Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Ivan Krastev discuss international reactions to the Trump administration, Europe’s weaknesses, and the impact of changing demographics worldwide.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We’re recording this at the end of the year 2025. I thought about how to round off the year for myself and for the podcast. The obvious way to do that seemed to be having conversations with two people who have most helped me think about the world and given me orientation in very disorienting times. I’m having one conversation with our friend and colleague Francis Fukuyama, and another conversation with you, as a kind of year in review.
We could start in many places, but a natural place to start, in some ways, is the White House. You said on an earlier episode of the podcast this year that the Trump White House was a kind of revolutionary movement, and that part of a revolution is that it always self-radicalizes and that you don’t really know where you end up. It feels as though the Trump White House has been self-radicalizing, but perhaps in the last few months it has also been getting stuck. How should we think about what is going on at the heart of American power?
Ivan Krastev: I’m sure you will know better, because one of the interesting things about revolutionary dynamics is that it’s better to be where the action is. This is very much about how you feel it and how people are reacting to it. What was important this year was the speed. If you go back, you have the feeling that in January you were transferred from a normal train to a fast train, and everything started happening very fast. But it was not very clear what the destination was.
What you’re sensing, in my view, when you say that it feels stuck, is that people are puzzled about where the train is going. Funnily enough, it was very fast and very radical, but what was the objective? That, in my view, is starting to paralyze Trump himself, because he was jumping from one small issue to another. The grand narrative was missing. There is no big story anymore that he’s telling.
From this point of view, even when you look at the national security strategy, it reads much more like a transcript of his mind than a story for the future. It’s more a story of what he has done than of what he is going to do. That, I believe, captures the broader sense.
The second point is that, interestingly enough, over this year a lot of things have happened, but neither the fears of people who believed this was the end of the world nor the hopes of his supporters came true. This is true of the economy. There were the tariffs. Many liberal economists said this is where inflation would break out, and it didn’t. His supporters said there would be tariffs and manufacturing jobs would come back, and that didn’t happen either.
So, strangely enough, a lot has happened, but nothing really changed at the level of how people perceive their lives. This is probably what people mean when they talk about peak Trump, the sense that the energy he came in with has been exhausted without it being very clear what the next thing is that he can do.
Mounk: That’s interesting. Part of it is the speed. There are two things. The first is that so many things were happening at the beginning that it felt like the “move fast and break things” approach in the famous Silicon Valley parlance, and it felt like they were going somewhere. Now that we’ve had more time to take stock and assess what they were doing, it looks more like a toddler who can run around and break a lot of things very fast, but who is running in a circle with no particular direction.
The other thing is that it does feel as though the speed with which the administration is doing things has slowed down a little bit. Right now, and I’m very aware of the risk of being premature here, because we would have said one thing in March 2025, another thing in June 2025, and another thing now, and the story may still look very different in two or three years, it looks as though some of the restraints on government are holding better than it felt like in March or April 2025.
The Supreme Court may rule tariffs unconstitutional, at least in the way they were passed. That’s not certain, but it’s what many legal experts expect based on the oral arguments in that case. The administration has certainly played with slow-walking its response to adverse legal rulings. In some cases, it has deported people who were already on planes when judgments came down, in ways that were deliberately close to the line. But it hasn’t yet simply ignored a court ruling outright.
There’s now the prospect of Democrats winning back the House of Representatives in 2026 and being able to limit Trump’s power in other ways if they regain control of at least one chamber of Congress. Do you feel like the Trump revolution has slowed in those ways as well, or is that premature? What should we expect for the coming twelve months?
Krastev: Many things, of course, can change, because this is also about how people react over time. But in my view, he exhausted a lot of the energy that came with him in petty fights. In a strange way, the most interesting story about the Trumpian revolution is that it has the energy and the anger, but no future project.
A large project could be totally utopian. You can like it or dislike it, but it allows you to have a story and to focus on the big things. Because of who he is, and because of the narcissistic nature of the leader, which became the narcissistic nature of the regime, what happened over this year is that he aged in front of our eyes. Revolutions do not like aging.
