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Aleksander Smolar - Europe in crisis (77/201)

210 views · Published 18 December 2018 · 1:48 · Indexed 25 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: And now we come to Europe. Europe is in a deep crisis on many levels… a multi-layered crisis. Poland or Hungary are contributing to it to say nothing of the problem of migration. And now there are the elections which have just taken place in Germany, and which may have checked the process of emerging from this crisis because Mrs Merkel is weakened and it’s debatable whether she together with Macron will be able to present a plan which will fix Europe. Well, we’re saying all this at a specific moment and it can all change very quickly. In any case, we are living through a time of destabilisation on various levels: fear, uncertainty, anxiety… the anxiety of people coming from different places, and this threatens democracy. Even in countries where there is an old democracy like the States we see the election of Trump, and the same could happen in Europe. I mean, if this wave of migration isn’t stopped, I wouldn’t discount the possibility of it leading to the destabilisation of various democratic countries. As regards Poland, Poland is still influenced by these global processes although this often goes unseen. In Poland, there is almost no discussion about basic phenomena like globalisation or one which has a fundamental influence on destabilising the situation at the moment, I mean the advance of technology which is leading to a rapid and radical reduction in the number of people being employed. So what then will happen with those people who lose their jobs? What kind of social model will emerge from this? The effect here might be anti-democratic movements. We are talking about masses here.

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