When working-class people, migrants with no papers, no legal protection, when they have no rights, they're much more easy to exploit. So they can't, you know, they can't be part of unions. They can't protest. They're much more easy to kind of threaten and to curse and to so they just can be exploited more easily. So it's actually in the interest of capital to have people who have no rights.

Employers will say, "Yeah, we need more people. We need more labor force because we have shortage of skills and so on." But if they were people that they'd have to pay properly, that could be unionized, that could fight for kind of bargains for their wages and put pressure on capital, of course they wouldn't want them.

I was born in the United Kingdom in 1984. Uh my great-grandfather, however, was born in what was then called the Russian Empire, Zaris, Russia. He was born in a city called Baku. It's in modern day Azabaijan. He had to leave after 1917, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War as it became known. He moved to Iran, which was where my grandfather and my father were both born. My dad was in the UK and I was only born in the UK because of another revolution, the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Now, for much of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, we thought those days were over. We believed magically that revolutions and wars and displacement was disappearing into the midsts of history that we were moving into something quite different. What if we're not? What if some of the disasters, war, genocide, famine that marked much of the 20th century is coming up in front of us? What if it's not all behind?

To discuss all of that from migration to rising geopolitical tensions between the United States, China, Russia and Europe. I can think of few better guests than today's. Leah Herpie wrote a fantastic book about growing up in Stalinist Albania free. Her latest book, Indignity, is about her grandmother's story instead. Like I say, these are narratives like my great-grandfathers from a century ago, but increasingly in 2025, they feel more relevant than ever. Leia Herby, welcome to Downstream.

"Thank you for having me."

"It's great to have you back on second time."

"Yeah, it's wonderful to be here."

"Your first book, Free, was translated into how many languages?"

"37."

"37. Which which was the sort of not strange? There's such a thing as a strange language, but which was the most sort of esoteric unusual language."

"I guess a combination of which one was the most esoteric and the most successful country. It was Iceland."

"Iceland."

"Yeah. Because it was a bestseller for a really long time and it's not a country that I would have associated to great interest in Albania and Albanian politics and history."

"We're talking about your latest book, Indignity. Before we talk about that book, I want to ask you a very simple question there. Where is your family from?"

"Well, it's not a very simple question."

"So, which part of the family? My uh original my Albanian family. Um, my grandmother was born in Salonica. My grandfather was born in what was called Monaster and is now Bito in Macedonia. Salonica was in Greece. Another part of my family is from central Albania. And I'm married to a English man, but also with roots in Cornwall and Wales. And so my children have all this mixed background, mixed roots. And he's from a little bit of everywhere really. Because that that question increasingly matters to lots of people, doesn't it? Who are you? Where are you where are you from? What is your identity? But for somebody like you, that's quite a a fluid answer."

"Well, there's two parts to that question. There's a more sort of historical to the answer as well. There's a more historical answer which is very complicated. And then there is a very simple answer which is well, what passport do you hold? And I hold a British passport and an Albanian passport. And and that answer and the question matters a lot at that level because what passport you hold determines where you can go, what you can do, what jobs you can apply for. What kind of life you have and obviously someone who has an Albanian passport has a much much difficult and harder life than someone who has a British passport. So my brother who only has an Albanian passport has never been able to visit me in Britain because he was never given a visa. Really?"

"Yeah. Never."

"And it now he's not applying anymore because there's no point applying. Basically the system uh it's done all mostly these days by algorithm. So you apply and if you're categorized as an Albanian man of a certain age group uh single uh in his case with only my mom in Albania, you're categorized as someone who were he to be given a visa to come to the UK would not leave and so he's not able to come because he doesn't get a visa. As simple as that. This is just to answer your question."

"Isn't that isn't that sort of racial profiling? I mean"

"Of course. Yeah."

"Is there not there's >> a kind of demographic and there's a kind of it's not just racial right it's like age category and yeah back ethnic background um sometimes obviously also income in his case was a middle-ass family so but of course if you are you have absolutely no chance to come to Britain if you're an Albanian man of working age with no income that's just zero possibility which might also explain why some of them decide to go on boats when they have relatives that they want to join for example"

"But is that I because I've never heard this before. Is that even legal under European law?"

"Well, I mean, I don't know how I really I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the ins and outs of the the technicalities are. But basically, he has applied a number of times and was rejected. Of course, once you get rejected once, it becomes even harder the second time to be rejected. And so, yes, at this point, he just doesn't apply anymore because you probably know also that when you apply for a visa, you don't get reimbursed for the fee. So, you spend a lot of money for the fee and you just get turned down. Then you get turned down another time. The fees have increased exponentially in the last few years. By the way, I just applied for my mom uh who once was rejected, but in other times has been able to. I don't know if she's she was going today to find out whether she got it this time or not. And uh the fees have gone up ridiculously. Um and yeah,"

"How much how much are the fees now?"

"I forgot what I paid for her. Something like she applied for a longer visa. Uh so maybe for a fiveyear visa and I think I paid maybe 1,200 pound something like that. Yeah."

"So for people who aren't familiar with you and and your work and your your professional status, you're not just a writer, you're also a very successful academic at the London School of Economics. You've taught there for a pretty long time. You are a British citizen who said even for somebody like you, it's incredibly hard for your family to come over here. I mean that's kind of incredible."

"In the case of my brother, it's impossible."

"It's impossible."

"Yeah."

"Yeah. And this is the reality. This is why when you ask me the question of where are you from? There is a very long story which is to do with roots and culture and history and where you know mixed cultures and so on and more kind of romantic poetic answer and then there's a very straightforward answer which is I'm from Albania. I have a passport from Albania and for a lot of people with Albanian passports it's extremely difficult to travel and to do anything to find opportunities that other people have just because they hold that passport. And in that case the answer of does it matter? Absolutely it matters. It determines your life."

"Does that does that kind of outrageous treatment towards Albanians, people of Albanian heritage, does that make you feel more proud to be Albanian? Does that sort of augment your sense of identity as an Albanian person?"

"Uh, I don't like the category of pride for national belonging because I have an inherently anti-ist instinct. It makes me feel solidarity with the people that I share a language and a background and a kind of experience with. And certainly it makes me think about their hardship and their experiences and how what one can do and how it fits with general patterns of injustice in the world. And also it makes Albania in that sense special because it singles out this country as a country where you see a kind of sight of oppression that in this case takes passport lines and uh and of course it's a country I know very well. I grew up there and of course I have memories. I'm fond of it. But I don't like the category of pride uh if you know what I mean because I think it's just a kind of blank."

"You said belonging. You said belonging. I think for a lot of people those two those two things kind of mean the same."

"Well, I don't know because you know belonging can be very pride is always unambiguously positive, right? I'm proud of my country. belonging can also be you know you can also not like your country sometimes and you can be frustrated and resentful with your fellow country men and women and uh I think it's a much more complex category which is not always unamiguously positive and I certainly as I say I feel solidarity and I feel that I have a certain special attention for the plight of people that I know well that I share these experiences with and that I have this background in common but yeah I just as I say I don't like the category of like am I proud? I don't know. I'm not. Yeah,"

"That's really interesting. We're going to talk about your sort of family story and how awfully they were treated by the government of Albania for a very long time. But speaking personally, for instance, during the recent Israel Iran conflict, I don't feel especially Iranian. I feel British primarily, but I feel attached to Iran through my father. He is Iranian. But during that conflict, I absolutely felt closer to the people of Iran, the language, the culture, the history. And I would use the word pride. I'm proud of I was proud of a people that are able to defend themselves in the face of such overwhelming hostility and aggression with support from the world's most powerful countries. That doesn't mean I agree with everything the Islamic Republic does. Actually, I agree with very little of the things it does. But I would still use the word pride. That's really interesting. Maybe that's a maybe that's a word we can tease out."

"Yeah, there kind of linguistic ambiguity there in the way we use it. Um, yeah. No, I absolutely share that. I mean, I of course I have I this is why I said I would single out Albania and Albanians as a place that I think about a lot more than other countries that I could be thinking about. And uh and the people I feel I know better. I understand certain practices. I'm very fond of certain things. I really miss, you know, Albanian parties for example or Albanian ways of socializing in the UK and yeah, there is a way of doing things that is familiar to me and that is not always the case when in in every context. So absolutely I'd say there are many many aspects of that experience that I identify with an increasing number that I feel solidarity with many of which I'm fond but then there's also a lot of other things that I don't like and yeah I feel like if I had to say I'm proud I would sort of somehow put cover on all the negative things and single out all the positives and I want to retain that ambiguity of that relationship because I think it's also what makes me a part of this community is to be able to have that critical stance towards it."

"Can we have one last sentence about pride? Because like this is a kind of interesting question, right? You made me think I mean when I think about the opposite of pride, it's shame, right? And so if you are to ask me, are you ashamed of being Albanian? Absolutely not. But uh this is why I think it's important to not be unamiguously proud, but also to say this what I who I am and this is how I relate to this experience. And this neither pride nor shame are relevant categories in this"

"A philosopher's answer. You're from Albania. You are somebody who has some sense of belonging to Albanians. Let's not use the word pride. Um, you're also somebody who identifies as being on the left."

"Would you call yourself a socialist?"

"Totally. Yeah."

"Yeah. You'd call yourself a Marxist."

"Yeah. Um, actually, so I say I don't usually call myself a Marxist. I don't have a problem when people call me a Marxist. So, I don't resist that. I don't say no, I'm not a Marxist. The reason I resist the label or I don't self-describe as a Marxist is that I don't like uh identifying with a person. So for me, you know, we don't if someone is a liberal, they don't say I'm a lokian or I'm a million or I'm a Hayekian. They're a liberal and liberalism is a tradition which has lots of great thinker thinkers in it and they are have some common themes and I I remember when I was hired at the LSE as wanted to teach a course that was basically Marx and Marxism and themes around Marxism and I had offered my colleagues to teach we had a course called liberal theories of freedom and I wanted to teach a course called socialist theories of freedom and I was told no the students won't like that course they want marks and Marxism and I inherently and maybe in part because of my coming from Albania Yeah, I don't like these labels that are by names, you know, Stalinist or a hoist or a troskist or a Marxist or I think there's a socialist tradition to which lots of eminent figures belong. And this is why I prefer the label socialist. But when people say I'm a Marxist, it's fine. I don't mind that I read marks. I have lots of things that I enjoy from Marx, other things that I don't agree with. And I feel of socialism is a live tradition that continues to develop. And when we call it Marxism, somehow we're restricting it or we're just um maybe overdetermining what it means and how it can be captured."

"Altusa had a great line about Marx which I'm I'm sure you know. Um, he said that marks discovered a new continent of thinking like Tales did with mathematics and it's for the rest of us to explore that continent and make sense of it which I think is a really beautiful way of"

"Yes, absolutely. And I think there is absolutely something to the sort of socialist critique of liberalism and of capitalism that begins to be articulated and I think has like maybe the clearest um in in Marx's writing. You get the most powerful origin of that thought. I mean there were of course other currents in socialist thought before Marx and uh other thinkers that Marx engaged with that were also part of the tradition. But I agree there's something to the Marxist critique of capitalism that is very distinctive and that is still very much worth exploring today and gives us really important categories. But it's also I agree a criticism that needs to be developed because it was written in the 18th century and the world has also moved on since then and so it's constantly kind of adapting like every other theory."

