At the dinner, the organizer of the conference, a female German scholar stunned me.
I expressed doubts regarding the usefulness of Trump’s tariffs and she practically exploded. Get this: in defense of the tariffs.
“You just said in your talk that you want a nation-state, right?” she ranted. “You don’t like neoliberalism. But how can you have a nation-state when there are no borders in any meaningful sense of the word? A national government needs to delineate the limits of the state. Isn’t that clear?”
This was before drinks were served, and it was pretty much the last thing I expected to hear in this milieu.
Of course, I shouldn’t be that surprised because the scholar who inserted me into this conference is a very religious Ukrainian colleague. But still. This is turning out to be a very unusual experience.
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