Democratic Demons and Family Drama, A Valentine's Day Text From the United States for their European Soulmates--Vice President JD Vance's Remarks Delivered at the 2025 Munich Security Conference

 

Pix credit The Guardian

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential – and trust me, I say this with all humour – if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk. (JD Vance, Remarks Delivered at Munich Security Conference)

 

 We are all the products of our relationship with our demons; and sometimes those demons, over the course of a life, take on human form. Those demons guard the cognitive cages within which one can find comfort and perhaps a sense of safety; perhaps they are the bars of those cages. Eventually those demons might well come to form the only basis through which it is possible to understand the world which is the accumulated product of demonic acts. When aggregated, these singular experiental engagement with, and rationalization of, the world around one (the world as people, mostly, though the rest of it as a function of the human for most or exteriorized  in some exogenous virtual essence), produce what sometimes passes for political first principles around which human society is organized, defended, corrupted, reformed, and organized again as new generations come to fill up the body politic, social, economic, and cultural.   

This approach might be helpful in understanding, and perhaps situating, the somewhat remarkable (and quite deliberately so) performance by JD Vance, the American Vice President, at the Munich Security Conference. His Valentines Day speech to the collectively august body of people who matter had the desired effect--both on the bodies onto which it was projected, and those for whom it was meant to be affirm solidarity within shared cognitive cages in need of expansion.  It was the sort of Valentine's Day offering that could not have been better scripted  by Hollywood or Bollywood. . . . .

The speech produced the intended reaction among the audience and their followers, dutifully reported by press and media organs. The ritual was almost theatrical. "Vice President Vance delivered a stinging message to European leaders when he took the stage at the Munich Security Conference on Friday: the biggest threat to their continent, he said, comes not from Russia or China, but from within. . . Vice President Vance delivered a stinging message to European leaders when he took the stage at the Munich Security Conference on Friday: the biggest threat to their continent, he said, comes not from Russia or China, but from within." (NPR Reporting here). The Germans were among the most willing to return the favor of the Vice President's bluntness with bluntness of their own: "German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius hit back in his speech to the conference later in the day, calling Vance's remarks "unacceptable". He said Vance had called into question democracy not only in Germany but in Europe as a whole." (Reuters). 

Mr. Vance is no stranger to the Munich Security Conference.  His remarks in the 2024 Conference were also memorable--but perhaps only a warm up to the blunt enthusiasm that only victory at the polls could generate.  (The Sleeper Awakens: Text of Senator JD Vance's Remarks Delivered at the Munich Security Conference 18 February 2024 and Some Reflections). In that sense the audience ought to have been prepared for the performance that Mr. Vance delivered. At the time I suggested the following:

Pix credit here

 Mr. Vance also appears to have been embracing the role of evangelist for gōdspel (from the Old English gōd ‘good’ + spel ‘news). And what better place to awaken other sleepers to the good news of the coming re- or trans-valuation of all values (Umwertung aller Werte) than at the Munich Security Conference. There, on 18 February 2024 "Senator JD Vance (R-OH) delivered a “wake up call” to Europe." (Press Release and Transcript of Remarks). In it here awake to the successes, during his first term, of President's Trump Russia policy, and what it might mean both for the European security apparatus and the priorities of the United States.

In the process he also provided an insight into the premises that shape those views and that judgment. These, in turn, are grounded in some sort of Manichaen dualist view of the world as composed of an infinite number of binaries that when aligned add up to zero. In particular, the view that productive capacity cannot grow but is merely shifted around to reflect priorities, is worth some considerable consideration. But more than that, the remarks suggest the semiotics of context--that is the way that values and premises about the world shape the possibilities and assessment of the possibilities within that self-referencing meaning-cube. As such, the premises, principles, and outlooks--the core assumptions that drive Mr. Vance's analysis, are not merely conceptually Manichaean but also in their application quite traditionally imperial in that way that this term itself has changed meaning and force (see essays here).

Pix credit here (roast goose with Black truffles)

But the 2025 speech was also remarkable for the audience to which it was targeted. Clearly those included the European leadership vanguard--those both in power and those waiting in the wings. But it was also targeted to their American counterparts: in effect what was sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. ("Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation."(JD Vance, Remarks Delivered at Munich Security Conference).) 

