing of taking in these people fleeing very desperate circumstances and this is just to give you a sense of where are those refugees really being hosted and despite all the populist radical right campaign ads and rhetoric the majority of them overwhelmingly are hosted in the Middle East by Middle Eastern countries not by Europe definitely not by the United States and so these are the top 10 post countries in our current refugee crisis and so you can see a lot of them like Turkey has over 2 million they have the largest number of refugees that they're hosting especially from the Syrian crisis Iran, Jordan we get some into South Asia and into Africa but overwhelmingly for the Syrians they're being hosted in the Middle East and then when you go even broader to Afghani, Somali, Iraqi refugees it's still the least developed countries there are actually some of the poorest countries that are least capable to take in refugees that are doing the job of taking them in and so when we compare that to for example Europe it really dwarfs the number that the European countries have taken in and really it's just Germany and Switzerland that have also done most of the resettling in Europe the other problem is we know that the European Union has continued to grow in the first slide where you can even see from the start of the 50s to today we went from 6 to 28 so every few years since the 1970s has been a wave of more countries that joined and that's what we call EU enlargement more and more countries joining this European Union but the problem is as it's spread you might say horizontally vertically in terms of the people in those countries believing what they're doing is a good thing but that has not been done very well so there's a lot of work to actually convince ordinary British people ordinary Danish people whatever it is that this is really something that's in their interest and kind of reminding them what was the whole European project to begin with and so you might say the EU has failed not only in the refugee crisis response but also to really communicate to average citizens why is it in our interest why are we in this European Union and kind of the future of Europe part if we look in the crystal ball it seems like these nationalist trends of reasserting sovereignty over collective cooperation are growing and so these PRRs it's populist radical right parties that I researched they're not going anywhere it seems like in fact they may be gaining a lot of ground and I don't know if people just saw in September there was a big election in Germany the first time since World War II in that country they had a radical right party gain seats in the Bundestag so that's really big because of Germany's history and even like the aspects of Nazi imagery that they have criminalized you know and the fact that they now have members of this it's called the AFD alternative for Germany the translation that's just to kind of show you the election results the two main parties in black and red for a long time in the dominant parties but then you can see in blue the AFD is now like the third most major party in Germany's political system and that's a populist radical right party so that is really something some of the AFD alternative for Germany has come to our similar themes that we've had before this one is saying new Germans will make our own the reason is because that's supposed to be like a white German lady who's going to bear the future youth of Germany herself not relying on immigrants because some people pointed out that Germany's aging population actually is in demographic decline so they need fresh immigration to help keep their economy growing and so a lot of people were pointing out that economic logic that oh we actually need the immigration and so it's kind of a counterpoint well we'll do that ourselves the women will get to making babies and we'll make our own German population we don't need to rely on those foreigners coming and that's going to give you a very similar theme that you've seen in a lot of these campaign ads Birkas we prefer bikinis and then it has the image of the bikini clad German women again playing on the opposite of the Birka like this is what we want, this is who we are and the imagination conjures up the image of the Birka that would alternatively be fully cloaking and oppressing those women and robbing them of their women's rights if, again, you have to connect all the dots the foreigners keep coming in and they're coming from most majority countries and Islam takes over our society why is it so remarkable that this far-right political party has come into German politics with such a force and the guy on the lower right he was one of the senior leaders and he has made statements minimalizing the holocaust and so to understand post-world or to Germany that's something that they really actively have, you know, mea culpa like we are taking culpability we're never going to let this happen again they have holocaust memorials contrary to their neighbor Austria they have really fully come to grip that this was part of who we were and so we're never going to let that happen again and he that's really remarkable, he actually said regarding one of the main memorials to the holocaust in Berlin oh, this is like a monument of national shame we need to get rid of these monuments and have a more positive view of our history and so kind of minimalizing the holocaust statements even suggesting that they should remove the holocaust memorials to kind of forget the negative the good things Germany has done and so that is really just again things like that that have happened in Austria and other places but for that to happen in Germany people that follow German politics are just really shocked by it and you know we have some other comments like the guy in the top left he's one of the, he's like the deputy to the director of the political party so he's the second highest ranking AFD party official in Germany and he's known for making very racist remarks and we follow football in Germany what we call soccer but one of the best players right now is part German, part Ghanaian and so you know he's darker skin and he said about this man that oh, he's good on the field but no German people would actually want him as a neighbor just because