Photo: Ian Willoughby, Radio Prague International
The Ukraine crisis has provided an opportunity to revive a European Union that had lost its way. That is one of the assertions of Benjamin Tallis in his essay collection To Ukraine With Love, which got its Czech launch last month. The Berlin-based foreign policy expert also identifies a new approach to foreign affairs – seen in, among others, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský – which he has dubbed “neo-idealism”. I spoke to Tallis, who previously lived in Prague, at our studios in Vinohrady.
If I could start with one of the first lines in your book, you say that “Russia’s war and Ukraine’s heroic resistance have had a clarifying effect”. Could you elaborate on that?
“I think the war and Ukraine’s resistance have had a clarifying effect in the following ways: They’ve shown us what it is we need to stand up for, and how. That if we don’t defend democracy, it can die; and that’s what Ukrainians have been willing to die for.
“I think that’s given us the wake-up call – to say this is something we can’t rely on being there forever, that we have to actively fight to defend our freedom.
“And that’s made a lot of other things simpler, in a lot of ways: What it is we prioritise, and what we don’t. What kind of actions that we take, and what we don’t.
“But on an individual level for many of us I think it’s been a prompt to make our own work, and our own words, clearer. And whether that’s through our activity social media – or in my case my professional work – I think that’s the clarifying effect that it has had.”
See the rest here.
Author: Ian Willoughby