Adam Tooze

They have a thing for the independence of the judiciary.

This is a problem.

But this is to do with the independence of the law, right?

So it's not democracy, it's the independence of the law.

It goes all the way back.

If you look at the constitutions of Australia as it becomes an independent commonwealth, which was a huge inspiration for racists in California and also conversations in South Africa, it literally says that we will decide who the people are.

with a view to excluding Asian migrants.

This Brechtian quip that the government should elect a new people is for those who have always been addicted to trying to defend white rule at the frontiers of power, this has always been a key explicitly formulated constitutional principle.

That was us.

John, the last serious effort to buy Greenland was made in the 1940s by the people who made that global order.

So the glitch in this is that like at the moment they were creating that order, they had their eye on Greenland because it is a – and in World War II, it had proved important real estate.

And its position within Denmark and the Danish sovereignty is really ambiguous.

It's the product of settler colonialism, right?

So this is not some – But we all are.

Well, many of us, some more than others, right?

But we have to be realistic about the logic of that earlier epoch of power that is celebrated now in retrospect.

And then Exxon shows up and says, we can't invest there.

I think Japan is crucial in this story.

And this is exactly, I mean, if we think of him biographically, that's the key moment.

And that is not a moment which has, you know, say China's globalization or Mexico NAFTA, you'd say American capital benefited on a really gigantic scale from that.