Both are to be cooked in equal measure; and in the service of what? Well this appears to be a new form of cognitive caging the bars of which are constructed from out of the demons of regulatory controls by the State and its apparatus. t is in this sense that Mr. Vance's remarks are better read, perhaps, alongside his quite direct challenge to the Europe model of liberal democratic regulatory governance, one grounded in an increasingly comprehensive guidance from the state overseen by large techno-bureaucracies interlinked with the bureaucracies of private sector enterprise leaders (more on that below). (See Vice President JD Vance's Jack Ma Moment?: AI and the EU, Text of Remarks Delivered at the AI Summit, Paris France 11 February 2025)

Pix credit here

It is premised on the ideal of a clawed back State, the principal duty of which is to protect its subjects from themselves and from outsiders. In this model the principal role of the State (for now) is the protection of its sovereignty--what goes on within its sovereign borders becomes a concern only  where sovereignty is threatened.  None of this s well defined; nor can it be. But to does suggest a challenge to and a retreat from a century or more of state centered administrative leadership and guidance increasingly of a mandatory character and of the triumph of public policy over private choices. Yet nothing is entirely clean cut and there is messiness at the margins. It appears that the disagreement in concepts of the state apparatus is not about Max Weber and the idealized bureaucracy for efficient management of institutions as much as it might focus on what, why, and how these efficient institution are created and used as a function of core conceptions of the ideal liberal democratic state and its balance between human autonomy and collective solidarity, and critics might argue, the role and nature of its biopolitics.

Internal protection appears to be grounded in notions of preventing corruption of the system in which personal autonomy, including the effects of asymmetrical relations among autonomous persons, may produce constantly iterative deal making among them, in the aggregate (and by definition) to the greater glory of the community but without the normative guidance of the State.  That principle suggests the limits of State internal passivity. One one sees this already in the early actions of the Trump administration that has used State authority to intervene decisively in a variety of matters and to use its leverage to guide private collectives (business and other groups) toward preferred behaviors in moving the State appropriately along the Americas First path. 

However it is framed, Mr. Vance projects a view that substantially challenges the consensus developed over the last century or so  and expressed in its liberal democratic and Marxist Leninist forms, which posits a growing normative role for the State, the necessity of the guidance of the State's government apparatus toward both the articulation of objectives and its attainment, and the deployment of that apparatus toward those ends (considered here). In China that produces both the Socialist Path (toward a communist society) guided by its vanguard of leading forces organized as a Communist Party. In the liberal democratic states it produces large techno bureaucracies overseeing compliance based  governance driven by the imperative to fulfill public policy goals, in which personal autonomy is bent through rules and compliance based systems, to the goals. None of this is bad or good--historically contingent demons produce their own cages, and sometimes when historical stages of development move on, resistance or challenge.  That role, in a sense, in what, in his own way (whether conscious of this or not) Mr. Vance serves. In a large sense, then, Mr. Vance might be suggesting that when he examines the systems of China and the EU, at least with respect to the role of the State, he might be tempted to conclude that there may be difference but only in degree.

The text of the remarks follows below as they were kindly posted first to the Spectator website, where it may be accessed HERE (JD Vance, Remarks Delivered at Munich Security Conference).  

Beyond that, there is not much to say other than to admire or be repelled by the details that the proffered challenge envisions. I leave that to readers. Still, a few points in this bonfire of the vanities, understood from the context of Renaissance Florence in 1497 and Savonarola, or from that of the anxieties of later 20th Century America, might be worth underscoring.  

1. The focus on the interiorization of security  further refined the  conceptual cage within which Mr. Vance, and perhaps the 2nd Administration of President Trump operates. That is not good or bad but worth knowing. The cues have already been quite visible to those who chose to see them: the focus on sovereignty, the critically important transformation of the concet of invasion, and the conflict with internal elites whose control over personal autonomy is thought to be distasteful.  In more religious terms, all of this points to a notion of corruption of the soul that itself must confess, express contrition, do penance, and recieve absolution for a personal and social transformation more in keeping with the fundamental theology around which a properly ordered society ought to be framed. And that theology views the current architecture as an expression of a fundamental heresy that threatens the immortal soul of the liberal democratic construct. 

2. All of this is bent not to rupture but to the coming back together of the community of believers in liberal democracy. That requires both the rooting out of heresy and its correction. To those ends, an informal Holy Office might be required.

F or years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team. (JD Vance, Remarks Delivered at Munich Security Conference).

That serves as the basis for the urgency--the Manichean notions already on display in 2024 now move to center stage as the founding premise of the urgency of housecleaning. And the Manichean impulse also produces change in the United States which is intended to be projected outward, but using the language of deal making emblematic of the current administration. "So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that." (Ibid.).