of the fact that he's racially part black you know part African and so you know these are some of the people they've had at the forefront another senior leader up there he's made really anti-immigrant remarks very anti-European union remarks we just have quote after quote from something like 10 of AFD leaders reminding us of what is the populist radical right party what unites them but even getting some of that holocaust minimalization is something new to me one of the most interesting things too because sometimes people will play up the economic logic and say it's all about the job competition people are hurting people are worried about their employment opportunity that's why they're anti-immigrant or that's why they're anti being part of the European Union but what you see in the northeastern where it's really dark in East Germany that is where AFD got the largest share of the votes and that is where per capita they have resettled the fewest number of refugees so a lot of the people that live there never even meet or see a refugee yet they were the ones when interviewed after the vote in the post vote survey that that's like the number one reason they voted for the party was they don't want all these refugees flooding the country but they live in a place where there's hardly any they resettle it by highest economy right and most populist places so they actually go to the wealthier most populist parts of West Germany and they don't resettle many in the East German parts so it's not really about the logic you know it's more about the anti-immigrant or nativist sentiment and then if you've been watching just this week the news coming out of Catalonia as a movement to separate from Spain as their own Catalonian people there's some interesting connection that we can make back to our broader themes of tonight because this is actually from a year ago one of the Catalonian nationalist figures said that Brexit encouraged them like oh well if the British can leave the European Union maybe we can leave Spain we also want to assert our own Catalonian nationalism over being part of an integrated Spain so some people are saying wow Brexit can really create a lot of instability and give a lot of nationalist successions movements renewed hope to break away and then what we're seeing now is the European Union is kind of calling on the Catalonian police to remember that part of being in the EU is respecting human rights because if you're watching the coverage of the last couple of days it's been really brutal treatment of the Catalonians that we're trying to vote in the referendum for independence by the Spanish police so the human rights question is still not resolved even in European Union member states you know there's a I want to give you the alternative because the alternative to a lot of what I said tonight would be there's also some research that shows Brexit made some European populations clean even more to the project and feel even like a stronger sense of no we like being in the EU and so among some populations it boosted support for being part of the EU there's also a really fascinating article I was reading kind of an analyst from the European Union looking at all this public opinion stuff on the use of Trump in the EU and the reactions to Trump have also been very negative in Europe and some people say that action may unite Europe sort of maybe not good for US but for themselves to sort of reunite as we are European and these are our principles in opposition to the new American administration and these were some of the headlines that came right after your Trump selection for Europe there's a new threat in town the US EU's president the president of the European Union calls on Europe to rally against the Trump threat specifically he wrote a letter to all leaders of European Union countries saying our top three threats are terrorism Russia trying to take over the medal in us and the Trump presidency and those were like the three top threats identified to Europe and I like this one because it gives us a bigger picture this is support for President Trump in context of support for the past two presidents and what we can see is they picked a couple of main Western European countries the red is the British the yellow is the French the blue is the German and the green is Spain so you can see we're kind of back to George W. Bush levels with the people that study global perceptions of the US and what we know for us after the Iraq war and then we we had problems during the Obama administration too so it was definitely not perfect in fact some say there was already a distancing between the US and Europe even then but we sort of really plummeted back down to the George W. Bush levels of favorability with the new president so that's another one to sort of watch for the whole question what is the future this was the specific question now that Donald Trump is US president over the next few years relations between our country and the US will what and this is taking all European populations a survey 8% thought it could get better with President Trump about half thought it might not change at all say the same and then 37% felt that it will get worse under President Trump so that's another one sort of for the future thinking and then I promise now we can get to all of your questions thank you you're showing a woman in a burqa but the French I believe prohibited burqas at schools I think not oh yes you should have had hey but my question at the beginning I was very surprised to see that Ireland was not a native country in South Africa you would just have to be a cork it was a big parade and there were overwhelming number of barters in that parade so they clearly welcomed barters unfortunately some activists yeah thank you so his question is about Ireland and you're right that Ireland has been in terms of it's even who can be a citizen one of the most liberal of the European countries they have reduced restrictions so that even like being born in Ireland just by that alone not blood to a lot of European countries have blood based citizenship so yes they're very liberal in that sense of accepting immigrants but they wanted to have their own control over that process and so that's why those countries that are in gray even though they're