"So you're a socialist, you don't mind being called a Marxist. Uh, you're Albanian. Now this is of course a country which was enduring experiencing actually existing socialism until very recently your lifetime. How do your how do your fellow Albanians make sense of that? Do you do people sort of look at you perplexed and saying you're a very successful person you're Albanian you've come from a country which tried this it failed. How on earth could you maintain the same opinions?"

"Yeah, I think um it depends on who they are really and and what kind of generation they belong to and how what kind of experiences they've had in socialism in Albania. Not all families and not all backgrounds were the same and not all suffered from the uh government repercussions in the same way. I would say that yes, there is a kind of generation of Albanians that came of age that was a little bit older than mine that so therefore knew much more of socialism in its negative aspects than I did when I was a child. I was uh 11 when the um regime fell. So I don't have actually personally any bad memories from socialist life. But there is a generation of people that was older than me and so clearly experienced repression, censorship uh and they are I suppose the ones that are the most surprised if uh of of that group of people. Then there's of course a category of people I you know family members or relatives older relatives who literally suffered under communism. so went to prison or their grandparents were executed and murdered and so they are the ones with the sort of greatest resentment and hostility and then I think there's a generation of younger Albanians a lot of them also Albanians in the west or immigrants of immigrant family second generation I would say they're much more open and much more curious and willing to explore different ways of thinking about socialism and um yeah I think I think these are the ones with which I understand myself better in dialogue and in conversation because they're a little bit more open-minded. I think there is in general in um in Albania, but maybe also in other East European countries, there is a tendency to relate to the Marxist tradition, as you know, this is a history that we know, we've tried it, we've failed, it's not worth going there. Just as there is a tendency in the west to think of the Marxist tradition by the left as this is a great philosophy and um yeah, it needs to be tried and it has never been tried properly. And so in one country in one context only the history matters and philosophy is just utopian doesn't work when you try and realize it in practice. In another context which is here only the philosophy matters and then the history is the history of these kind of backward people that tried it and failed for whatever reason but they never did it properly. I think both of these attitudes are limited and I my work is really situated I'm also situated between those two ways of thinking trying to both think critically about socialism in Eastern Europe and the experiences of real world socialism but also think critically about liberalism and capitalism and current dynamics of globalization where as we were saying earlier there are lessons to be learned from the Marxist critique and need to be adapted and therefore I'm also very open to that tradition."

"Just to be clear, you said about personal family experiences. Your grandfather was a political prisoner for 15 years. Is that correct?"

"He was a political prisoner. Yeah. For 15 years. Uh yes. And on my mother's side, my great-grandfather was killed by the communists. They were property holders and so their properties were confiscated. They were also elite, wealthy, bourgeoa elite in that case. In this my father's side, they were more aristocracy and more intellectual elites. But the thing is uh just to sort of explain in a way also of why my relationship to socialism is so ambiguous. My grandfather was a socialist when he went to prison. He spent 15 years in prison. When he came out he was still a socialist. He was against capitalism always reflected critically on what was going on. Even when he came out of prison and he didn't do this just because he was complying with the regime or you know because he had to pay lip service to communist. He genuinely saw what was wrong. And my father was the same. generally saw what was wrong with uh capitalism and I feel that now you know he's he's not there I've actually not really met him but I read his notebooks and he used to read and write and has left a number of documents that you can read and left is he wrote about social theory of heart and uh he was a sort of engaged intellectual and I feel as though it would be insulting to that legacy of someone who was a victim of communism but came out and was still a socialist to say that uh the real the socialists are only the people who put him in prison. So what about all those other socialists who are victims of Stalinism and of this state socialist project but also remained critical of capitalism. So for me it's really important to be able to to engage with these experiences and actually I think these experiences are not unusual they're not uncommon. If you think about 1989 and 1990 in Eastern Europe and the dissident movements on Eastern Europe, of course, the story in the West, it's told as a story of they were all free market liberals. They loved the West. They wanted to have genes and consumption and rock music and so on. But this is not the case. If you read the movements, especially you know how the Czech movements, the dissident movements of 1980s in Poland, in the Czech Republic, in Hungary, an important part of that project was a critique of real socialism, but also a critique of capitalism. So these were democratizing movements that were generally trying to find the third way, not the third way of the kind of labor, new labor kind, but a third way that would be able to put together perhaps the more positive aspects of a socialist project. you know this attention to um social justice or the attention to certain gender questions or the attention to anti-colonial struggles with also critique of the lack of democracy and the bureaucratization of the rigid way in which the socialist Stalinist regime but even just socialist regimes even after Stalin in Soviet Union operated. So I think it's really important to recover that tradition and not to let it be crushed between those two poles. on the one hand the ones who say well socialism is just what real socialism was you know Stalinism and then post Stalinism you know BRV and Abdul Gorbachov on the other hand and uh you know or it's capitalism it's free markets it's hayek it's so I think this is where I I I believe it's really important also for the left to be able to engage and to carve a space between those two >> poles"

"Your grandfather actually knew ha in Paris."

"They were in Paris together during the time of of the popular front. So 1934, 35, 36. These were years in which the socialists and the communists were together fighting the far right, uh the monarchists, the anti-semitic right, this beginnings of fascism obviously in Europe as well. And at some point the left won the elections with this prime minister called Leon Bloom. And it was a coalition government between the uh socialists and the communists. So even though my grandfather was a socialist, ha was a communist, they knew each other very well. And at that point they were on the same side of the struggle."

"Did they they briefly was staying together? Is that or does that mean mis"

"No, the story was that at some point Ha was uh renting a flat in Paris and he didn't have money to pay the last installment of the rent. And so he had called up all his friends including my grandfather to uh receive his suitcases. So he told the land lady, "I'm going to go in the room and I'm just going to pack my and then I'm coming and paying the rent." Because he didn't have money to pay. He went and threw out all the suitcases from his window and then he jumped himself off the window and his friends kind of received him and my grandfather was one of the people who was in this group of people and this is the story that I'm recounting."

"And your and your grandmother met hot show?"

"My grandmother met him in Albania through my grandfather. My grandfather knew really well from Paris. So they had been hanging out in Paris and my grandmother met him in the 19 late 1930s just before the communist resistant movement started in Albania and he was in the cafes hanging out and was not as involved in Albania Albanian politics as he eventually became with the war"

"And that that it's really interesting reading actually the accounts of what was going on in Albania towards the final years of the Second World War and I think it's something that barely anyone in Britain even knows about the violence and the destruction and the just extraordinary intensity of the partisan and resistance movements in southeastern Europe. I mean in in what was then what became sort of Yugoslavia under Tito but also that that part of the world as well. And it's just been erased from history. If you look at I think the the two countries in terms of per capita casualties from the second world war it's the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Huge numbers of people and that, you know, the Vermachs were really screwed because you have this really important path between, you know, the Russian front and sort of what's going on with West Asia and Europe and you have to go through Yugoslavia. There's Greece as well, of course, and the parts kind of screw that and it's just been completely obliterated from our memory of the Second World War and and the demise of of the German war effort. We don't talk about it. It's like it never happened."

"Yeah. And I think I mean in the Balkans it's especially complicated because the communist politics is always in a very fraught relationship with nationalist politics sometimes with progressive nationalism. So the nationalist movement itself it's split between a more reactive conservative fascist side and a more progressive liberal side. And the communist and the socialist my grandfather as I say was a socialist but they were trying to navigate this uh complexity of the war where on the one hand it was about securing your state. These were new states and especially Albania is a little bit different from Yugoslavia although even there you know obviously the there is the invasion of Yugoslavia and the break up and there is different history different history of different republics basically but uh it's a really complicated story because these were uh states that had emerged from the collapse of empires whose borders were not secure and therefore their resistance to fascism and to Nazism was always combined with having to think about what where the border is going to be and how is it going to be carved and this is what makes it really really complex and of course what happened as uh in the second world war and actually one of the reasons my grandfather was arrested uh by the communist later his official charge was agitation and propaganda in collaboration with British intelligence officers now what happened in Albania during the second world war uh the S so SOE the special operations executive was active in the Balkans trying to encourage anti-fascist resistance and they didn't really know who was the anti anti-fascist resistance because they were barely trained and they didn't really I mean in terms of trained in terms of understanding the country and the language and the context and the culture and what other struggles had there been and so they had to they sent these very young very inexperienced officers who received two weeks training in Cairo by an anthropologist who had been following Albanian history and politics for a few decades in the 20s but that was it not much more and then they came and they had to figure out who to support as part of the anti-fascist resistance movement and The history of the war is very complicated because it changes depending on whether it's the Italians or the Germans in charge and the Brits in this all this um configuration really complex configuration of forces decided that the most reliable allies were the communists. Now the communists were not strong in Albania before the war. There was no communist party. It was only founded in 1941 which is in the middle of the war basically. Before then there was nothing. also because it was a very rural society. There wasn't really a strong working-class movement. There were no factories. It was very different context, semifudal relations inherited from the Ottoman Empire and the Brits played a really important role in encouraging the communists in actually together with the Yugoslavs. So the communists were influenced both by the Yugoslavs ideologically but materially in terms of resources, intelligence, information, it all came via British officers. Now when the war finished Hoda had to jump somehow and of course he was a communist so he wasn't going to jump the way the liberal and the churchill and the uh western side so he decided to jump with Stalin and and Yugoslavs and so at that point he decided to kick out the British officers and purge anyone who had been somehow in connection with these British officers including my grandfather. So the reason he went to prison was that uh he had been in contact with these intelligence British officers with whom Hoja had also been in contact but because Hojo was a communist he called the shots and my grandfather who was not a communist was a socialist could be accused of collaborating with these British officers. I mention this because it's sort of you know I've been thinking a lot about questions of historical injustice and how you know how these histories change and who you are how it depends on who your grandfather was and so on and because I've been thinking obviously now I live in Britain so I think a lot about the second world war also from the perspective of British readers and British history and of course the SOE is celebrated for encouraging anti-fascist rightly for encouraging anti-fascist resistance and so on but if you think about the Balkans in particular in Albania it really was like NATO when it left Afghanistan. You know, you have these foreigners who are supporting certain progressive movements and then they're out and then the progressive movements are tossed at the mercy of the Talibans. And here they were in Albania. They were supporting these socialists, social democrats, not communists. And then they decided, okay, this is not a priority anymore. The war is over. It's won. And uh he they left. And I when I was reading for the book my grandfather's trial um documents, the name of some of their British officers came up. So I was googling them and then I discovered they were selling uh luxury villas in Greece and the families who had kind of inherited property in the area because I clearly had this kind of connection and I remember thinking you know in these exact same years that this officers who was there talking to my grandfather who is mentioned in the trial as someone who was encouraging him and with whom he was in contact in the same years in which my grandfather ended up in this horrible prison um in Albania. this other guy he there he was in Greece building a swimming pool for his new villa that he just bought and uh yeah no longer thinking about what had happened to these lives"

"I suppose there's absolutely that angle but there is also the the aspect to all of this which is there were people within the so SOE and within the British armed forces who were communists themselves and socialists obviously you know you get a pretty leftwing government come to power in 1945 many of the people voting for it are having having fought in that conflict and there's one particular story I can't remember who it is it's the brother of a very famous Marxist historian. I think it may be it may be Christopher Hills brother. It may not be >> who was fighting with Bulgarian partisans against the Vakt and he was a committed communist and um he refused to basically say that he was British. He refused to because his comrades had been killed, his Bulgar Bulgarian comrades been killed. So he died with them and again extraordinary story."

