Donnacha Ó Beacháin

And that's what the European Union project, I think, is about.

That's where its greatest potential lies.

It's the only...

you know, collective force that can withstand those pressures potentially.

And that's why, by the way, it's a target for Putin's Russia.

It's a target for Trump's America.

Both of them loathe the EU.

Both of them say quite openly that they prefer the EU wouldn't exist.

And they try to undermine it in every way.

They prefer to meet the leaders of individual nation states within Europe rather than the EU institutions because they realize that the European Union is the only potential

institution which can withstand their pressure.

So this is where we're at.

I mean, obviously, the result in Hungary, you know, was a welcome result, but I wouldn't collapse in a sense of relief.

This is a punctuation mark, but the story goes on.

We could end up with a situation, as I sometimes fear, that liberal democracy is kind of a fleeting moment in history.

You have to remember that most of human history is the powerful dominating the weak, the strong dominating the weak.

It's very Darwinian.

It's very Hobbesian.

It's very unfair.

And we have tried to create international orders, legal orders, rules, international rules to restrain democracy.