When asked to describe Europe in three words, Ivan Krastev repeated one word three times: "speed, speed, speed." Anne Applebaum offered "fragmentation," "imagination," and "the technology gap." Together, these terms capture much of what Europe is facing.
In the first episode of The Next Question, the Robert Bosch Academy's new podcast, Pradnya Bivalkar interviews political scientist Ivan Krastev and historian Anne Applebaum about the future of Europe in a world where the assumptions that guided it for a generation are no longer valid.
Krastev argues that the European Union as we know it will not survive the world being built around it and that Europeans are still debating how best to play a game that has already ended. Applebaum argues that Europe should build on what it already possesses since independent courts and the rule of law were European inventions long before they became American ideals.
Ivan Krastev is a political scientist who chairs the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and holds the Albert Hirschman Permanent Fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. He is a contributing editor at the Financial Times and is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy.
His books include After Europe and, with Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed, an account of how the post-1989 demand that the East imitate the West produced its own backlash; it won the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2020. He writes regularly on European politics for Foreign Affairs.
Anne Applebaum is a historian and a staff writer at The Atlantic and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for Gulag: A History. At the SNF Agora Institute and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she is a senior fellow, she co-directs Arena, a program on disinformation and twenty-first-century propaganda.
Her recent books, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc., examine why authoritarian politics became attractive again in societies that assumed they were past it, and how today's autocracies cooperate across ideological lines. She received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2024.
Pradnya Bivalkar is Senior Project Manager at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin and works with the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellows. Her areas of work include Identity Conflicts, Political Systems, Modern India, and the Global North-Global South Dynamic. She has hosted the Academy's podcast since January 2023, first as Think. Debate. Inspire. and now as The Next Question.
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