"Yeah,"

"Just like the Spanish civil war, extraordinary stories of international solidarity which have been completely erased from the contemporary imaginary particularly of this country Britain"

"Which I suppose that was part of a broader project in the 1980s just eviscerate any memory >> of an actual left >> yeah and actually that's another reading for why some of these officers because they had a choice you know who to support do you support the kind of monarchist leaning anti-fascist or do you support the nationalistleaning anti-fascist and often it depended on who these intelligence officers were and sometimes because they were left-wing oftentists they supported the communist movements And this also determined like the personalities and the histories of these officers determined who the Brits were funding and who they were in touch with. And uh yeah, it's really interesting story actually."

"Yeah. I've never heard the analog of of Hawkshire and the Taliban, but it kind of as you were talking and before you overtly said that, that's where my mind went. You mentioned about your grandmother. She was born in Salonica. At that time it was the Ottoman Empire, the tail end of the Ottoman Empire. How big a tragedy was the collapse of the Ottoman and Austrohungarian empires for Europe but also obviously West Asia over the course of the 20th century? Do we sort of do we underpric how mismanaged the demise of those two empires was?"

"Yeah. So, so my grandmother was born in 1918. Uh the Ottoman Empire was still around but Salonica had at that point become Greek. It was annexed or liberated however you ask. You know, if you ask the Greeks, they'll give you one answer. The Turks will give you another answer. But basically, 1912, it became part of Greece. And so, my grandmother was born in what was technically Greece, but to an Ottoman family and in a time of great upheaval, and the Ottoman Empire was in its last dying breaths in a way. So her life was marked by a fundamental shift in management and institutional politics that was very very different under these new nation states that were emerging from the from the empires from the collapse of empires which had an impact on the people. Now why did it have an impact? Because Salonica for example was a very cosmopolitan city and the largest group in the city were not Greeks were Sephardic Jews. So there were Jews, there were Albanians, there were Bulgarians, there were Armenians, there were Turks, there were Greeks, but they were not by any stretch of imagination the largest group. So then the Ottoman Empire collapses and in the process of the collapse world war I uh there is horrible massacres of you know Armenians, Greeks, Turks in various provinces of the empire and the collapse of the empire leads to a range of international agreements uh under the opaces of the League of Nations which had just emerged to kind of settle and to bring sort of political order to this international mess that World War I had left. And as part of those agreements, the break up of empires begins to lead to this quest for homogeneous nation states. So the politics of the states that were emerging from the empire was a politics of having to manage very multicultural communities but now with authorities that were representing one of the groups not all of them. So all her childhood was marked and to go back to your question you know how big of a change and what happened with the collapse of the empires. This is a very different way of organizing political institutions because it's organized by the nation state principle. And so self-determination uh this idea that you know a nation and a state nations should have their own states. And of course there's a beginning of what's now called the minority question in international law and efforts to negotiate minority issues with international law. But predominantly the politics is a kind of nationalist politics that has to manage these new states that emerge from the collapse of empires. And that isn't just the case in the Ottoman Empire. It's also in the Hubsburg Empire and in the Russian Empire. So these are all states, new states that emerge from the break up of these three large empires, which accounts for quite a lot quite a large part of Europe's population. If you think about Europe in a kind of expansive way that includes the Ottomans and the Russian Empire, my grandmother's life, I mean, it's really interesting because when I was a child, I uh always, you know, we talked about her past and she always mentioned something that I could not get my head around. and she said, "You know, my life was ruined by the population exchange." And when you're a child, this concept of a population exchange just doesn't make any sense. You how do you get your head around? When I tell my kids now, what is a population exchange? This idea that millions of people were literally exchanged for other millions of people in another country and there is this territorial principle by which entire groups of people need to comply. And her life was actually in Salonica. The the impact of that was particularly devastating because there were the population exchange prescribed the return of Greeks of Asia Minor in particular and Turks. Greeks in Turkey had to return to Greece and Turks of Greece, Muslims had to return to Turkey and everyone in between like the Albanians who were both Muslim but not Turks had to decide where to go. And so in her case, in the case of her family, they weren't forced to move by the exchange, but they could decide. And depending on what they decided and what they said their identity was, their entire lives would be different. So the part of her family that actually went to Turkey was fine. The part of the state in Greece did not do as well and eventually had to go to Albania and that also determined the rest of her life. So I always I couldn't quite understand why she said because you know she'd lived through communism and my grandfather had been in prison during communism. She'd had a really hard life. She was a single mother. She was went to the countryside to work after having a life of privilege as a young woman. And she always said the greatest disaster was a population exchange and prison you understand as you know the coercive nature of it and why it might be so hard on an individual. But when you're a child or a little bit later not when I was a child maybe 10 11 when the regime fell that she started opening up about her past and the prison histories and so on. when she said the population exchange was really the the most horrible thing, I remember thinking to myself, what is a population exchange? And it's only when I wrote the book that I began to sort of go into this question of population exchange and what that meant for people, what it meant institutionally, but also what it meant for everyday lives."

"Yeah. And you use that quote from Lord Keren about unmixing of peoples. So this idea that we start with and this is obviously the sort of in the the mindset of much of the contemporary ultra nationalist right is we had homogeneous nations globalization has mixed people up and now we need to rectify well actually the story is kind of the other way around"

"Absolutely yeah absolutely and also I mean people were always mixed even in countries where you think there was a homogeneous nation state they were also always mixed but here what was really interesting is that the unmixing of people was done by international treaty and so you know there's something called the Loausan treaty which was the last treaty to end the Ottoman Empire which was the one that decided this shift of this population exchange between Greece and Turkey. And the population exchange didn't involve just people. It also involved property. So there's like huge bureaucratic documentation. You would go to an office. It was run by the subcommittees of the League of Nations. So people would literally go to an office and say, you know, we're going to uh give back this amount of land here and they would register what they were returning there and that would go to some refugee family that came from Turkey to Greece. that was given to a Greece family and they would receive an equivalent more or less plot of land in Turkey. uh and just think about the social lives and you know their connections, their human relations. This is just completely all over and what you have is like people just being like sheep you know you just take them from one side and move them to another side and I think this had it was devastating. It was devastating for my grandmother personally, but also for the city, you know, the city that suddenly has to deal with more than a million refugees for Aisha Minor who are Greek, but they're not Greek like the other Greeks who have always been in Greece. They're Greeks from Turkey. So, they're also not seen as quite the same. Imagine a second generation group here. You know, if these when I hear them when I hear the now the conversations in the right about remigration, there's this term remigration that kind of keeps occurring which it starts of course with we're going to do deport illegal migrants and rapists and criminals and so on. And now the discourse has normalized that. So you know it becomes mainstream. It's sayable that you know you can deport irregular migrants. And then it begins to be well maybe you can be a little bit more expansive. And so you start talking about second generation migrants. Now imagine a second generation Albanian who's only ever lived in Britain and goes to Albania. Of course they're not going to feel the same as the other Albanians because they've had a completely different socializing experience. So my grandmother's life was this whole constant trying to renegotiate relationships between these groups. And in her case, she went back to Albania because she felt under pressure in Greece because the new Greek nation state was trying to unmix the people. And so what unmixing meant was that the Albanians of Greece would go to Albania. She went to Albania to discover she wasn't like the Albanian of Albania. She was very different. She'd always lived in Greece. And so it's this is where all the trauma comes from with this is kind of cultural integration, social trauma, but there is all the economic issues of housing of u where you going to work and where you going to go to school or how you going to survive."

"I mean somebody watching this or listening who's from the right, they might say, "Oh, here we go. The woke talking point from Aaron and Leia, which is that Britain's always been multicultural." That's not, let's be very, very clear. Some countries, some states, some entities, polities have been more quote unquote homogeneous than others. But if you look at the you know Austrohungarian Empire, if you look at the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, vast swades of these places were far more diverse than Western Europe is today than Britain is today. Um and just just just to go over"

"But also even Brit Britain had an empire, right? So this is the other thing. It was a kind of imperial unit. It's"

"Because it was an island because it was an island. No, we had our it's like the American South. We had we had those colonies. It wasn't it just wasn't one contiguous land."

"Right. Right. So it wasn't territorially continuous. I was in in India over the summer and you know there's so much part of the Indian elite and the Indian establishment in the inter war period or even before that there was kind of educated and Britain and uh yeah, it's sort of you can't say that this is a completely different unit right because it was the same unit and it's sort of politically it's the same unit now of course with asymmetries of power and inequalities and injustices and oppression and hierarchies of difference you know it matters whether you're a sort of white elite British or whether you're Indian elite and whether when when you're but it is still the same unit. So this idea that Britain was ever homogeneous, this is a myth as well."

"Well, yes and so yes and no. So I do think there is a difference in so much as Britain was an island and you you had this this um this cultural, social, political phenomenon elsewhere, you know. So Melbourne and Kolkata are quintessential Victorian cities, right? If you talk about great Victorian cities, you're thinking Manchester, Birmingham, London, Melbourne, Kolkata, right? But I do think that's different to somewhere like say the Caucuses"

"Where you got Armenia, Aabai and like you have or Salonica I mean this is really important 50% Ireland for example, right? Of course I you know I was just thinking about Marks and Engles when they write about immigration and when they write about the sort of um what how why immigration is such a such a fraud topic for them already then for the working-class movement how immigration is"

Splitting the working-class movement, they mention the example of Irish immigrants. They say that migration is dividing the working class because the exploited British English worker, when they side with their Irish counterpart, sides with the exploiter. And so, they take the side of capital because they have this kind of racism that somehow feeds into this hierarchy.

So, this is just to go back to this idea that I think, in the end, with all these histories, when you start scratching a little bit beneath the surface, you discover this much more complicated reality. And also, you discover how minorities get weaponized constantly by some elite or other.

So, I agree with all of that. And it's really interesting how the ultra-nationalist right in this country, they've now decided Irish weren't actually immigrants. Well, if you look at the Times newspaper cartoons of the mid-19th century, they definitely were. They weren't even human, a lot of the time.

But I do also think that you're talking about the population transfers. Some of the stuff, I mean, this is now a century ago. You talk about the Treaty of Lausanne. And just to be clear, so the Treaty of Lausanne is basically where Atatürk gets lots of what he wants. Prior to that is the Treaty of Sèvres, which, you know, is not as advantageous to what became Turkey's interests. Um, but these are these extraordinary postwar documents under international law doing stuff that I think now we would just be like, "What the hell is going on here?" Right.

And I think another really powerful example for me, you mentioned the population transfers of Greeks and Turks. And there were Greeks in Anatolia for thousands of years, which is just wild. And then you just go, "Right, new document, you go."

