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The Current Transcript for February 3, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

Prologue

Listen to the full episode

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I ask you today to join in the political revolution. Letâ€™s transform America! Thank you!

[crowd chanting] Feel the Bern! Feel the Bern!

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Feel the Bern, theyâ€™re yelling. He's an unlikely presidential contender, a 74-year-old democratic socialist, not particularly warm and fuzzy, with no big money behind him, but that is the appeal of Bernie Sanders who slams the control and excess of Wall Street while vowing to expand government safety nets for the middle class. His critics say he's a dreamer, but the polling data shows the Democrats' millennial voters are turning to him in droves. Can he sustain it? And what will it do to Hillary? We're tracking the growing appeal of Bernie Sanders in a moment. Also today, the magic of genius.

SOUNDCLIP

We treat genius like shooting stars. You can't predict them, they're amazing and beautiful when you see them in the night sky, but you don't know when they'll be coming and there's nothing you can do about it. And I don't think that's true.

AMT: Eric Weiner says if you really want to predict genius, it might be best to stop looking at the stars and find a map, because genius is more about place than parentage or planets. His journey through the geography of genius in half an hour. And then another journey where the obstacles are getting bigger.

SOUNDCLIP

This is Denmark and you know. We're proud of our country and we welcome refugees and others who want to seek our neighbourship but we are Denmark and we have traditions.

AMT: And in the name of tradition yet another Danish city has created a by-law to protect pork on menus sending a not so subtle message to Muslim migrants whose religion says they cannot eat pork. It is emblematic of a turn in attitudes across Europe as refugees try to settle in countries that are now saying they're overwhelmed. We've got that story in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top Â»

Bernie Sanders looks like serious Democratic contender after Iowa

Guests: Benjamin Dixon, Jay Newton-Small, Harry Jaffe

SOUNDCLIP

I think the people of Iowa have sent a very profound message to the political establishment, to the economic establishment, and, by the way, to the media establishment.

[crowd cheering]

[crowd chanting] Feel the Bern! Feel the Bern! Feel the Bern!

That is, given the enormous crisis facing our country it is just too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.

[crowd cheering]

AMT: And that may just be the sound of a shot over the bow of the US political establishment as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders came within a whisker of upsetting Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucuses Monday night. As a former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was supposed to have had a lock on the Democratic presidential nomination. Instead she took Iowa with the slimmest of margins in caucus history, just point-two percent, meaning that the battle is far from over and that the Sanders insurgency is real. Benjamin Dixon is a Bernie Sanders supporter. He's also the host of the political podcast The Benjamin Dixon Show and we've reached him in Boston. Hello.

BENJAMIN DIXON: Good morning. How are you this morning?

AMT: I'm well, thank you. And I'm really curious to know what you're thinking. So what do the results of the Iowa caucuses say to you?

BENJAMIN DIXON: Really, it indicates to me that there is a steep divide in the Democratic Party between progressives and those who want the status quo. And there was given little hope to Bernie Sanders at the beginning- he was 50 points down at the beginning of the summer- and to close that closely to if former First Lady and sitting Secretary of State- a former Secretary of State, rather- indicates to me that this is going to be one heck of a race.

AMT: Now, some analysis says that he is so strong in Iowa because it's overwhelmingly white and that he won't sustain that in a more racially diverse state. What do you think?

BENJAMIN DIXON: You know, I think that narrative is just a part of, a projection right there. They want it to be the case that Bernie Sanders has a minority problem. I think it's more of a name recognition problem that he could have done more to come back and I think he's doing it now. So I think when people actually hear about his policies regardless of their race he's going to do quite well.

AMT: What appeals to you about Bernie Sanders?

BENJAMIN DIXON: Quite honestly, it's his fearlessness and his progressivism. He is not ashamed of being called a socialist even though he's a Democratic Socialist. And I think for so long we allowed the political right to chump us, if you would, into being afraid of going at their progressive values because to them anything that's beyond the status quo or anything that's not right wing politics is in fact socialism in their mind, but Bernie Sanders embraced it, confronted it and now he's running hard on it.

AMT: Well, and we can see from the numbers that he's done very well with millennials, young people from anywhere from 17 to 40. Where do you fall in that demographic?

BENJAMIN DIXON: Almost 40. Iâ€™m a few years away from the 40. But I'm kind of on that cusp of the Generation X. and a Millennial. But we identify with him regardless of his age. I think it's amazing that young people- 45 and under, I think, was actually the cut off- are identifying with Bernie Sanders like never before.

AMT: And why is that?