When he entered, because of the energy, he was an old young man. He was very energetic. He was doing this and doing that. Now the cameras are capturing him sleeping, not being there, and this is changing the perception of people, including those around him.
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Last week, I was working with colleagues from the European Council on Foreign Relations on their global survey. It covers twenty-one countries, eleven in Europe, as well as China, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa. It’s interesting to compare the data with a year ago and see how the world has started to view him differently.
Because the data will be public on January 15, I don’t want to go into too much detail, but there are two striking things from this year when viewed from global public opinion rather than American public opinion. This was the year when everyone was talking about Trump. But when you look at the data now, there’s a widespread sense that the next ten years are going to be the Chinese decade.
We see this every year, but you may be surprised by how suddenly people have become convinced that China has the upper hand, and how the rise of China is no longer scaring people. That is the interesting story in the data.
Mounk: Is that because views of America have become so negative that China looks like a relatively better alternative? Is it because views of China have become more positive? Is it that people have simply gotten used to the idea? What do you think has changed that perception?
Krastev: Of course, America has lost ground in some parts of the globe. For example, South Africans have changed their views of the U.S. quite significantly. But something very important has changed.
During the Biden period, there was both fear and expectation of a return to bipolarity. The United States confronting China, a renewed great-power confrontation. When Trump came in, there was an inertia that assumed this was what would happen. The paradox of this one year is that Trump was extremely polarizing in domestic politics, but he was depolarizing in international politics.
This happened because tariffs hit everyone. He was making deals with the Chinese. He was making deals with the Russians. Suddenly, for many people, China became another name for multipolarity. That does not mean America is declining or going to be ousted, but China stopped looking as dangerous and aggressive.
Many international relations scholars believed the rise of China would push countries and publics toward the United States. Instead, you now see public opinion in places like India warming toward China, despite a long history of conflict. This is quite interesting, because there was so much focus on Trump that many people missed how these dynamics were changing.
Part of it is that China managed to stand up to him without appearing particularly aggressive, even though it was. Another part is that he disoriented everyone else. From a European perspective, when Trump came to power, leaders knew they would have a difficult time. They assumed that even if Trump was challenging, the U.S.-China confrontation was so central that Europe would remain necessary.
Instead, we ended up in a situation reflected even in the national security strategy, where every region is largely on its own. There is no overarching frame. This matters because so many things happened so quickly. The speed was enormous. But at the end of this year, there is more of a feeling of exhaustion than a sense of major achievement relative to the objectives the administration set for itself.
Mounk: How do you think this is going to play out? I want to come back to the United States, but let’s stay with the question around China for a moment. It’s striking that over the course of the past year, attitudes seem to have become more accepting of China playing a major role going forward.
In part, that’s because for many parts of the world, China is going to pose an even bigger challenge. When you’re sitting in Europe and you see that the United States is now imposing significant tariffs on Chinese goods, that’s going to lead to even more competition from Chinese imports elsewhere. It’s going to become harder and harder for China to export, for example, car technology to the United States, and that creates a massive problem for the German car industry.
If you’re sitting in Berlin, Paris, or Vienna at the end of 2025, you might think the challenge from China is actually bigger than it was a year ago, not necessarily because China is doing anything particularly wrong, but because of these broader dynamics. Yet the perception seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
Is it that, for medium powers like Germany or France, the idea of a multipolar world is more appealing because it offers more room for maneuver? Do you think being less concerned about China is a rational response, or do you think it’s short-sighted and underestimates the nature of the challenges we’re now facing?
Krastev: This mood, of course, can change. Any crisis can change it. But in a strange way, the decline of American power and the rise of China are perceived by many as a rebalancing. One thing that, in my view, Trump got wrong was focusing almost entirely on trade and the economy. There was an implicit sense of not talking about ideas and, to be honest, not talking much about war or other issues either.
Suddenly, he started competing with the Chinese on their own terrain, and that is a game you cannot win. Fifty percent of global manufacturing production now comes from China. China also managed to stand up to Trump without looking hysterical or aggressive. They pushed back and created a sense of predictability.