Another one is in the Caucasus, in the sort of, I think it was called the Transcaucasian Federation. This very short-lived country of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia all in one country. And I didn't know this at the time, but Yerevan, which is now the capital of Armenia, I think about a century ago was primarily Azeri. And Tbilisi, which is now Tbilisi, or Tiflis, as it was called, which is now the capital of Georgia, I think that was primarily Armenian. Right. And I think again, I may be wrong, when these countries, when the Federation doesn't quite work, you've got these three separate entities declaring independence. I believe they all declare independence from the same city.

Which, and again, it's just so this idea that you've got these homogeneous peoples in these sort of very clearly demarcated areas is just complete nonsense. And we're still, we're still from Gaza to, you know, southeastern Europe to, you know, Russia's near abroad to Georgia, etc. We're still living in the shadow of all that stuff.

Yes. And the model that we have for how to create communities, political communities, is always the model of a nation-state, right? So the institutional model is still the same model. It's we're still operating within that framework. And we're thinking about how do they get their independent state? Who belongs? Who doesn't belong? Where do we draw the boundary? How do we go about it? And it's interesting that when those international frameworks were adopted within the League of Nations, part of the rationale for them was that if there was no international framework, if there was no kind of legally prescribed arrangement for how you would manage these issues, there would be genocide.

And so this is also some of my characters in the book. They have this in their conversations. You know, one of them is saying, well, we had the empire, that was a framework. And another character says, yeah, but the empire is gone. And these gentlemen from the League of Nations said there would have been genocide between the Greeks and the Turks if you didn't stop this somehow and you didn't have a what they call a settled agreement and a settled framework. And the settled framework is literally packing up people and saying, you're on this side, you on this side, and you don't mix, and you have your own state, you have your own state. And that was not how the empire operated.

Now, of course, the empire had its own, I don't want to idealize, and you know, we mustn't be romantic about empires either because although at one level they were more tolerant of minorities and cultural groups, and they have their own tribunals and they settled disputes in very different ways, you know, in the Ottoman Empire, you had the millet system, of course, it was a site of hierarchy and, you know, gender oppression and racial hierarchy still. And so it's not that it was all great, but it was, as I said, it was a framework as well. And now you can think about which framework are you going to democratize? And why is it that we decided to democratize a nation-state, or to democratize via the nation-state, as opposed to thinking about this in a slightly different way? It's a really interesting question, which I have not answered yet. But this is what sort of completely fascinates me. Like, can you think of how you could have? And I think there were some projects, partly why I'm really interested in Austro-Marxism, because they had these projects of what they call the kind of non-territorial political community, where you worked with diasporas that were non-territorial and following a little bit of the Habsburg Empire. So these were Austrian and uh Bohemian Marxists who were thinking about this along very different lines from Lenin, who had more like a self-determination principle that was more like Wilson. But, and they were thinking about it like that because they were within the Habsburg framework. And so they were trying to think about how could you democratize the empire and how could you think about diaspora arrangements? And so there were some elements also in the Marxist tradition, actually, of thought from which you could think about transnational units. But they've now mostly forgotten characters, and a lot of their work is not really translated from German. But there, I think it's really interesting thought from this interwar period that one could go back to.

I mean, two of the two of the best books I've read in recent years are Joseph Roth's *The Radetzky March* and, um, Stefan Zweig's *The World of Yesterday*. And I know you're like, you're trying to problematize the state, the nation-state, without saying empires are good, which we're not saying that. But with Stefan Zweig, there is definitely the sense of, okay, what comes after the Austro-Hungarian Empire was definitely a downgrade, of course, in terms of civil liberties, in terms of meritocracy, etc., however you want to measure it, because it's replaced by an Austrian state which ultimately joins the Third Reich with Hitler.

And in *The Radetzky March*, you have this very final pages of such an amazing book, of *The Radetzky March*, which is in the, if I remember it correctly, around the Ukrainian border, and we're all this kind of, you're in the same military unit, and then suddenly these soldiers who are all fighting for the Kaiser, then they decide that, well, suddenly the world is changing, and the First World War is about to start, and they all discover the nation that they're from. And you begin to see how, also, how epistemological frameworks change once the world begins to move in a different direction.

And people talk about Europeans and Western values and Western civilization. I think, like, the apotheosis of European culture probably is Vienna before the First World War, full of Jews. Um, you know, the heart, I think at one point you had Lenin, Freud, and was it Einstein? Trotsky was around. It was like, they were all in the same cafe in Vienna, kind of. And people say, you know, somebody like Peter Hitchens would say that Europe committed suicide with World War I. But I think, you know, there's probably an argument it committed suicide as well with these treaties you're referring to, becoming something very different.

Well, of course, yes, there is an argument that those, but again, it's really hard to know how you would negotiate the end of World War I, right? Other than by these treaties. So it's sort of an interesting counterfactual question. I think for me, the question is not so much like, what would you have done? Maybe were they wrong or were they right? Because that's kind of neither here nor there. It's more about what conceptual space does it open for us now when we're thinking about how to think about minority questions or disputes between different groups? And this obsession that we have that, you know, if everyone has their own state, it'll be fine. And maybe, you know, multinational states are also a different framework, but also worth thinking about. I mean, just think about the Middle East now, for example. It's unsayable to say that you always think about a two-state solution. So a two-state solution is one solution, but another solution is to have a multinational, one kind of collective common space where everyone negotiates and sort of lives together peacefully in a more multicultural form. Yeah. So one could be like, I don't know, French and English speakers in Canada, that's also a model, right? So, but these things have now become unsayable because I think the dominant model is the nation-state.

Elon Musk's project, I think, is trying to say something quite similar. He, you know, he thinks ultimately the state of Israel will fail because of its becoming two countries, two peoples, which is the state of Israel and the state of Judea, liberal Zionism, and this, which, you know, he's not defending, but it's very different to what settler colonialism, which Israel's founded on. In the West Bank, these illegal settlements, ultra-religious Haredim, etc., they have completely conflicting cultural, political attitudes to the liberal Zionists who founded the state of Israel. And he thinks, you know, as that fails, I think that's going to have to create a space for the conversations you're talking about, which is, you know, multinational states. And I think I meet so many Turks who say, you know, what the Ottoman Empire was, was probably a better way of doing things in Turkey, if you look at what then subsequently happens and to this day is happening.

Um, I mean, we could talk about this for a long period of time. I think, I mean, one of the reasons why I defend, I defend Iran as it is, and I will happily go on record and say I defend Iran, is because I think there's a long-term project by the state of Israel to basically Balkanize Iran because of geopolitical interests. Iran is one-third Turkish-speaking, has Armenian speakers, it has Arab speakers in Khuzestan, Baluchistan, has Balochi speakers, and it hasn't quite caught up with the Europe of the 1920s and the 1930s. You know, it wasn't it wasn't Balkanized in that way. Um, and that's something I would want to defend. You know, the idea that, oh, no, Iranian Azeris want their own state, which is a bit of a talking point from some people in the foreign policy establishment. Well, my dad's Iranian Azeri. No, they don't. They don't want that crap coming to their country.

Um, anyway, you are one of the most high-profile, if not the most high-profile Albanian in the UK. I could say Jew, but she's Albanian. Yes, you're right. Yeah, but still. Yeah. Okay. They they also call themselves Albanians. That's true. Okay. But I, you know, that's just slightly because she has she has Kosovar citizenship and Albanian citizenship. Both. She has both. Yeah. Yeah. But she's Kosovo-born. But after Dua Lipa, you're one of the more famous ones, right?

What's it like for Albanians living in the UK right now? And we talked about how hard it's been for your your brother and your mom, but in the last five years, what's changed? Well, I mean, you know, there is a obviously a project that has been going on for a really long time in this country of scapegoating minorities and trying to blame on various minority groups the sort of failures of neoliberalism and of globalization with all its repercussions on various categories of people. And I think Albanians are just the latest victim of that project. I don't think they're, you know, I don't think there's anything special about Albanians. And now they're every, they get talked about a lot, you know, if you read the media, it'll be about like, you know, the prison population of Britain and how many Albanians there are. You'll be hearing about Albanian small boats crossing and illegals and so on. But of course, the project of kind of scapegoating didn't start with Albanians and it's not going to end with Albanians.

I lived in Italy in the '90s and it was just the same. So somehow, unfortunately, I have this kind of tragic thing where whichever country I move to, suddenly there is a kind of wave of anti-Albanian sentiment. In Italy, it was just as horrible in the '90s. You know, there were this waves of immigration from Albania to Italy. And I remember this very well because I had a friend who was a journalist, and she said she'd call the police to report a crime. And so she'd find out from the police that there was a crime, and they didn't immediately say who the crime was committed by or who the suspect was. And she said she always had to ask them because her newsroom was not interested if it was not an Albanian. So she was the intermediary between the sort of newsroom and the police station. And so then she called her editor and said, there was a crime, and if it wasn't Albanian, they wouldn't write about it. And I, this story stayed with me. This was a college university student who had then gone into journalism. And I think it's the same, you know, when you read now the sort of mainstream or the, I don't want to name newspapers, but basically there is a narrative about Albanians and how they want to come and stay, and how they're all involved in the drug gangs, and how they're. And of course, you know, there are 140,000 Albanians in the UK. Of course, they're not 140,000 drug smugglers.

Um, as I said earlier, it's impossible for an Albanian young man to get a visa. So the most obvious answer to when I get asked why do Albanians cross the border illegally, I'm like, well, you give them a visa, and then they won't cross illegally. They'll cross legally. If they cross illegally, it's because they have family in the UK and they want to join, and they've been told there's a job. There is a shortage of skills in this country in a number of sectors, including the construction sector, where there are a lot of Albanian businesses and stuff. So there is a very, a diaspora that is and a community of Albanians that's diverse and employed in various parts of the, um, various parts of society, some academics, some doctors, some nurses, some builders, and then of course, also some drug smugglers. But the narrative is very much one of demonizing the community. But as I say, I don't think there's anything specific about Albanians. It just so happens that this is the easiest target for now. And if it were not Albanians, it would be someone else. There's, um, and because this is just how mainstream right-wing scapegoating works, and this is how it worked in the 1920s and '30s as well. It's, you know, back then it was the Jews and the Albanians and the Armenians.

Do you think we're going back to the 1920s?

Yes and no. I mean, we never go back to exactly the same thing. I think we can see some of the same dynamics. So I'd say there are some trends that we can detect. The crisis of globalization and the breakup of international multilateral institutions. There is a parallel between, you know, for example, the crisis in the '90s in Europe and the Western world. There was this moment of heightened international cooperation and transnational institutions that were beginning to develop that began to have quite an impact on the life of states and free trade agreements, sort of reduction of barriers and so on. And I think this has some parallel to the time in which the League of Nations was the institution under which many of these both free trade, but a number of policies were being coordinated, which wasn't just security-based policies, but there was some sense of an international framework for cooperation. In that case, and of course, that was all ended by the Wall Street crash, by the 1929 financial crisis. So that was one aspect. 2008, 2009 financial crisis, there's some overlap between this end of this kind of globalization capital moment, I'd say.