BENJAMIN DIXON: I always credit it to our ability, as younger people, to not be afraid to dream of something more and I think it's astonishing that people who are over 45, you know, they'd lived in a time before Ronald Reagan. And just based on political analysis, we are quite frankly still living underneath the Ronald Reagan paradigm. So people who are 45 and under, we never really knew a world outside of the one that Ronald Reagan crafted. But we are bold enough to listen to the stories, to read our history books, and realize that there was a time when we actually invested in human capital as much as we did financial capital and Bernie Sanders has not forgotten that time and we are identifying with him because we're bold enough to dream about a time that we know existed at one point.

AMT: And, Benjamin, you're African-American, are you not?

BENJAMIN DIXON: That's correct.

AMT: So are you in a minority of black Americans who like Sanders, do you think? Or do you think some of that punditry is just wrong?

BENJAMIN DIXON: I think, you know what, I think it's-- For me, just because I'm a political observer and a media observer, I think it's a concerted effort by the media, particularly black media elite who for, in my opinion, are just as much a part of the establishment as anyone else, I think it's a concerted effort by them to push this narrative so that African-Americans and other minorities won't give Bernie Sanders a good look. And so they forward this narrative that he has a minority problem or they paint the picture of him as being this old white man who's out of touch and experiences this white privilege and all these types of narratives when, in actuality, when we hear about what he stands for we quickly connect to the reality that there is something fundamentally wrong with how things are going in the United States. President Obama did a good job, the best that he could do considering the intransigent Congress, but we can do more. And so I think the more people, more African-Americans hear about his actual platform the more we connect with it. But I do believe that there's a concerted effort to keep us from ever looking at him through objective lenses.

AMT: And why do you prefer him to Hillary Clinton?

BENJAMIN DIXON: You know, Hillary Clinton, I really respect her. I would be excited to see America have the first woman president. I think that would be a tremendous accomplishment. But beyond that I believe she represents, she's a quintessential establishment candidate. If you listen to her now, she is quite literally telling us that what we have is good enough, that we don't need to build on the Affordable Care Act, we don't need to go to the single-payer system, we don't need to do anything more than President Obama did and to me that's just not leadership. We have mediocrity in our regular lives living paycheque to paycheque, going every single day to the factories that we go to work in. And we don't need someone to tell us that this is the best that we can do. We actually want leadership who's bold enough to dream of something bigger and help take us there.

AMT: Benjamin Dixon, thanks for your thoughts.

BENJAMIN DIXON: Thank you so much for having me, Anna Maria.

AMT: Benjamin Dixon is a Bernie Sanders supporter. He's also the host of The Benjamin Dixon Show podcast. He joined us from Boston.

SOUNDCLIP

We just got in from Iowa where we astounded the worldâ€”

[crowd cheering loudly]

And now in New Hampshire weâ€™ll astound the world again.

[crowd cheering loudly]

AMT: Well, they say that out on the campaign trail this season the cheers for Bernie Sanders have been the loudest of all. And my next guest today has been hearing a lot of them. Jay Newton-Small is a political correspondent for Time Magazine. We spoke with her last Friday about what to expect in the Iowa caucuses. We've caught up with her today at the next big stop on the trail. She's in Portsmouth, New Hampshire where the primaries will take place next Tuesday. Hi, Jay Newton-Small.

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Hi, thanks for having me on.

AMT: So, you were listening to Benjamin Dixon a moment ago. In what way does he reflect the appeal of Bernie Sanders?

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Certainly, Bernie is very populist and he's incredibly popular with a certain base of the Democratic Party that is, you know, are very unhappy with the status quo, they're very unhappy. They feel that progressives really haven't been represented very well enough by President Obama, in particular Hillary Clinton, and there is-- His economic populist message really resounds with them and they want to see him succeed or if not him succeed, then Hillary be dragged a little bit more to the left to say that she represents them more.

AMT: And why specifically the under-45s?

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Well, young people just want to be inspired. I mean, this happened again with Barack Obama in 2008. It's this-- He speaks to them in this sweeping, sort of, very inspirational dreamer kind of tones where he wants to start a political revolution, he wants to change the way Washington works. And what young person doesn't want to do that? I mean, it's a very inspirational message. It works with them. And so Hillary Clinton's message is sort of the exact opposite. Her criticisms of Bernie Sanders are, essentially, that is pie-in-the-sky, thatâ€™s dreams that we cannot really achieve given the political reality on the ground in Washington, DC. And that's not exactly inspirational stuff when you're an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old kid looking for somebody to inspire you to run for president to basically be told, no, this is what we can't do, but here's what we could do. It's, sort of, incremental. It's not something that is, you know, a huge revolution the way Bernie is promising.