If you look at Europe, on one level it is clearly threatened by the Chinese shock you’re describing. There will be more and more cheap goods entering European markets. Macron said during his visit to Beijing that Europe has no option but to consider tariffs to protect its industries. But because Trump confronted Europe so directly, Europeans have become much more cautious than before. They are asking whether they can really afford an ideological confrontation with Washington, a military confrontation with Russia, and an economic war with China at the same time.
I don’t believe this response is limited to Europe, and I don’t think it’s unique to middle powers either. In my view, middle powers share three characteristics. First, they are very ambitious. In moments of disorder, they tend to see opportunities more than risks, partly because they are status-conscious. In a more disorderly world, there are more ways to assert status.
Second, room for maneuver is critical for middle powers. Being a middle power means hedging. In a world where America is loud and present but not disciplining, hedging becomes easier. It was much harder to hedge in a period of strong ideological confrontation, when you were expected to take sides and clearly define who you were.
Third, because Trump tried to engage personally in nearly every conflict and play a role everywhere, a new kind of middleman position has emerged. This goes beyond traditional middle powers. Some countries have become professional mediators. Look at Qatar, the Emirates, or Saudi Arabia. In a certain sense, there are now more mediators than disputes.
This position has been strengthened by two characteristics of Trump’s diplomacy. The first is his belief that, in order to solve a conflict, you should not know very much about it. I’m saying this, to be honest, with a certain level of sympathy. If you know too much, you know very clearly what cannot happen, and sometimes you need an outsider to break a status quo. From that point of view, there is probably some truth to the idea that, particularly if you want to disrupt an existing equilibrium rather than simply close a deal, an outsider can help.
The second point is that, because he operates through non-professional diplomats, personal friends, and businesspeople, the world has suddenly become very monarchic. When you look at relations between the great powers, almost with the exception of China, it can feel as though it’s not states negotiating but families. You see figures like Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner meeting Mr. Dmitriev, who is close to Putin’s family. In both cases, foreign ministries are reading the news to understand what was negotiated.
I believe this nineteenth-century flavor is critically important. The personalization of power, which in my view has been fueled by social media and its ability to amplify this anti-institutional dynamic, allows many things to happen. At the same time, you begin to lose clarity about what exactly has happened.
Mounk: Where does that leave Europe? There’s been a lot of talk this year about Europe’s weakness. The phrase you used earlier, that Europe is in an ideological confrontation with the United States, a military or proximate military confrontation with Russia, and an economic confrontation with China, captures how embattled the continent is.
I tend to have a quite pessimistic view of both the current state of Europe and the extent to which European political and intellectual elites have understood the stakes of the moment. There’s an assumption in the European public, which I’ve seen in a number of opinion polls, that France twenty-five or fifty years from now, or Germany twenty-five or fifty years from now, will look more or less like today, just a little worse. I’m not convinced that future exists, or that it’s a realistic prospect for how things might go.
Perhaps I’m overstating the point. Perhaps being a middle power, or a collection of middle powers, depending on whether you think of Europe as a single entity or of Germany and France as separate countries, will offer significant opportunities in this new multipolar world. Perhaps Europe can maintain a military alliance with the United States while relying less on American predominance, and continue trading extensively with China, managing tariffs and other measures along the way.
It may be that ten or fifteen years of crisis, during which European industry has fallen behind, could allow Europe to discover new areas of economic strength where it can compete. How dire is Europe’s situation likely to be in this new, more monarchical, more multipolar, and perhaps more transactional world that you’re describing?
Krastev: It has been said that Europe is the most vulnerable part of the world these days. Of course, this is also because it is the wealthiest. As a result, this combination of vulnerability and wealth, which means that everyone is trying to see what they can get out of you, is quite clear. If you look at opinion polls, and our polls show the same, Europeans themselves are the most doubtful about Europe.
This creates a situation in which the European project was really prepared for a different world, and that world has disappeared. On one side, you have Russia at war, and it was never a secret that Russia sees the very existence of the European Union as an obstacle to its foreign policy objectives in Europe. On the other side, you have an American president who is essentially saying the same thing. He is saying that what is not a nation-state does not have the legitimacy to exist.