The second one is the rise of the far right. But before even the rise of the far right, the beginnings of these projects of persecution or reduction of spaces for minorities. So before it becomes a far-right or fascist question, it's a question of reduction of rights for, or loss of multiculturalism as a project. Now, of course, in the '20s and '30s, there wasn't really multiculturalism in the way in which we know it, but some of the questions that people were raising were similar. For example, I remember when I was reading about the Popular Front in France in the '30s and why were these leftists protesting and what were the issues? One of them was that Jewish people were being given access to professions of doctors and nurses, for example, and a lot of French people, manipulated by the far right, were saying, why are these professions open to Jewish people? We wanted them to restrict them to Jewish people so that French people can have access, so that we can kind of. And this was one of the things that my grandfather in the Popular Front was protesting about and fighting. And that was a big question. And of course, it reminded me of a number of, for example, when Marine Le Pen a couple of years ago was saying how we can restrict access to state offices for immigrants or people with immigrant backgrounds. They, there are certain professions that shouldn't be accessible to them. That was the clearest parallel because it was France. It was France two years ago versus France in the 1930s. So there was certainly this project of thinking about how minorities might be an issue, and that the problems of society get solved if they turn into a homogeneous society with rights, you know, rights for French, France for the French, and so on. So, so those two are, I think, connected.

The third one that is becoming to me also increasingly similar, first this move, which is connected to the financial crisis, the rise of tariffs and protectionism, but on the other hand, also alongside that, defense and defense spending. So at some point in the '30s, you begin to see like real investment in an arms race. And of course, you know, you produce. And this is another character in my book that says, if you produce a lot of arms, if you see now in the charts of which industries are doing well in the world, the ones that have really skyrocketed in terms of their shares and so on, it's usually arms-based industries. Of course, now it comes with new technologies and so on. But, you know, if you have this arms race, there is a real risk that they will be used at some point. And if you have a discourse that heightens conflicts in society between groups, also war becomes a catalyst for that. So the reason the Second World War becomes a catalyst of a number of things that have been going on is that the territory is ready. You know, you have minority groups fighting each other, and you have weapons, and you have states increasingly in conflict, breakup of international institutions and frameworks of agreement. So I think there are a lot of parallels, but of course, it's not the same thing. We're in a different period.

And the other one that I say, the last one, which also had a real impact, and maybe this is talked about less when people compare to the '30s and '40s, was actually the impact of the radio in the spread of fascism. And when you think about new technologies. Yeah. When you think about new technologies now, and in what way do social media influence radicalization? There was an argument that, you know, had to do with the force of the voice of Hitler or Mussolini and the cinema in, you know, people just having this direct, or what they thought was direct communication, direct access with these leaders, and the way in which charismatic or discussions around charisma and personality entered the realm of political discussion. I think there was also there is also something like that with the way in which news cycles are produced and accessibility and proximity to listeners. Which this was also a moment of kind of technological revolution because this was sound and images which hadn't been there before. And I think we now obviously have new social media and internet digital circulation, which is very different, but has some parallel in terms of there's this kind of revolution in information spreading. And I'd say that's the other aspect that's also worth thinking about.

I say this on a YouTube interview, but I think TV was a huge mistake. You know, Neil Postman, this great media scholar, you know, he talks about, you know, somebody like Abraham Lincoln simply would not reach high office in a world of television. And he talks about the debates, presidential debates in the '30s and the '40s and the '50s, 1830s, '40s and '50s, I should say. And, you know, if you read them, these politicians are are are thinking and speaking in whole paragraphs. And it's just a world away from where we are now and where we're moving to, which is basically one-minute clips and reels, which I mean, implicitly you're saying is buttressing these ultra-nationalist far-right arguments.

Yeah. Although I'm personally, I think, I mean, we could have a whole podcast on this just to discuss this issue, of course. And now we can stick to the comparison with radio and television, for example. There's also a kind of democratizing aspect, right? Because not everyone has the same skills, and not everyone can read long paragraphs and read the newspapers and have the same kind of. And there is something that if news are more accessible, more easily circulate, more easily, everyone can participate, there is a sort of way in which the public sphere changes that might also be conducive to promoting democracy. So actually, my take on on new technologies is that this is like a kitchen knife. You know, you can have a kitchen knife and use it to slice bread and have a nice picnic, or you can use it to kill your fellow human being. And it's not about a kitchen knife. It's about the use of it. Who controls it? Who produces it? Who sells it? How they sell it? What discourse there is around it? How it gets framed. And this technology is the same thing. I don't think technology is inherently good or bad. I think humans are good or bad. And the purposes they have are good or bad. But I don't think there's any. But yeah, we could have like a really long debate about this. It's a very interesting question. Yeah. Like the novel, if you think about the whole point of the novel, who is it? Stendhal has a great line about the novel. He says the point of a novel is the novel is the bow, and the violin is your soul, and each novel plays your soul differently. Forster has another great line as well about novels. He says that, you know, it allows you to see the world through it. This is a hackneyed sort of cliché, but he says it in a really, really compelling way in *Aspects of the Novel*. It allows you to see the world through a second set of eyes, in a second way, and it's a gift. And I buy the argument that as a technological innovation, with mass literacy, with the printing press, that that fundamentally alters something in human consciousness after the 15th and 16th centuries. And of course, the novel, hand in hand with the industrial revolution of mass literacy, changes a lot. And I think that I think that has a massive impact on on the human psyche and on society and on politics. And I think that the move to a post-literary society is going to create really ugly things, really. Like, really, really. I think even the very essence of universalism, obviously, goes hand in hand with the rise of Christianity. So the idea that there's a universal humanity is a very old idea. But as a popular idea that you can access for yourself, I think that goes hand in hand with the rise of the novel. And I sort of think it's disappearing. I mean, I could be wrong.

I mean, if you think about the whole point of the novel, who is it? Stendhal has a great line about the novel. He says the point of a novel is the novel is the bow, and the violin is your soul, and each novel plays your soul differently. Forster has another great line as well about novels. He says that, you know, it allows you to see the world through it. This is a hackneyed sort of cliché, but he says it in a really, really compelling way in *Aspects of the Novel*. It allows you to see the world through a second set of eyes, in a second way, and it's a gift. And I buy the argument that as a technological innovation, with mass literacy, with the printing press, that that fundamentally alters something in human consciousness after the 15th and 16th centuries. And of course, the novel, hand in hand with the industrial revolution of mass literacy, changes a lot. And I think that I think that has a massive impact on on the human psyche and on society and on politics. And I think that the move to a post-literary society is going to create really ugly things, really. Like, really, really. I think even the very essence of universalism, obviously, goes hand in hand with the rise of Christianity. So the idea that there's a universal humanity is a very old idea. But as a popular idea that you can access for yourself, I think that goes hand in hand with the rise of the novel. And I sort of think it's disappearing. I mean, I could be wrong.

going to do better than last time.

"You said, you said um you said that the right basically says that um questions of identity, who's in and who's out, will basically solve everything."

And you've just captured there something I've been thinking about for so long. You know, I was posting when I was in Malta recently. My wife's family's from Malta. lovely, you know, masonry on the floor and the stones look great. And I'm saying, "Oh, they they haven't yet found the wonders of outsourcing where there'd be graffiti everywhere and all the stones would mismatch because that's how it looks in Britain. There'd be rubbish everywhere." And then one of the replies said, "Well, that's because they don't have refugees." And of course, Malta per capita has about eight times more refugees than Britain does.

And and they really do, and this is the remarkable thing for me because I try to be charitable with people who disagree and often rightly so. They're very clever. they think about things. You know, they're no, you know, they're no less intelligent than me. Often I'm less intelligent than they are. But for lots of these people, they genuinely seem to believe that every single problem in Britain right now from, you know, the trains not working to um litter being on the streets to and social behavior to the housing crisis, if you just have fewer migrants, not even they say refugees, then it'll all be sorted.

And I'm thinking, well, I'm from Bournemouth and in Bournemouth, there's a guy called Dave Wells. He's a he's a slum landlord. him and his family have about 2,000 properties and they're all in awful condition and it leads to broken homes. It leads to bad communities. The people who are owner occupiers who live next door to these properties, they're not happy either. What's that got to what's that got to do with refugees? But they don't, you know, like you say, it doesn't really register for them. And it it really is incredible how seemingly intelligent people can just

Well, I mean, think about is this other for example, I've been thinking a lot after the American election. It's complete paradox, right? that an American warehouse worker, a white American warehouse worker who is in some kind of completely exploited condition in an Amazon warehouse in the US, how they can think that they actually have much more in common with Jeff Bezos than with the immigrant worker that is next to them. And this but this for me signals the fact that there is an absence of discourse of being able to articulate conflicts along different lines. And the old Marxist concept would have been class, right? So you would have said you and I there we are both exploited and the problem is the people at the top who have money and wealth and capital and who have certain incentives to work in a certain way and have an incentive to exploit both of us.

Now if there is not that that reading in society is not there because actually even on the radical left I'm not really sure how much this gets problematized and how much migration is spoken of in those terms and migration isn't really I don't think even when it's mentioned as a problem no one talks about migration as a question of social class when it's so obvious that it's a question of social class right think about other example that I've also was really troubled by in the same week in which Donald Trump was posting videos of immigrants in shackles going on these boarding flights that were like properly horrifying shocking images in that same week he announced golden visas investor visas for oligarchs right so clearly they know that or they know I don't know if they know clearly the problem is not about you know who speaks English and who doesn't and who belongs and who doesn't because if it was about who belongs and who doesn't in terms of culture

surely the restrictions should be the same for everyone you wouldn't make you know you wouldn't say the Arab oligarch is fine but the Arab who is like you know in a neighborhood that is deprived and so is is a problem because is an Arab. If the problem is being Arab, then it's whether you're rich or whether you're poor, it doesn't matter. But you have this kind of and the right is champion migration policies. Multi is a very good example of how they were selling investor visas and selling passports. And so we're in an age of completely uh restricted citizenship for the poor. So you have means tested, you don't get citizenship very easily, you have income requirements on integration, you have real difficulties if you're people workers in Albania to get a visa. and so on. So completely restricted citizenship for the poor and completely open borders for the rich and it's really not about culture, it's about class.

So why does the left not is not able to actually articulate a criticism of globalization and on society that says, "Yeah, sure. Let's talk about migration. You want to talk about migration? Let's talk about migration. Let's talk about the oligarchs. Let's talk about what they're doing to housing in London or anywhere. Let's talk about how people are excluded. And let's also talk about how citizenship which used to be even if you're thinking as a kind of democratic nationalist or a progressive someone who is not you know into cosmopolitanist multiculturalism citizenship used to be a vehicle of social inclusion and infranchisement and progress right and it was that when it was no longer taking property and census line so it was in the beginning in the 19th century was citizenship only for the rich workers couldn't vote people who couldn't read and write couldn't vote they didn't have political rights and then it became universal so citizenship has returned turns to being exactly that because it's basically whoever is rich can purchase it. Doesn't matter where they are. They can come from wherever they are and get a passport and get accelerated visa procedures. They can have the home office come to your house and take the uh fingerprints if you pay the right fee or they can be completely denied inclusion even if they've been already living in the country for like 20 years if they don't have the right amount of money. So you're returning to this dynamic of citizenship that is just sold and bought like any other commodity. And that returns us to the days where citizenship was a basically a good that was bought and sold and was restricted by property. And the biggest one of the kind of biggest conquests of the democratic movement in the stages where it was going well was to say, well, let's make citizenship universal and let's not make it income dependent. So why is it that the left is unable to have this discourse on migration and citizenship that puts the finger on where the problem is?"