3. And thus the inquisition: and the tone--deliberating irritating. The irritation was quite conscious and for the reasons that are fairly obvious. The first was to use irritation to underscore power relations, a superior speaking to . . . . others.  The second was to provoke reaction. That worked well as Europeans leaders and American elites took the bait.  The third was to control the focus and flow of conversation among allies. This agenda setting is also an exercise and underscoring of power relations, but here also bringing in mass management which was a strong object of the initial portions of the remarks. And fourth and perhaps least was to use irritation as a warning about the nature of deal making and the possibility of win-win, even asymmetrical win-win, between the United States and its traditionally most important external core.  

4. Yet that rhetorical irritant is a double edged sword.  All of that fancy talk about popular mandates is well and good--but it hardly worked in favor of American influence after any number of exceedingly close elections over the last century, including those of 2000 and 2016. And that is a problem that Mr Vance avoids as he paints with Caravaggio's chiaroscuro to emphasize stark binaries of which he is quite fond. In particular is the notion that mandates are not binaries always or necessarily. Closer elections suggest the need, the obligation, to take into account the values and intentions of all participants; and all the more so where the difference between victory and defeat, was measured by exceedingly slim margins. Consensus, and win-win (even asymmetric win-win) is as much a form of populism is the notion that a popular mandate provides a basis for doing what one likes within the boundaries of that "mandate." Indeed, to do otherwise if to reduce elections to a form of democratic centralism--a core value of Marxist-Leninist systems (on the Chinese version here). In this case Mr. Vance effectively substitutes voting mandates for the result of discussion and debate within the ruling vanguard party. That may not be what Mr. Vance had in mind, but the operational consequences and convergence with core Leninist theory, is hard to avoid, even if it is masked within the forms and conceits of liberal democracy.  That cannot be what he means, but one might be excused for considering whether that is where he will wind up.

 5. It is in this sense that the temptation, that Mr Vance could not resist, to suggest some sort of connection between the habits of European officials and their techno-bureaucracies and the operating style of Soviet nomenklatura and their discursive tropes appears less potent ("Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election." (JD Vance, Remarks Delivered at Munich Security Conference)). A pity really because the conception and challenge of information, mis-, dis- and mal-information for sovereignty and collective solidarity (to use the conceptual lens of Mr. Vance) are certainly issues that touch on security as well as discourse and merit something of a more comprehensive discussion. 

Pix credit here

6. And that leaves external security, about which Mr. Vance offered very little.  What he did offer was a light hearted scolding about the miserliness of Europeans when it comes to their own defense spending--but that critique is as old as the Kennedy administration of the early 1960. Less lighthearted was the intimation that the nature of the American defense umbrella is changing: "President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term ‘burden sharing’, but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger." (JD Vance, Remarks Delivered at Munich Security Conference)). Mr Vance has made it abundantly clear that Europe ought to get used to fending for itself as the American focus turns to the East. Many might disagree, even within the small space democratic centralism permits within American political discourse under our election mandate system (to use Mr Vance's conceptual cage). Certainly form the reshaping vision of post-global empire, the fruits of which permitted Mr. Vance to deliver these remarks in Munich, apex powers must cultivate mutual inter dependencies--and security is among the most valuable commodities in the arrangements of dependency. This is true even as the focus of dependence and control shifts from territory to intangibles--like production chains, and sentry posts along both the American and Chinese silk roads.  To some extent, Mr. Vance's remarks here show a remarkable unwillingness to time travel back from the first half of the 20th century to our own times. Yet 20th century thinking will neither help the Americans nor their European partners--whatever the hierarchies of those relationships. 