European Union they still want to have more of their own policy making now they cannot deny an European citizen so even the UK it gets to make its own policies in many regards but they can't block or ban other European Union citizens and so that's something to keep in mind that part of the arrangement and part of why UK the vote to leave being pushed as anti-immigrant is that they don't want to have to take any European Union citizen because maybe someone who's really a Tunisian and so they are an EU citizen could then come here and work and go to school and live in our society and well we don't even want the EU citizens that may be second generation or third generation if they're maybe non-white or if they're Middle Eastern origin or especially if they're practicing Islam that's a very quick and simple question and maybe it's a trickle for them to have but it looks like there's a small portion of Finland that is not part of this but shouldn't get it the area is that accurate or is that just a trickle of the map yeah I don't know actually I've never noticed that in the map I would be sure that it's accurate but I almost wonder if it's because there's like part of Finland that's something extraterritorial because I don't think the map would be wrong I've looked at Finland recently excuse me there's another area like that too in southwest Lithuania and northern Poland that's actually part of the question is that what it is? yeah a little territory north of Poland is part of Russia yeah sorry I haven't looked at that one in a while so let me bring the mics so we can all hear the question anybody else have a question? oh come on I think we're all aware right now in the elections in Germany and France and probably in the Brexit as you were looking at all of this did you notice Russian influence in other other European universities in for example, Catalonia yeah I don't know about Catalonia I didn't see anything in that one but I saw a lot about Russian influence and here's a Russian exploitation of Brexit and I also came across something that well you know how currently we're investigating Russian influence in the US election that some were saying a similar bot used on Facebook that's a Russian bot or Russian some kind of Russian hacking device was used to support populist radical right rise in Germany so there was a story about it I didn't have a chance to really look in depth but this idea that the Russians are actively trying to exploit divisions in Europe absolutely and scholars that study the region say that is the biggest concern over something like or if there's a growing rift between the US and between Europe is that Russia is all over that and they are waiting to pounce and that would be great for Russia to have a rift between the US and Europe because Russia does have the designs to sort of regain foothold and be a great power in the region so yeah, there are a lot of concerns of Russian exploitation of all the instability that could be happening in Europe Drive for Catalonia and and then it goes back centuries as in Scotland so I guess it's just maybe intensified maybe for seven days there's nothing new No, no indeed under Franco people have ever looked at the US relationship with Franco. He was very brutal towards any non-Castellanos Spanish and he banned Catalonian dance and language schools and that resentment is still very well known by the Catalonian people so right, it's not that Brexit causes movement for sovereignty and breaking away succession but perhaps it can give renewed hope to some movement like oh now we're going to think about how this could apply to us take advantage of the moment break away as well but from our own country Regarding Brexit and the vote to lead is there any chance that that vote will come again before the population and go the other way? That's a great question. There have been some calls by the Labour Party the Liberal members of Parliament like clearly so many people are against it. They just did a survey over the summer that found now more people would vote to stay than to leave if they held the referendum today so some of those Liberal members of Parliament have called for doing it over or redo so it's a domestic politics issue right now in the British political system because Theresa May is facing kind of a weakened position. She had an even lower support level in the last election they held and she thought it would show everyone that people really love Brexit and they do support her party going forward with it and so some even within her party are saying maybe Theresa May maybe you should step down because you're linked to the Brexit vote whether they're actually going to redo it remains to be seen right now her position is we're going to do like a soft exit and we hope to negotiate all of these things to help our economy before we officially leave 2019 but the issue is there's really no way to do it softly because part of getting to be in the free trade part with all the benefits of the economic sharing is the people sharing and that's what really motivated the vote of people wanting to leave was more about immigration than the economy when they did post vote surveys so that remains a question for British domestic politics and her own party if they force her to step down without then being used as a platform to do it over and call any referendum her position has been the people have spoken we had the referendum it was official we are moving on that and so her stance is no we're not redoing it and we're going to be out by 2019 you said that the European Union was not doing enough to help certain is there some way that the European Union could be made stronger or should be taking stronger steps yeah for people that study European Union reform there are so many avenues so there's the economic problem that comes with the shared currency how does the country then respond to inflation how does the country use its own economic background I mean Germany only has like 4% unemployment compared to Spain or Greece where maybe it's more like almost 20% so these are really different economic context and for all or many of them to have this idea of a shared economy can be problematic so there's a lot for we should I think people that may have done the reading in the booklet there's a