So I'm a big fan of the green card. It's quite a democratic thing. You know, I quite like this country to have a green card system. I suppose I would add to that. You have people like I shouldn't really say names because you're so diplomatic and nice. Somebody like Isabelle Oakshaw will be talking about the problem of Muslim migrants to Britain or Richard Ty her partner. And I'm not suggesting they're Islamophobic, but they might be highlighting certain people coming to the UK from certain countries. And then I'm thinking, lady, you moved to Dubai. So clearly, like you say, clearly you don't you obviously don't think culture is a problem. Otherwise, you wouldn't be living in Dubai. you don't think Arabs are the problem but it's certain kinds of Arabs, certain kinds of Muslims and those certain kinds of people come from lower classes or you know more economically um deprived or less privileged backgrounds.

Um yeah and but why so then you have to last line on this then you also have to ask a question why is that because when people have no rights so when workingclass people migrants with no papers no legal protection when they have no rights they're much more easy to exploit so they can't you know they can't be part of unions they can't protest they're much more easy to kind of threaten and to curse and to so they just can be exploited more easily so it's actually in the interest of capital to have people who have no rights and it's in the interest of capital and the circulation of capital to be able to exploit people without rights. Yeah. Well, I think you know my colleague Ash Saka has said this before. There is you know there's an interpretation for instance of um undocumented migrants in this country working for the likes of Uber Eatats, Deliveroo, etc. I think these companies kind of like that setup actually. They kind of like it. Yeah.

Because if they were, you know, if they were legally here, legally able to work, they would have a lot more leverage, easier to unionize. Kind of suits those guys actually. And I think that's something we don't really talk about enough.

Yeah. And this is another really interesting thing because if you read actually so there is a part of the radical left that is anti-immigration right and the Zara Vagenesh used to be the best example of this in uh in Germany German politician right and her argument was well capital is clearly interested in a lot of migration

but it's not true capital is interested in migrants without rights it's not interested in migrants with rights so it's true that there is a sort of the employers will say yeah we need more people we need more labor force because we have shortage of skills and so on But if they were people that they'd have to pay properly, that could be unionized, that could fight for kind of bargains for their wages and put pressure on capital, of course they wouldn't want them. And this is the again the mistake of the this radical part of the left that thinks that it's defending domestic workers by antagonizing them and by saying, well, you know, you can it's migration is a problem because clearly working foreign working migrants are capital loves them. They don't love them. They just love people who have no rights.

So on on that point, it's been referred to as the Boris wave, which is this massive wave, and it was massive, massive wave of um economic migration to this country after COVID. You get that migration in one year, I think 23 um of 900,000 people, just ma extraordinary migration to this country, historically unprecedented. And you know, there's a right-wing critique of that which would center on class, which is that was done because we'd left the European Union, there had been COVID, and clearly you were going to see upward pressure on wages. that was that was that was happening actually. And so there was a a concerted effort by the ruling class to compress wages partly through um quote unquote the Boris wave. Now what you would say is what you've just sort of said there is well if you have things like close shop unions high level it doesn't it kind of doesn't matter and I I agree with that. So I think you're both right but then and this is something that I I kind of I kind of buy this. Let me put like a policy a policy sort of push back to you. Somebody from the right who agrees with all that. So, they've got a critique of capital and how elites use um poorly regulated migration to their own advantage and also that politically that helps them because it lets them mobilize a distinctive electoral constituency to help them. Right? Gary Stevenson says this about Elon Musk. He want, you know, Elon Musk wants to talk about migration for two reasons. First of all, but he doesn't want to solve it because it helps him politically, but you know, the the cheap the cheap labor really helps the economic model they have. So, they want to talk about it. They want to make it a problem, but they don't want to solve the problem. Somebody might agree with all of that watching this, you know, a thoughtful conservative, but they would say, Leia, in 2023, 900,000 net migration. We only build 150,000 homes in this country every year maximum. By the way, the target's two 300,000. I think some years is 100,000. How on earth can we address the housing crisis if you have 900,000 people arriving in one year, 700,000 people in another year, 600,000 which is I think that three-year period. If you're only building 150,000 homes, but you're having net migration of almost a million in one year, what would you say to that person?

Well, I say you got a lot of people who have multiple houses and so why would you level down as opposed to go start from the top? Why would you start from the bottom trying to think about I mean you know the the pile of the state is not it's not a fixed cake right it's about policies and how you intervene and where you which groups you affect. If you had a a class perspective on political conflict, you'd say, well, you have a lot of like pretty rich people with 15,000 15 houses and you know why should someone have 15 houses and for what reasons that are empty and are just there for speculation and for so it's I think redistributive and I'm not this is just an example right for tat. So we're talking about houses. I'm saying, well, we don't have enough houses. And I'm saying, well, actually, we do have enough houses if you look at families who have multiple property and how how you can think about inheritance tax. You can think about all kinds of policies that go in this direction. But none of these policies are going to cut it if you don't have a reading of conflict. That is a class-based reading that says the problem is concentrations of wealth and concentrations of capital. And that then has an impact on what goods and what resources certain groups of people have access to. And the task of redistribution is to be if you're thinking socially or if you're socially minded even as a sort of you know moderate you don't have to be a socialist just be a kind of radical social democrat the task of the state is to think about all these different constituencies that it needs to cater and the point of representative democracy is to make sure that there aren't these huge differentials in wealth and power and therefore it's not acceptable that some groups can wield this much wealth and have this much power and others have nothing. And so it's just a very basic point of redistribution. So it's not true because there isn't a kind of pile that is fixed and that you have to within that decide you know what's here and what's there. It's more about what kind of policies you have in place which are determined by what kind of political vision you have. But of course if you don't have a political vision that reads society in those terms that thinks about class differential that thinks about you know, the migration for example in terms of what does it do to the rich what does it do to the poor who does it affect most negatively and how does it advantage other people. I'm sure there's a lot of uh if you want to talk about immigrants, sure a lot of immigrant investors that have bought like huge amounts of property in London that are just locked up and nobody even knows what's happening in there. Well, you could start from there.

Yeah. Well, actually, a lot of it's being built right next to us right now. Um I think the site manager probably wouldn't tell us the details, but I'm I'm pretty sure a lot of it's being bought by nonUK nationals.

And you could start with a kind of foreign oligarchs and Yeah.

Yeah. And you certainly, you know, the thing is as well, if you're having three, four, 100,000 net migration per year, yeah, you you know what, you might have problems if you don't believe in state management and and some level of oversight by the state. You might you might have problems. Sure.

Yeah. So, so can I also say something about this is also very important because right now we've been talking about migration at the point of arrival, right? And of course the right has again an interest and the mainstream has an interest in talking about migration on you know, what happens suddenly one day you wake up and you find yourself with all these migrants that have this creation this emergency on your door. I just don't believe any of that. I think also the academic research on this is very clear that migrants are not a net burden on society. They're usually net beneficial. Let's not even go there. Okay let's just stick to the kind of right-wing discourse on this and let's assume that it is a problem and that these numbers are a problem and that they pose a problem for the welfare state. So this is just you wake up one day and you realize there all these migrants. The question is where do they come from and why do they come? And so usually the triggers of migration are war, poverty, environmental disaster. So what are these countries and what are these politicians doing to solve at at source? What are they doing for environmental uh questions? What are they doing to make sure that there are no wars in the world that produce migration? Because most of the waves of immigration in the last few years have all been triggered by wars funded by the west and supported by the west. And what are they doing for global inequality for issues of access to certain goods and services north south and divides between different parts of the world that have unequal development? What are you doing at the level of reforming of international institutions? If you don't think about where does the problem come from, how does it arise? How does migration become a problem? I don't think it is a problem but let's assume it is a problem. to solve a problem you don't start with when you're you're with the problem you start with with the causes of it. So that's why migration is not a problem because it's not actually the cause as the the cause is not the movement of people. The cause is what triggers certain categories of people usually vulnerable people to move under conditions of helplessness. And again the conditions are not the same for everyone. It's not if you're Leia from Albania and is coming on a visa for you know brain for talent or highkilled and so on the conditions of migration are very different. If you're someone who is running away from from wars the conditions are very different. So if you don't address the you don't tackle the causes and you keep thinking about the problem as the movement of people and membership as a solution then you're really not really addressing the problem and you're actually not interested in addressing the problem.

You know, a week before we recorded this, or maybe it was a few days ago, no, it was about a week, the prime minister of Yemen was killed by Israel, right? They blew him up in an air strike. And you have loads of people online, primarily Americans, I have to be honest, saying, well, the Houthis aren't the legitimate government of Yemen. The actual government is in Aiden. Well, the Houthies control, I think about 95% of the land area. They have a monopoly on violence. They are the state. Okay. If you're killing the prime minister of a country, you are basically saying it's okay if that state to become a failed state. You're basically saying that that's generally what happens. If you kill the government of a country, the government will collapse. And these people genuinely don't seem to understand the causal relationship between blowing up prime ministers, failed states, regime change, and then in 10 years when you have thousands of Yemenes on small boats crossing the channel, they don't understand how one leads the other. Right now, there aren't many Yemenes coming to the UK. there will be or or Iranians say well the Iranians are that are coming they're coming they're not really refugees they're economic migrants the country has the most stringent economic sanctions in the world I'm sure they are economic migrants I'd leave too you're trying to destroy the economy through sanctions of course they'll leave so I I think this is a and this is a terrain that I think that the left has really just given up on talking about the causes of this

Well, absolutely and also even these distinctions you know the distinction between refugee and economic migrant I constantly get asked this you know why are these Albanians coming they're not refugees and I'm If you're someone who just needs to run away from a desperate situation, you don't ask yourself, am I a refugee or am I American? Where shall I go? Because if I'm a refugee, then I have it just doesn't work like that. No, nobody's had ever any experience of countries of out migration or of war or of any problematic scenario. Just doesn't understand how this type of thinking works in practical terms. And so the fact that you think these categories will do any work in dissuading people from leaving or from operating in a certain way, it's just so far removed from reality that it makes me laugh because they usually, you know, they they talk to the left and they say if you're a left, you're utopian and you're idealistic and you don't really know how the world works. And yet you look at how migration, for example, is articulated and conceptualized. And as you say, this is a very good example of you don't know how the world works. So who is the real polit the one who is lacking in real politic here? you have no idea of how people are motivated and how diasporas are formed. What what triggers migration? If you don't start with what triggers migration, you're just not serious in solving the problem.