7. Curiously, that viewpoint that seems to serve as the foundation of the way Mr. Vance perceives the world around him, tends to be more in accord with the outlook of Mr. Putin than of the rest of the vanguard of state leading forces (on Putin's view see hereThe Stories One Tells Incarnated in Rituals of Blood Sacrifice: Alexander Dugin as Storyteller to Russia and China in the New Era). Within that framework, the United States  best serves itself as a mediating power (« une puissance médiatrice » The Semiotics of Humiliating Russia), serving its own interests. That invites conceptual contradiction, or at least dissonance between the flourishes of discourse and the realities of action (A Principle of Solidarity for States Navigating the Peripheries of Empires--Full Text: Ukraine President Zelensky’s speech to Israeli Knesset 20 March 2022)). It would be a pity if that were so. And yet for years, abd certainly respecting Ukraine since 2014, there has been a sense of contradiction between what liberal democracies say and what they are doing, and in the process the disjunction reveals  liberal democracy's "Yalta Moment" (Liberal Democracy's Yalta Moment: Burning Opportunity Along With Bridges; Thoughts on Framing a Blueprint for Post Conflict Settlement in a Post Global Order). This is not to suggest that the Americans won't out of a necessity born of their own interests as they now see it, force concessions that are distasteful to allies. It is to suggest that early 20th century territorial thinking may not be the most fruitful way of understanding and protecting the national interest--especially where that policy is meant to further the Americas First project. Nor is the sort of unfortunate elitism and old school mean-kid clubbiness (and here apologies for the strong condemnation and language) that would lead (whatever the form and content of the public rationales advanced) either to roadblocks for Ukrainian admission to NATO (and thus to the fortification of European borders in an efficient way) and to the European Union. Here is certainly one area where the Americans and European elites share common ground in ways that ought to embarrass them both, one in which both appear to have expended a substantial amount of resources in the management of popular opinion (the success of which remains to be seen). That embarrassment is both a product of fear (of Russia) and of advantage (to the extent that they profit from the current arrangements). If the Americans and Europeans really have something to chat about it would be this. And if, at the end, they are both willing to sacrifice Ukraine, then they ought--as Mr. Vance suggests--be quite transparent to their populations, including suggesting what may be the consequences that the masses will have to bear (because perhaps almost certainly those who control risk on both sides of the Atlantic may be able to insulate themselves from any negative impacts of risk).

 

Pix credit here

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Read: JD Vance’s full speech on the fall of Europe

• 
  

• 14 February 2025, 3:32pm

Credit: Getty Images

Here’s a full transcript of the speech that JD Vance gave at the Munich Security Conference this afternoon.

One of the things that I wanted to talk about today is, of course, our shared values. And, you know, it’s great to be back in Germany. As you heard earlier, I was here last year as United States senator. I saw Foreign Secretary David Lammy, and joked that both of us last year had different jobs than we have now. But now it’s time for all of our countries, for all of us who have been fortunate enough to be given political power by our respective peoples, to use it wisely to improve their lives.

And I want to say that I was fortunate in my time here to spend some time outside the walls of this conference over the last 24 hours, and I’ve been so impressed by the hospitality of the people even, of course, as they’re reeling from yesterday’s horrendous attack. The first time I was ever in Munich was with my wife, actually, who’s here with me today, on a personal trip. And I’ve always loved the city of Munich, and I’ve always loved its people.

I just want to say that we’re very moved, and our thoughts and prayers are with Munich and everybody affected by the evil inflicted on this beautiful community. We’re thinking about you, we’re praying for you, and we will certainly be rooting for you in the days and weeks to come.

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many, many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine – and we also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defence – the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.

I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too.

Now, these cavalier statements are shocking to American ears. For years we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defence of democracy. But when we see European courts cancelling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask whether we’re holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard. And I say ourselves, because I fundamentally believe that we are on the same team.

We must do more than talk about democratic values. We must live them. Now, within living memory of many of you in this room, the cold war positioned defenders of democracy against much more tyrannical forces on this continent. And consider the side in that fight that censored dissidents, that closed churches, that cancelled elections. Were they the good guys? Certainly not.

And thank God they lost the cold war. They lost because they neither valued nor respected all of the extraordinary blessings of liberty, the freedom to surprise, to make mistakes, invent, to build. As it turns out, you can’t mandate innovation or creativity, just as you can’t force people what to think, what to feel, or what to believe. And we believe those things are certainly connected. And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it’s sometimes not so clear what happened to some of the cold war’s winners.

I look to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest: the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content’. Or to this very country where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of ‘combating misogyny’ on the internet.

I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago, the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Quran burnings that resulted in his friend’s murder. And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden’s laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant – and I’m quoting – a ‘free pass’ to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.

And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs. A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 metres from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of his unborn son.

He and his former girlfriend had aborted years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was found guilty of breaking the government’s new Buffer Zones Law, which criminalises silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person’s decision within 200 metres of an abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.

Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person. But no. This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime in Britain and across Europe.

Free speech, I fear, is in retreat and in the interests of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation. Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China. Our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.

So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer. And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.

In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square. Now, we’re at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure from its continental neighbours. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I’d ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it’s wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage, even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.

Now, the good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them.