If you are a European citizen or leader, this is deeply shocking, because Europe has gone through too many kinds of disintegration to know that the cost of unraveling is very high, particularly with an aging population and a stagnating economy. Normally, when you think about the future, you don’t know what is going to happen. Only Nostradamus knows that. But you usually know what is not going to happen. You have certain assumptions about what cannot happen.
At the core of the current crisis is the belief among Europeans that the United States, under Trump, could side with Russia over Europe on the Ukrainian crisis. That possibility is destroying many of the assumptions on which their world has been based.
Suddenly, there is a sense that many solid assumptions no longer hold. You can have crises in relationships, problems here and there, but not everywhere at once. From this point of view, the European Union is beginning, in many respects, to resemble the Habsburg Empire, which survived only insofar as it could convince others that its existence was in their interest. There is a growing feeling that this momentum is being lost.
At the same time, this opens an interesting question about what could happen next. For me, that makes 2026 particularly important. Because of President Trump and his highly ideological politics, one effect has been the encouragement of political parties in Europe that see their relationship with the Trump administration as a political strength.
The key question is what happens if Democrats win Congress. If that happens, Europe will face a very interesting choice. Trump-aligned forces in Europe implicitly hope that Trump will remain in power for a long time. Otherwise, they can expect that if European politics becomes defined by American domestic politics, a Democratic return would be very damaging for them.
This raises the possibility that even some far-right parties and mainstream parties could renegotiate a basic consensus on Europe. What should the European Union be? What should remain, for example, of the single economic space? What should change and what should not? From this point of view, the end of 2026 and the beginning of 2027 may be the most critical moment.
The strength of the Trumpian right in Europe is closely tied to Trump’s own strength. This is not because there are no domestic reasons for support of these parties, but because Trump’s existence allows them to act as European players rather than merely national ones. Many of these parties no longer dream of exiting the European Union. They want to change it. From this perspective, what seems clear is that the European Union is unlikely to survive in the institutional and ideological form in which it was originally created. The major renegotiations of the European Union will be shaped largely by relations with the United States on one side and Russia on the other.
Mounk: One change during 2025 is that at the beginning of this year, you had a fresh Labour government that was already having a bad start but was still sufficiently new that it looked like it might get its problems under control. You had in France a political system that was under obvious strain, but there still seemed to be relatively good prospects of some kind of coherent, moderate candidate emerging for the presidential elections in 2027. You also had a fresh government in Germany with Friedrich Merz, or perhaps that came a few months into the year.
Now, at the end of this year, you have Nigel Farage’s Reform Party leading in the polls. In the Westminster system, you can get a big majority with 32 or 33 percent in a fragmented party system. By the same token, if you lose five or six percentage points, you can suddenly go from a projected majority of seats to being a minor player. But according to current polls, Nigel Farage would have a majority of his own in Westminster whenever the next elections come.
In France, you have Jordan Bardella leading opinion polls very clearly for the first round, where he would get about 33 percent of the vote, while the next candidate would get around 16 percent. He is also leading in matchups for the second round against virtually every competitor, relatively narrowly against some center and center-right candidates like Édouard Philippe, and very clearly against any candidate on the left.
In Germany, you have Alternative für Deutschland, the most radical of the right-wing populist parties in major European countries. It does not look like it is about to govern nationally, but it is either even with or ahead of the Christian Democrats in most national polls. It may, for the first time, enter government in some state parliaments in East Germany, and depending on how things go, it may even win an absolute majority in some of those state parliaments after elections due to take place in 2026.
One question raised by all of this concerns transatlantic relations. I’ve been saying repeatedly since Trump’s national security strategy was published that many European mainstream outlets want to frame this as an ideological battle between the United States and Europe. But I think it is an ideological battle within the United States and within Europe. The Democratic Party does not agree with the national security strategy. Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s national security advisor, who was on my podcast in February or March, does not agree with it. By the same token, many people in Europe, including spokespeople for parties that may be in government in London, Paris, and perhaps eventually Berlin in the coming years, do agree with it.