I was reading a great book recently about Margaret Thatcher and her mis she was always she had massive misgivings about German unification, right? Massive. Because I think she wanted, you know, Britain to be the major military power in Europe, but she was a smart woman. As much as I disagree with most of her sort of political choices, she kind of understood a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the integration of Eastern Europe into a broader European economic entity would probably expose Britain and Western Europe to immigration from the Middle East because all of a sudden if you become a single market and I'm like, "Wow, she really got it." She was a very clever lady like that and it really got me thinking how recent a lot of this stuff is. Finally, before I go to the last question, this this thing about net burden, because I know you're doing a thought experiment, you're saying, "Okay, well, even if they are a net burden, and people come up with all this data of, well, look, they're they're using more state resources than they provide through taxation." And that may be true for that may be true for some people, I'm sure, many people. But if you're a Marxist, of course, the value they're providing isn't just through taxes, it's also through um the value they have given through exploitation. So sure, if somebody is a is a minimum wage cleaning lady in central London for 35 years who then gets dementia in old age, maybe they are a net quote unquote drain on society because that care is very expensive and they didn't pay much in tax. But they didn't pay much in tax because they were being exploited to the upth degree and probably they may have been living in some kind of social housing because that's a state subsidy towards corporations to give low pay to workers. So actually that person was a major net, you know, a net asset to the country. It's just where was the value going? Sure, it wasn't going to the state. It was going to private businesses and her and her employers. I mean, we should probably be saying that's Marxists.

Well, I mean the point that Markx makes, you know, he has all this in capitals, which I happen to reread. There was a nice interesting recent translation of capital, volume one of capital. And so I we had a reading group at the LSE and we were kind of discussing some of these questions. But of course, you know, Mark says the liberals love to talk about the working class as parasites, but like who are the real parasites of societ? People who don't work and just, you know, their entire purpose in life is to make money out of exploiting the people who actually work. So there is a whole but I also going back to this question of migrants as net burden and net I actually don't also like the way in which many people on the left and I've noticed this many conversations take this is why I said I don't want to go there because I have also moral problems with that. I don't like the discussion around migrant workers as resource, you know, just in resource terms. Is it a benefit? Is it a burden? Because I don't think humans should be spoken of in those terms. It's like I'm a Canian and I think it's sort of a violation of this very basic canon principle to not think of people as mere means, right? You're just thinking of them. If you're making Yes, of course they are. No, no, exactly. But I think sometimes you hear this. This is why of course for capitalism they are. But for people on the left who want to push back against that argument, often they will bring out research which there is a lot of that says no it's not true because I feel labor shortages. They actually friend of mine at the LSC did a search that said that children of immigrants in schools she did a lot of empirical research on this and she showed that in fact not only do they not hold back English-speaking kids but they because they are from immigrant backgrounds they like to think of themselves as you know they need to work hard and have a kind of ethos of achievement in society that actually pushes other kids to work harder as well so it brings the level up rather than bringing down. So the discourse is in school in Germany as well as in this country in schools immigrant background children hold back native English speakers because when they come to school they don't really speak the language and so with the state has to invest resources in training them and making sure they speak and so she did this all this research. She's a labor economist and she did all this research to show that first of all children learn languages very quickly. Second, because they have this immigrant background, they have an ethos of achievement that raises the standard rather than bringing it down. So now there's all kinds of arguments that you could be making, but I think if we only put our energies into making those types of arguments, then again, we're not really getting out of the discourse because then the discourse becomes instrumental and becomes about, you know, are migrants and net benefits is are they a resource or are not a resource? And that's more or less the same same categories of analysis that I don't I think are kind of morally objectionable. This is why I don't usually drive with that. But I could have a very long argument with anyone who because actually migration one of the things I've been working on for a long time. I'm not I'm a political theorist. I don't do a lot of applied work. But this is one of the questions where I have done a lot of also applied research. So I've seen a lot of numbers and a lot of you know all kinds of data that you are given about the migrants come and stay. No one talks about circular migration. So often migrants come stay for a period then they go back. This you know all this interesting research that nobody's ever bringing up in the public sphere and has no impact on migration and in many ways shows you how isolated academia is because we're having all this fantastic conversations amongst colleagues and then you go out and you see Nigel Farage winning elections. But surely that's also about how our political system is not really channeling all the right energies. I mean, I I do agree with you that the whole discourse of oh well actually you know migration is good because you know they help maintain the welfare state and they're good for I obviously I don't buy that for a second and I actually think even I think we've now got to the point where the left is so behind on this stuff politically that even I think there's lots of people on the right who said you know what even if you're right I don't care right even if there even if it means even if it means I can retire a year later a year earlier rather because of migration or you know that GP P waiting list will be you know a few you know days short I don't don't care and I think this is about two things so firstly about a re-enchantment of politics we've had since 2008 a re-enchantment of the world in the barbarian sense but it's happening only only on one side of the political divide which is the right and the rise of neo-reactionary politics

and then also growth you know we we had um Jason Hicklon recently fantastic guy and you know he's talking about how you know we need to have degrowth we need to which doesn't mean by way does no growth means growth of some things and degrowth of other things. Um but you know, the I think the right are very happy to say yeah let's have the growth great I don't you know I care about the nation the family and faith that's what I care about so if you let's let's have let's have stagnant GDP for 20 years who gives it to us and so they're at that level and we're not and it's it's it's a bit of a worry you said and I'll finish with this actually although I think I'm going to ask you another question afterward so I shouldn't say that you said um that the right is setting the sort of agenda through we can solve more problems by just asserting who's in and out identity and the left makes these appeals to law and bureaucracy and and implicitly you seem to be saying that's well it is obviously empirically a failing strategy expand on that what what do you mean by that and why is it failing

well because I think law depends on politics and so of course we now happen to have relatively progressive legal institutions which are the result of progressive struggles that have been going on in the 20th century mostly by social democratic parties. This is the other, you know, big oblivion from the what have we learned from the 19th and the 20th century. We've learned that actually now everyone is a Democrat. Of course, in the 19th century, not everyone was a Democrat. And the liberals were not Democrats. There was a very clear difference between a liberal and a Democrat and a Democrat was someone who exactly wanted to have citizenship without property qualifications and universal access to certain rights and so on. And so even the kind of rule of law, the liberal rule of law was actually not really necessarily promoted by just the liberals or the conservatives. It was mainly pushed by people who were socially minded. I don't want to say socialist because depends on what period we're talking about, but to make the general point that the law is one way or another depending on what kind of political movements and forces and what political agency there is behind it. So now we're at the point where we can to some extent rely on legal institutions and it's no no coincidence that the right is fighting so hard against judges and against courts and because the law has entrenched certain socially progressive norms as a result of the struggles of the past century. So there has been this the problem is that I think the left has kind of forgotten this connection between law and politics and so it thinks that the law somehow upholds itself and upholds the right standard and law depends on power like everything. So if you want to have progressive law, you need to have a progressive politics. And if you want to have progressive politics, you have to have a narrative of what is wrong with the society in which you live and a kind of critique of the system that enables you to channel that narrative. The law the left doesn't really I mean the the left I don't know there is there is a radical left that obviously has a critique of the system. the mainstream left, the center left, the social the old social democrats who all emerged out of this critique of capitalism have completely forgotten about the critique of capitalism. So they think that you know you can with law regulate capital and you can give certain claims to people and that there are policies and institutional tools through which you can regulate conflict in society. So has kind of abandoned politics and sees its only task as coming up with policies. Which is why whenever people ask me what will the future of society look like? I think don't worry about that because the left has come up with so many policies over the last decades. They have great ideas about everything you know wages democratizing the workplace firms deliberative democracy experiments with juries with representatives. This is just like you know thousands and thousands of pages that have been written with on all kinds of subjects. And I'm only now mentioning the ones that I know a little bit about, but I'm sure there's like the same is for the environment. The same you you you name it and they'll give you a range of a menu of amazing policies. What does it have? What does it not have? It's a politics that can bring together all these different policies and say, well, this is what's wrong with the system and this is how we can come to a better society and that better society will then look like with A, B, and C. The right has no policies, zero, not one on anything. you start from migration work, but they have great dreams. You know, they can sell these amazing ideas of belonging and make this great and do this and so on. So, they have a kind of politics and they understand how conflict in society works. they understand that they just need to kind of keep banging on with this and there nobody's even going to hold them accountable on the policies because everybody is going to spend so much time talking about the the visions and I think if you don't and going back to this question you know what is the problem with the rule of law and with the law and politics is we've missed this connection between law and politics and we've lost politics and we've just now basically reduced to defending the welfare state or some kind of liberal minimal norms and without really thinking about how the state is actually at any given point in time just reflects the power relations of that moment and with with law with a little bit of delay. So, as I say, law is still looking relatively progressive. You still have this human rights frameworks and international convention and they're not going to be there and they will disappear in the next 10 years. that there's not going to there will not be anything of that left because you can really see this attack on the judges and courts and

I'm glad you say because you said I don't like to make predictions but I I'm I think it's really important to say look within 10 years I think the ECR is gone and and you know what maybe even the Labor government gets us out of the ECR actually um I think refugee convention I think that's finished I think that they'll basically get rid of asylum as a as a thing I think it would just be an act of parliament and you know they can do that if you want to let in 200,000 Ukrainians in one year, okay, act of parliament. But as a continuous sort of legal process that that will end, all that stuff's going to go and I I you can see it happening in slow motion. And the next big campaign for like, you know, these sort of vacuous liberal sort of pseudo social democrats, and they're not even social democrats, will be we have to defend the EHRC, right? We have to defend and they'll be like just rally around and I agree. And by the way, the the right's going to get rid of the HRC. And actually it's the really the refugee convention they need to go after. But that they know that. But that's good because then they can they can drag it all out. Right.

Um, but the reality is you're not going to get more than like 20% of the country running around a legal document nobody's ever heard of before.

Yes. Right. And I I mean, I was in a cafe the other day. I I live in Portsmouth and I was in a cafe. The people there are lovely. The staff are lovely. This dude just walked across the road. He works another place. He sits down. He chats them all. And he goes, "Oh, I used to be a socialist until I, you know, was in the real world." And I sort of that makes me chuckle. You hear it all the time. Whatever. And then he said, "We need to leave the HRC." And I'm thinking, "This guy hadn't," and it's not to diminish him. Maybe he's a very thoughtful, intelligent man. I don't know. I'm not going to judge him. But I can be pretty sure he hadn't heard of that until about maybe a year ago. And now he has such strong opinions. It can't be reformed. We have to leave.

And you know, and like you say, like that's how the right that's how they operate.

Yeah. But also it's also the logic of nationalism, right? That you begin by undermining international institutions. Yeah.

And of course the the out the ultimate outcome of that, but I don't want to say because we're at the end and I don't want to be a prophet of doom is war.

Because you you know you begin to dismantle the framework of international agreement, of diplomacy, of international cooperation, of negotiations. Every state is out there. It's becomes the war of all against all. And then what do you do when you have nothing of this left and you still haven't solved the problem? Well, you fight.