AMT: Of course, when you're 38 and you've got two kids and a mortgage, they still want to dream, though, right?

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Theyâ€™re a little bit more realistic.

AMT: Except, thatâ€™s still the demographic. Like, why-- It's just interesting. Will his popularity translate across all the demographics that he needs, do you think?

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: So, I mean, I was listening to your previous interviewer and I certainly know people in South Carolina who have endorsed Hillary. Wendell Gilliard and Joe Neal who are a state representative and a state senator in the South Carolina legislature who are African-American. That said, I mean, Bernie's polling in South Carolina is he's under water by 30 points going into South Carolina. And that's a state where 60 percent of the Democratic electorate is black, is African-American. He really just doesn't resound the black voters. I saw him, Iâ€™ve seen him repeatedly in South Carolina and when he speaks there-- You know, one of the appeals to Bernie is that heâ€™s had the same message for 40 years, I mean, literally the same stump speech for 40 years. And when he goes to speak in South Carolina it's almost, I mean, it's really sort of noticeable where he delivers his usual stump and then heâ€™ll stop in the middle of the stump speech and sort of look down and someone is clearly giving him a card and heâ€™ll say, yes, and here is why this is important to African-Americans. And it's sort of awkward and weird and he reads it off. And, you know, you go to his events in South Carolina and there's maybe a handful maybe two dozen of African-Americans out of thousands of white progressives who are very passionate for him. So, I don't think it's just a matter of name recognition. Itâ€™s that he's really not speaking to them, hasn't never really learned to speak to them, because there are very few whiteâ€”very few black people in Vermont and he didn't need to for his re-election. And itâ€™s too bad. Iâ€™m not saying that Bernie is racist at all. I mean, he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. He has a very good record with civil rights. It's that he doesn't speak to them. He doesn't seem to have found the right way to speak to them on the campaign trail.

AMT: How has he affected the way Hillary Clinton speaks in campaigns?

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Oh, that's interesting. I mean, Hillary Clinton very noticeably last night, two nights ago, before leaving Iowa declared herself a progressive, which is hard to imagine Hillary Clinton declaring herself a progressive years ago. And then yesterday morning when she got to Iowa her first speech was all about economic populism and so sheâ€™s certainly being dragged to the left. Sheâ€™s certainly picking up a lot of Bernie's message and trying to tell people that she also represents economic inequality. She also would do something about it. But she also tries then to broaden her message and says, yes, I work on economic inequality, but I also work on racial inequality and on gender inequality and on sexual inequality. And so she talks about all the ways in which her campaign works for different groups.

AMT: It's interesting. He's pulling her to the left and we've seen Trump pulling the Republicans to the right. Great time to be a political reporter in the United States. Itâ€™s fascinating.

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: It is. I mean, there certainly is very rich vein in both parties anti-establishmentism and disgruntlement with the government. I mean, people are really unhappy. They want change and weâ€™re here in this sort of era of digital, you know, Twitter. I mean, everything goes so quickly and I think there's a lot of frustration that people don't see that immediate change in government, that they want more revolution, they want things to change more quickly. And Barack Obama used to say, and still does say, that change is very difficult. This was a guy who was elected on hope and change and he said that trying to change the US government is like trying to turn an aircraft carrier. It doesn't turn on a dime. You have to do it in incremental gradients and I think that's very frustrating to a lot of people.

AMT: Okay, well, Jay Newton-Small, thanks for bringing us up to date and for your perspective.

JAY NEWTON-SMALL: Thank you.

AMT: Jay Newton-Small, political correspondent for Time Magazine. She's the author of Broad Influence: How Women are Changing the Way America Works. She's in Portsmouth, New Hampshire today. Well, Bernie Sanders may be the new kid on the block when it comes to US national politics in the scene right now for the presidential nominations, but my next guest has been reporting on the 74-year-old political underdog for, well, for decades. Harry Jaffe is the editor-at-large at the Washingtonian. He's also the author of Why Bernie Sanders Matters and he joins us from Washington. Hi.

HARRY JAFFE: Good morning, good morning.

AMT: So, you're calling him, many are calling him the most unlikely of presidential contenders that has been around. Why is that? How unlikely? Run it by us.