So one question is whether this becomes the new basis for transatlantic understanding. Are we facing a breakdown of the transatlantic relationship, or a shift of that relationship onto a very different ideological track?
The second question posed by those opinion polls in Britain, France, and Germany is where we are in what I think of as an epochal struggle over European populism. Are we losing across the board? Does this family of political parties continue to rise unabated? Should that temper any optimism we might draw from the fact that Democrats appear poised to retake the House of Representatives in 2026?
Krastev: On one level, I don’t believe the Cold War or post–Cold War West can be restored. This type of relationship between Europe and the United States that was typical for the last thirty years cannot return, for a very simple reason. It was based on the fact that regardless of who came to power, these relations did not change dramatically.
Now, and I agree with you on this, the dynamics of the relationship between the United States and Europe are very much defined by domestic politics on both sides. On the right, you have an alternative project. Not the West as the free world, not the Cold War West, which was universalist and centered on relations between the United States and Europe, but the idea of the civilization of the West. This is very clearly reflected in the security strategy, where the West is framed as a kind of Christian civilization, a white civilization.
The question is how stable this project can be. Here there are several issues, including some ironies of history. If you look at why Trump’s America is so unhappy and furious with Europe, it is because Europe has become Americanized. The discussions about multiculturalism and being more open to migration are ideas normally associated with America, not Europe.
It is also ironic because the United States was founded as an alternative to the old Europe of nation-states, closed nation-states. It was the New World. Now, in a strange way, the Trump administration resembles a migrant who left Europe two hundred and fifty years ago, built a life elsewhere, no longer likes the place where it lives, looks back, and says, what happened to the country I came from? I want to go back, but it is no longer the same country.
I understand this story, but I don’t believe you can easily build a civilizational alliance on this basis. That alliance would require America to be ideologically present in Europe while reducing its military presence and financial commitments, while arguing that Europe should spend more on defense and be able to defend itself.
This brings us to the second part of the problem you’re touching on. We are likely to see a much more militarized Germany at the same time as a Germany in which the AfD could eventually enter government. How does that change Europe? The far-right parties we are talking about, to different degrees, are sympathetic to major elements of the Trump administration’s agenda, particularly on immigration and national culture.
At the same time, historically, they are in competition with one another. I don’t believe Marine Le Pen would be particularly happy to see a future in which Germany’s defense budget is three times larger than France’s. That is the interesting part of the story. One thing that also matters to me is that Trump is a nationalist, but he is a nationalist without history.
Mounk: When Tucker Carlson interviewed Putin, the first hour was essentially a history lesson about all the ways Russia has been wronged and why it needs to regain its grandeur. It’s very hard to imagine Trump giving a one-hour history lesson with the same knowledge and conviction.
Krastev: It’s not even about knowledge. He does not believe that history matters. In a certain way, what is interesting about Trump is that he is not interested in what happened before he was born, and honestly, he is not interested in what is going to happen after he leaves office. One moment that always stayed with me was when he was recounting a conversation with the Chinese president and said that she told him he would not invade Taiwan while he was in office.
From this point of view, you have an extremely important difference in time horizons. On one side, you have Putin, and you also have Xi, who think in terms of centuries. This is excessive, but it is real. The Russian president asks for ninth-century archives to be brought to him. He wants to see original documents. He meets archaeologists to understand where Russians come from. On the other side, you have the President of the United States saying that he is not thinking in terms of centuries, but in terms of weeks, because the world is moving so fast.
This creates a problem, because the nationalists on the European side share several characteristics. These parties are driven by deep demographic anxiety, by dramatically changing populations, and by the feeling that the country is no longer home, because home is a place you understand and believe you understand, and that feeling is gone.
At the same time, when you look at their projects, many voters for far-right parties are migrants themselves, but they want to migrate to the past. They are not dreaming of a different economic model. They are dreaming of a different demographic and ethnic composition of society, which is extremely difficult to achieve. It is particularly difficult because demographic change is so dramatic. This is what drives these parties, but it is also what paralyzes them.