You go to war. And so this is why I think it's this is the nationalist. It's I always keep saying this, you know, the fascists, they don't necessarily want to go to war. It's just a kind of logical conclusion of having this vision of the world that is everyone is out to defend themselves and there is no solidarity, no cooperation, it's my nation, my country needs to become great again. Well, if everyone wants to make their country great again, it's not going to work very well because they can't all be great at the same time. So, it's the logic of the argument that leads to destruction. And I don't think anyone needs to want that. And none of these politicians, you know, in fact, if you read the what they say, Orban, Melani, they don't, it's not like they're saying let's have let's go let's go to war. It's usually the liberals that are like there is war, we're in war circumstances in Europe. But it is in the end the narrative changes, the culture shifts, the discourse, it becomes, you know, against the problem becomes as it was in the 20s and 30s, the League of Nations. The League of Nations is a problem. The Geneva was a site of the League of Nations and the free trade agreements. It's these, you know, the elites, they don't understand the people. all this discourse if you don't have a progressive critique of the elites which is necessary which is again to go back to where we started with what is the what is it about the Marxist tradition that's interesting it does have an account of power and law and the state and on a critique of elites but it doesn't take the nationalist form so if you don't have that from a different corner then of course you will end up with where we are and with potentially worse but I I didn't want to go there actually because I just don't like to talk about it and

no I I think no it's important to talk about because you know I think we're we're still at a moment where that's sufficiently far away that we can avoid it. Right.

Right. Exactly. That's right. So we talk about Exactly. So we talk about Exactly.

The tanks are coming in over the water and oh god here we go.

Yeah. Absolutely. I think that's right. And that is the point of actually talking about it and and making these parallels with the past is not to say well this is where we're heading is to say well how can we stop it and how can we learn from the past and avoid ex doing exactly the same things.

See that's the thing as well. There's lots of doomerism around and I think that's why it's really important to be optimistic. Um, so let me let me explain what I mean there. You know, you can walk out of here if you're if you're on a decent income, you can walk out of here and you can go into a supermarket and you can buy produce and you know, goods from around the world. You can procure any service you want. A bit like canes, you know, before the first world war saying I can buy anything and the next morning it's at my doorstep kind of thing. We have extraordinary technology, extraordinary medical advances. Infant mortality has crashed. People are living longer as long as they're middle class or wealthy in this country. People are traveling more than ever. Like there's lots of good stuff. The 20th century was a disaster. It was a horrific disaster as you chronicle so beautifully in your two books. But lots of good stuff happened as well. Let's just try and preserve the good stuff and let's try and mitigate and and sort of remove the bad stuff. And there is bad stuff. Of course there is. You know the elites are out of control. Of course they are. And that's why we need like you say a progressive critique of that. But yeah, talking about this reminded me, you know, there's this piece because we were talking about Zag in the world from yesterday where he says it was so inconceivable that you saw these planes that were flying across countries and you know he was talking also about how there were this moment of globalization, cooperation, openness, cultural, you know, why would he see was talking to his French writer friends and to his German writer friends and they had all these meetings of international artists doing these visionary projects and these ideas of emancipation and so to him there were also like these were the world of yesterday also had it good things right and yet that you read the story and you think okay so this is clearly this was also one-sided right

and it's not a spoiler but for people who are like what what book are they talking about this is a guy who who basically grew up in in Vienna and he lives through the first world war I mean it's just actually I think with each passing week it feels like a more relevant book you know he talks about being I think in on Belgian coast in the days before the first world war and everybody's like it's fine

it's fine and you know and then and then something similar happens with the second world war

um and it's not a spoiler you know this guy basically goes to Brazil I think it was wasn't it went South America with his wife or partner I think was his wife and he writes this whole book and then he kills himself right I think in 194142 yeah it's just unbelievable unbelievable unbelievably depressing. Yeah.

I think one of the most important books of of of the 20th century and like wow, you know, that wasn't very relevant in maybe like the 1970s or whatever, but like it's so unbelievably relevant today. And I'm really happy you said that about conflict because, you know, you've got kids from different of different heritages. So do I. And I I think we need we need to protect that kind of society. And I'm really worried that we're going to go back to the world of of of your grandmother growing up, which

Yeah. Exactly. and the and the world where they start by saying as I kind of document in the book, you know, they start by saying we will go after the Orthodox Jews because they don't really integrate and they're kind of outliers and they have these strange practices and then they end up and and and people like my Jewish character in the book Dr. Elias who is a progressive secularized not, you know, always been part of the Salonica elite and so on kind of things, well, it's not really me, you know, they're not really talking about me and my family is Muslim background. Well, they're Muslim. I'm not a believer. I'm not a practicing Muslim. But when they come for you, it doesn't really matter whether you're practicing or not practicing.

So they started with the Orthodox Jews and the people who didn't integrate and who had these strange practices that they somehow didn't fit with the state and who were undermined seem to undermine other communities. In Salonica, in the inter-war period, in the 20s, it was all about what should we do with the Shabbat? What should we do with schools of certain languages? Start with language rights, with these questions of day-to-day integration? What should we do with access to the professions? And then it ends with, "We're going to find the list of whoever has the surname of Levy." Now, my uncle is called Muhammad Ali, and my brother is called Alan, and my father is called. These are all Muslim names. So if they go for me and they go for the names, it really doesn't matter what I think about which version of Islam is the right one. This is what's kind of why I think it's really important, and this is what is really scary about this word "remigration" that's sort of entering the picture, because I think that's a crack through which you can kind of see this completely devastating past that risks being also the future.

You know, I saw a great line by a guy, an Iranian guy I follow on X. He's an American Iranian, and he said, "Iran is not a fake country." Like, you know, he lists off this typical sort of Iranian figure, is a fake country. You know, it was really Iran, then Russia took it, and now it's its own fake country. "Um, we're not a fake country." And he lists off all these other countries because we never, we never deported millions of people for ethnic purity. And I thought, Christ, that's actually kind of true. Like, not the fake country bit, but Iran never deported all those people. And, you know, this country, to its credit, not since, I'm trying to think, the expulsion of the Jews, or, you know, best part of 800 years, I'm trying to think, hasn't done that. And that would be an enormous moment if they did. And again, like, it's really plausible in the next 10 to 15 years. I mean, the front page of the New Statesman this week was "The Age of Deportations."

Well, exactly. I mean, they're deporting. They're thinking about Rwanda flights, and they're thinking about how they can deport the, how they can take the prisoners, how Albanians can take the prisoners that are in prison in the UK. How can they send them back to Albania? I mean, of course, it will start with that. They're not going to start by going to deport Leup, obviously, you know, but they are talking about deportation. They are talking about flights. That image for me of the immigrants in shackles in those flights in the US, that the White House was tweeting, I thought it was a fake account when I saw it. I was like, this must be some kind of far-right group that has decided it was the official account of the far-right of the White House and was posting these videos. It was a completely dehumanizing image because even if you're deporting, you don't need to. I mean, this is the other thing, like in the past, things, people were being deported and nobody even knew about them. And now you're doing this in the same way with Gaza. You know, you're live-streaming and everyone can see it. Stop. We're not that far. We started with deportation in the UK, but you're saying, you know, we haven't deported anyone. Well, I mean, they're getting close to it. They're starting.

Yeah. No, it is starting. Exactly. And I'm under no illusions about what the UK has done, but it's, yeah, it's, we're clearly moving now to a new level of something.

In the book, you talk about a Jewish cemetery in Salonica.

Yeah. And I, I tweeted a picture of a body with a JCB digger in Gaza. And I'm thinking, it's less than a century ago that Jewish corpses were being dug up, left by the side of the road, and dogs were eating their bones. And now this is happening. And some of the, some of the descendants of the people who were subject to that horror, some of the descendants now celebrating the exact same thing happening to Palestinians.

Yeah, because fascism looks the same everywhere. And those are the features that make it up. This, you know, distinguishing between communities and cultures and people who are worth claims that are worth respecting and rights that are worth respecting, and making these kind of hierarchies. I, I think that's a sort of universal categorization that these distinctions are there, and they are part of, you know, if you have a fascist government in power, whether it's a fascist government in Israel or in the US or in the UK, it's not going to matter.

Right. This is my final question, I promise. What's really interesting for me, and I'd like to hear your view on this as a British Albanian, what's interesting for me is that when I speak to people that my dad knows in Bournemouth, Iranians, Turks, Afghans, lots of them are planning to vote for Reform. Lots of them. And I think this is something which is really lost on, on white, liberally minded people in major cities. They don't understand the extent to which migrants, first generation and second generation, are actually looking to vote for Farage, Reform. And for the record, I don't think Farage is necessarily quote unquote the problem. I think he's going to unleash something which even he can't control and which is much bigger than him. Um, but that's by the by, people can disagree. The main question is, are you seeing that as well amongst British Albanians, even though as a community, they've been so subject to this very poor treatment from the government, that they're saying, actually, we're the good Albanians, they're the bad Albanians?

Yeah, I think it's not even about that because many of them are, you know, they know how they came. Not many of them, some of them who came in via small boats and so came in as illegals, or sometimes many who have been here for a long time have come as Kosovars. So they declared that they were Kosovars, they were actually from Albania, so they could get refugee status. They came at a time when in Albania, it was like near civil war, so really severe economic crisis during the financial pyramid scheme collapse of '97. Two years after the Kosovo war happened. And so they could come to Britain and claim they were Kosovars and get asylum status. So they know that they have come with a kind of wrongful claim and they sort of tweeted their way into British citizenship. But what's interesting for me, and I have some who are very good friends, actually, working-class Albanians, and it's very interesting because they will first, when they unpack this, they will talk about, they all were educated in communist Albania. So they'll talk about the labor theory of value, and they'll talk about the extraction of surplus value, and how this is all helping capital and so on. And then I asked him, he's a worker, right? So I said to him, so where are you going to vote for? Cuz he gave me this really elaborate account of what was going on and why Albanians were being scapegoated and how they were being exploited and how he was being exploited and all of this. And I said, "Who are you going to vote for?" And I said, "I'm going to vote for Reform next time." And I said, "Why are you going to vote for Reform?" He said, "Well, it's all about survival. Now I have citizenship. Now I'm legal." And for me, this shows you that it's all about the narrative. If the dominant philosophy becomes one of survival, it's the war of all against all. And I promise you, survival and security, then of course that narrative wins, even if people have very sophisticated ideas. And a lot of it has to do with mechanisms of political education, of activism in society, of, you know, connections between different groups of people. I mean, I happen to, I don't know how many academics actually have long conversations with working-class people. I just, because I'm Albanian, and there are a lot of Albanians who are working class, and they often help me with various things that I need help with, and they've become friends. So, yeah, it's, it's, I think I have a little bit more social mobility. There's a lot of British academics who've never had a conversation with working-class people, I think. So, it's these, these friends of mine, as I say, the way they unpack it, it just shows you that the problem is when there is no vision, then you go for the one that is the cheapest and the most obvious, and it does make sense to you. It explains the world in a certain way. And it's only the, you know, elite that is completely out of touch who would go to this guy who is a very intelligent guy, way more intelligent than a lot of academics I have met, very sophisticated works all day long. Oh, you're a racist, or you're a, you know, patriarch, or something like that. Right? So for me, this shows you that there is a gap in communication, and a gap in mechanisms of political education, and a gap in how we're thinking about politics in society, and a real, in that sense, kind of divide between the elites and what working-class people think.

Leah, we'll leave it there. It's been fabulous to have you back on, and all the best for the book.

Thank you very much. It was great.

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Are We Living Through The End of An Empire? | Lea Ypi meets Aaron Bastani

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