lot by Dr. Moravchik because he really focuses on European economic reform there's a lot of avenues for that in terms of the refugee burden sharing yes there have been plans of here's how each country based on its wealth and population could fairly share responsibility for these desperate people fleeing looking back to our own history when we were desperate and fleeing war and violence and that has been rejected it's been all talk no action by the actual states viewing that they would really be committing political suicide at home if they took that many refugees in so yeah there are a lot of great plans and I think we just don't see the political will so far to execute them Thank you for coming General Merkel what type of force do you feel she is for holding the EU today yes that's a great question because Merkel in the last election she did win less than her party has traditionally in Germany so some people said wow that's really showing a decline in support for her but she did still win and that's a really important factor because she's so pro-European union the thing with Merkel is she does see a new potential ally because in France the populist radical right Marie Le Pen lost and Macron came and Macron is very pro-European union as well so she has the potential now she has like a new ally in France she can work with Macron they both take a very pro-European union stance and maybe weather her own domestic politics storm of the rise of the radical populist right in her own country so yeah there she is really linked with the European Union the people that voted for the AFD were also very anti-Angela Merkel they link her with refugee sharing because Germany has done so much they've really led, they've been like a model for refugee responsibility sharing but her attackers use that against her and those that support her believe in those principles of kind of who we are in Germans that's who we are we are taking in these desperate people and they recognize their own history maybe positive for her because Macron is there now in France and they can kind of unite and then a lot will be a question mark about Trump-Merkel relations because they were off to a very rocky start but he did recently visit Germany and he, I don't know if people followed but early in Trump's campaign when he was president-elect he said he would not support NATO's Article 5 which is mutual security and defense if one is attacked like we all come for the one and fight to defend them and he's just saying I don't know if I support that and that was really well or I should say really poorly received in the European Union because that's a staple of the North Atlantic Treaty organization but then when he just visited Germany he was kind of backtracked and he said okay I do recognize and accept Article 5 is important and we would continue to defend a European ally like it was off to rocky start Germany-U.S. but if that can improve then maybe that will also help Merkel feel more secure I know you touched on McCroven I'm interested in what he had to say about his his difficulties I think that's what we would eat what is going on what are his problems yeah so the support for Le Pen even though I think it came to like 34% for Le Pen the French right candidate over his 64% so he had a very strong victory over her but there's still that third of the country then that not only wanted the opposite of McCroven but they wanted something even more extreme they wanted maybe even pulling out of the European Union one of his biggest things too he's viewed as an elite because he's also a wealthy businessman so he's viewed as maybe part of that problem of the economic collapse but France has a higher unemployment in Germany so that's more of a concern for him than for Merkel so I would say the fact that he's viewed as an elite the fact that they are having a slightly higher unemployment and the fact that he has a whole third of his country that wanted the populist radical right candidate instead of him I think there was maybe just time for one more let's see what happens the President said a few weeks ago and I think he probably changed his mind yesterday but he was very concerned about they're not paying their fair share and he's saying a lot of different things happen but he's still on that point about the European Union not paying their fair share what's the position now if he has an elite or they change their people right right and it's a great question actually the fair share is about NATO which is your very similar yes but it's a very timely question NATO so there are some false numbers where they say the US contributes 70% to defense spending but that's really misleading because that's saying defense spending all over the world and the US has 800 military bases in the world a lot of stuff in Asia Pacific and the Middle East well outside of Europe so that's a really misleading kind of fake news thing and people are saying oh the US pays 70% we don't pay 70% we do pay 22% of the NATO budget and we liked it that way so that we can control I think the next one is like I may have it Germany pays 14% of the NATO budget France 11% so we're at 22% and that gives us a sense of control and so historically that's why we wanted to control NATO and we wanted to be the pullers of the first strings so that we can feel like our hegemony our power is intact and that we dominate even in Europe that like we are the regional great power of Europe because we control the military also there's a key principle of international relations regarding threat perception and this belief that countries want to judge their military might relative to other countries so we would want to have the strongest military and we would feel threatened if Germany started spending more on its own military or France started spending more so it's a really interesting thing now to hear US presidents say oh they should spend more on their military because all through the Cold War and since we emerged as a major power we've wanted just the opposite we've wanted other countries to spend less ally with us and we'll be the ones with the big guns and we'll be the ones that run the show so yeah there is something to it but also there's a reason why it's been that way and this would be a big departure from our history