One figure really struck me in the U.S. national security strategy. There is half a page devoted to Africa. In 1900, twenty-five percent of the world’s population lived in Europe, and between eight and nine percent lived in Africa. If United Nations projections are correct, by 2100, six percent of the world’s population will live in Europe, and forty percent will live in Africa.
You then end up with a security strategy that treats Africa as a footnote and tells Europeans to be who they used to be. That is not easy, because demographic decline, low fertility rates, and the failure of governments to address these issues are already realities. These societies have already been remade. Instead of trying to understand how they can be governed, what can be achieved and what cannot, there is this dream of returning to the past, and that is not going to work.
Paradoxically, if you look at American history, this logic does not work there either. Even the idea of “white,” which did not exist in Europe before the emergence of America, was an inclusive concept. “White” emerged because Bulgarians like me, Jews, Italians, and Irish were not considered white in the eyes of Germans or Englishmen.
Instead of focusing on how to redefine the world so that societies can function and be governed, we retreat into nostalgia. There is a difference between nationalism and nostalgia. The real drama of Europe is that there is national sentiment, but there are no longer national economies.
When we ask what is going to happen, imagine the European Union disintegrates and you are left with nation-states. What does the Bulgarian nation-state look like? What is the Bulgarian national economy? What kind of protectionism is possible at the level of the state? How does it compete with anyone?
There is a major contradiction between a world increasingly organized around large spaces and civilizational states, and a U.S. political offer that encourages fragmentation in Europe while proposing civilizational alliances. I find this deeply disturbing.
Mounk: Let’s pick up for a moment on this idea of demographic anxieties that you’ve talked about a lot. There are two elements here. One is immigration. In the United States, the choices of the Biden administration that led to a large influx of migrants across the southern border were probably one of the reasons Donald Trump was able to win re-election in 2024. There was a very detailed article in The New York Times a few weeks ago that went deeply into some of the choices the Biden administration made and why it made them. Reading it, the whole thing felt like a bit of a train wreck.
In Europe, there are strong reasons to think that the expressed preference of the population for many decades to have more control over borders and less immigration, combined with the inability or unwillingness of policy elites to deliver on that preference, is one of the main reasons for the emergence of right-wing populist parties. In the study of populism, it used to feel like there were many new ideas emerging every year because it was such a fresh field. At this point, the number of genuinely new ideas seems to be diminishing, and much of the research is circling similar themes.
There was, however, a very good article published in 2025 by Laurenz Guenther on what he called a cultural representation gap. One of the things he showed very vividly was that in 2013, the average German voter’s view on immigration was to the right of the average member of parliament from the Christian Democrats, which at the time was the most right-wing party in the Bundestag. That meant there was a large gap between the views of the average voter and those of the most right-wing party in parliament. What happened next was that this space was filled by Alternative für Deutschland, and immigration remains the most potent recruiting ground for these parties, particularly in Europe.
As you’re saying, though, there’s a deeper question. One question is how to deal with border enforcement and how to avoid continually handing such a large electoral gift to populist parties. The deeper question is why populations around the world feel unable to reproduce themselves in the way that historically happened, through having children and raising the next generation of citizens within the country.
This is a deep problem across Europe, particularly in Southern and Central Europe, but throughout the continent. It’s now a major issue in the United States. It’s also a problem in India, where fertility rates have fallen below replacement level. It’s a significant issue in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where fertility is around 1.6 children per woman. It is a massive problem in East Asia. China is likely to be one of the dominant powers over the next ten or twenty years, but if it wants to remain dominant over fifty or one hundred years, it will have to address its severe depopulation challenges.
How is this going to play out? Are countries going to find ways to encourage citizens to have more children, or are we heading toward worldwide depopulation?
Krastev: This is an incredibly important story, demography, because in my view it has several elements that are dramatically different from any other period before. Demographic fears have existed before. In the nineteenth century, there were strong demographic fears about overpopulation. That was Malthus. There would be too many people and not enough food and economic resources. For the first time in history, what we are facing is the fear of depopulation. This is new and it has three critical parts. The first is not simply that fertility rates are now very low. It is that we cannot understand why. They are low everywhere. They are low in rich countries and poor countries. They are low in autocracies like China and in democratic countries like those in Europe. Normally, one would expect fertility to stabilize around replacement level, about 2.1, based on theories of demographic transition, women’s education, and gender equality. But suddenly, even in countries with very generous social systems and highly egalitarian societies, like Finland, fertility rates are extremely low.