Now, to many of us on the other side of the Atlantic, it looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet era words like misinformation and disinformation, who simply don’t like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way, or even worse, win an election.

Now, this is a security conference, and I’m sure you all came here prepared to talk about how exactly you intend to increase defence spending over the next few years in line with some new target. And that’s great, because as President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think you hear this term ‘burden sharing’, but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.

But let me also ask you, how will you even begin to think through the kinds of budgeting questions if we don’t know what it is that we are defending in the first place? I’ve heard a lot already in my conversations, and I’ve had many, many great conversations with many people gathered here in this room. I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?

I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump. You need democratic mandates to accomplish anything of value in the coming years.

Have we learned nothing that thin mandates produce unstable results? But there is so much of value that can be accomplished with the kind of democratic mandate that I think will come from being more responsive to the voices of your citizens. If you’re going to enjoy competitive economies, if you’re going to enjoy affordable energy and secure supply chains, then you need mandates to govern because you have to make difficult choices to enjoy all of these things.

And of course, we know that very well. In America, you cannot win a democratic mandate by censoring your opponents or putting them in jail. Whether that’s the leader of the opposition, a humble Christian praying in her own home, or a journalist trying to report the news. Nor can you win one by disregarding your basic electorate on questions like, who gets to be a part of our shared society.

And of all the pressing challenges that the nations represented here face, I believe there is nothing more urgent than mass migration. Today, almost one in five people living in this country moved here from abroad. That is, of course, an all time high. It’s a similar number, by the way, in the United States, also an all time high. The number of immigrants who entered the EU from non-EU countries doubled between 2021 and 2022 alone. And of course, it’s gotten much higher since.

And we know the situation. It didn’t materialise in a vacuum. It’s the result of a series of conscious decisions made by politicians all over the continent, and others across the world, over the span of a decade. We saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city. And of course, I can’t bring it up again without thinking about the terrible victims who had a beautiful winter day in Munich ruined. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and will remain with them. But why did this happen in the first place?

It’s a terrible story, but it’s one we’ve heard way too many times in Europe, and unfortunately too many times in the United States as well. An asylum seeker, often a young man in his mid-20s, already known to police, rammed a car into a crowd and shatters a community. Unity. How many times must we suffer these appalling setbacks before we change course and take our shared civilisation in a new direction? No voter on this continent went to the ballot box to open the floodgates to millions of unvetted immigrants. But you know what they did vote for? In England, they voted for Brexit. And agree or disagree, they voted for it. And more and more all over Europe, they are voting for political leaders who promise to put an end to out-of-control migration. Now, I happen to agree with a lot of these concerns, but you don’t have to agree with me.

I just think that people care about their homes. They care about their dreams. They care about their safety and their capacity to provide for themselves and their children.

And they’re smart. I think this is one of the most important things I’ve learned in my brief time in politics. Contrary to what you might hear, a couple of mountains over in Davos, the citizens of all of our nations don’t generally think of themselves as educated animals or as interchangeable cogs of a global economy. And it’s hardly surprising that they don’t want to be shuffled about or relentlessly ignored by their leaders. And it is the business of democracy to adjudicate these big questions at the ballot box.

I believe that dismissing people, dismissing their concerns or worse yet, shutting down media, shutting down elections or shutting people out of the political process protects nothing. In fact, it is the most surefire way to destroy democracy. Speaking up and expressing opinions isn’t election interference. Even when people express views outside your own country, and even when those people are very influential – and trust me, I say this with all humour – if American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.

But what no democracy, American, German or European will survive, is telling millions of voters that their thoughts and concerns, their aspirations, their pleas for relief, are invalid or unworthy of even being considered.

Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t. Europeans, the people have a voice. European leaders have a choice. And my strong belief is that we do not need to be afraid of the future.

Embrace what your people tell you, even when it’s surprising, even when you don’t agree. And if you do so, you can face the future with certainty and with confidence, knowing that the nation stands behind each of you. And that, to me, is the great magic of democracy. It’s not in these stone buildings or beautiful hotels. It’s not even in the great institutions that we built together as a shared society.

To believe in democracy is to understand that each of our citizens has wisdom and has a voice. And if we refuse to listen to that voice, even our most successful fights will secure very little. As Pope John Paul II, in my view, one of the most extraordinary champions of democracy on this continent or any other, once said, ‘do not be afraid’. We shouldn’t be afraid of our people even when they express views that disagree with their leadership. Thank you all. Good luck to all of you. God bless you.