I am not even touching on South Korea, which looks almost suicidal in demographic terms. In places like Russia and Iran, all of this is blamed on a Western conspiracy. The narrative is that because liberals in the West do not have children, they do not want others to have children either, so they promote feminism and gay rights. Part of the anti-gay propaganda in many of these countries is explicitly about fertility rates. But the reality is that governments can spend a great deal of money trying to incentivize young couples to have children, and it does not work. In countries like Hungary, around five percent of GDP goes to policies aimed at reversing demographic decline, and the results are modest. You do not just have a demographic problem. You have a demographic problem without a solution. Governments do not know what to do.
The second element is that for a long time people believed technology would help. Artificial intelligence, automation, and robotics would compensate for labor shortages, especially in caring for aging populations. But technology has become a source of fear as well. We hope technology will solve demographic problems, but we also fear it, particularly artificial intelligence. People are not only afraid of being replaced by migrants from Africa, the only region with strong demographic growth. They are also afraid of being replaced by robots.
This fear is combined with another factor: the concentration of wealth and technological development has created the prospect of individual immortality. You may remember the famous conversation between Putin and Xi about people living to 150 years and organ replacement. This creates the idea that a small group may be able to buy immortality, while most people remain mortal. This is a new kind of inequality that feels impossible to bridge. It resembles ancient Greek mythology, with a few immortals determining the lives of mortals.
Previously, people accepted individual mortality because something larger would endure. One of those things was the nation. You would die, but your children would remain, and their children after them, along with a shared culture. Now there are no children. You face the mortality of the individual and the mortality of the nation.
The third element of demographic anxiety is political. The fear is not just that newcomers will take jobs, but that they will outvote you. There is also the fear that governments will select migrants based on how they are expected to vote. This obsession destabilizes the basic understanding of political community: who belongs, how belonging is defined, and what identity means.
I often use a simple example. There is an Italian restaurant in Vienna that was originally founded by Italian owners. It was later bought by someone else. Now the owner is not Italian. The waiters have never been to Italy, do not speak Italian, and do not know much about Italy. But the restaurant has Italian music and an Italian menu. Is this an Italian restaurant? For me, it is. For an Italian customer who expects to speak with someone from the same place, it may not be. This captures a deeper identity conflict.
This reflects a clash between two ideas of majority in democratic politics. One is the historical majority that formed the nation. The other is the electoral majority that emerges on election night, which can be ethnically very different. The first person to experience this clash may have been the first president of Poland in the 1920s. He was elected and survived only a short time before being assassinated. His killers argued that he was elected by minorities, Jews and Ukrainians, and therefore could not be the president of Poland.
This tension between migration, democracy, and the remaking of nations is critically important. Civilizational discourse does not help, because it only says “defend,” without offering solutions. At the same time, Trump captures some very real anxieties, particularly in Eastern Europe. For Eastern Europeans, ethnic homogeneity of the state was understood as a lesson of the twentieth century. People say populations have always moved in Europe, but the difference is that twentieth-century movement resulted in ethnically homogeneous states, especially in the East. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic are examples. This homogeneity was produced through population transfers, the Holocaust, and the expulsion of Germans.
What we are now witnessing in Europe is the unmaking of these ethnically homogeneous states. This raises further questions. Are Bulgarians in Germany part of the problem Trump talks about? Or are migrants only those coming from outside Europe? Then comes the question of Islam. This is also striking, because in the imagination of the American far right, Russia is a white Christian nation. In reality, Russia has the largest Muslim population of any European country, and one of the strongest centers of political Islam is Chechnya.
We are living in a world where policies are increasingly driven by anxieties rather than ideologies or solution-oriented strategies.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Ivan discuss how artificial intelligence is changing both the future and present day, and make predic