HARRY JAFFE: Well, this is a guy who is a Jewish man from Brooklyn. He sometimes comes off as a homeless guy because he's always rumpled. And he talks like a deli guy. And he hasn't followed any of the patterns that people usually follow in this country to gain office, which means that he doesn't come from money. He doesn't have a great pedigree when it comes to education. He's just had a very, very strong constant message that's always resonated with people. And if you look at it how he ascended to power in Vermont it's kind of the same pattern and you can understand why he's been so successful now.

AMT: Okay. So what happened in Vermont? How did he get Senator?

HARRY JAFFE: He kind of stumbled into office. He was a hippie back in the seventies, didn'tâ€”He was kind of wandering around trying to figure out what to do and he literally volunteers to run for the US Senate for a third party that had just started off- it was called the Liberty Union Party- and he didn't get anywhere electorally in his four elections in the seventies, but he did realize a couple of things. He realized that he was good at it and that he really liked, you know, being in the public eye. He also got a tremendous start on his brand name. Then he runs for mayor of Burlington. And what I found so fascinating about that was that he won. And he was shocked. He shocked himself. And he also actually had to then be mayor. And when he was mayor Burlington for four terms he did a pretty good job. Always ambitious, always, you know, as he was mayor he ran for governor. As he was mayor he ran for Congress. So he always wanted to move up. And if you really look back and see what drives Bernie Sanders- he wants to change the world. He always has wanted to make, not small changes, but big changes.

AMT: And he identifiesâ€”He is not afraid to call himself a socialist, right. He really-- That economic change he's talking about now is kind of ingrained in him.

HARRY JAFFE: He doesn't shy away from being called a radical. He gave a speech in 1986 when he was elected for the third time, he said, I am not afraid if people call me a radical because we need radical change in this country. And I think that that's one of the things that's propelling him right now is that, you know-- He has been talking about enemies, if you will for all these many years. And, you know, he's against Wall Street. He's against the establishment. He's against the oligarchy. And right now in this country I think that many Americans are starting to see the world through his same lens. Wall Street is clearly out of control in many ways and the amount of wealth being accumulated by very few people is kind of disgusting. I mean, capitalism is out of whack. The establishment that's being supported now by very rich people does describe the oligarchy that Sanders has been talking about for years. I mean, it's funny when I talk to his aides and I said, well, that was a great speech today. They would say, oh, that's the oligarchy speech. [laughs]

AMT: Yeah. So a couple of things- I want to pick up on that, but first of all, he wasn't even always an official Democrat, right? Like, isn't it just recently that he has actually been under the party officially?

HARRY JAFFE: Not only that, he's been the anti-Democrat. I mean, this is a guy who's been running against the Democrats and beat the Democrats to a pulp in Vermont. He ran against the Democratic machine when he when he won for mayor. And then as he's mayor he runs against a sitting Democratic governor Madeleine Kunin. And he, you know, he has no love for the Democratic Party and when he was in the Congress and the Senate he was a very reluctant co-operator with the Democrats.

AMT: So, it's so interesting because-- So you have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump defining themselves as anti-establishment choices. So the billionaire anti-establishment guy on the Republican side and then you have the anti-Democrat Sanders on the Democratic side. What is this doing to this election campaign?

HARRY JAFFE: Well, I think what joins these two candidates in kind of a bizarre way is that they are both populists in the American vein of populism which is historic. I mean, you go back to President Teddy Roosevelt, you know, governor Huey Long from Louisiana, Fiorello La Guardia of New York- these are our leaders who always said the common man is getting screwed and is not being represented and there are evil forces around that are keeping the common man and the everyday man at bay. But Sanders and Trump look at it in two extremely different ways. Trump sees it as, well, you know, we've got these immigrants who are bringing us down, we've got these Muslims who might, you know, threaten us in the supermarket, which is, you know, many people think it's kind of insane. But nevertheless, there's an element of demagoguery that one can use with populism. Sanders, on the other hand, uses it in a very different way. His populism is more that the rich are getting too rich and there's needs to be more sharing, if you will, and we need to rebalance the economy. So, in a way, they're both populists, but one being a Democrat- a demagogue from the right and one being a much more of a radical from the left.

AMT: And fascinating to watch. Harry Jaffe, thanks for your insights.

HARRY JAFFE: Pleasure. Pleasure. Interesting to watch.

AMT: Yeah. Thanks again. Harry Jaffe, editor-at-large at the Washingtonian, also the author of Why Bernie Sanders Matters. He joined us from Washington. You want to weigh in you can tweet us. We're @thecurrentcbc. You can find us on Facebook or you can go right to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the Contact link. Tell us what you think of this fight and the populist fight in each party and where you think it's heading and maybe what we should all be paying attention to.

Back To Top Â»

Genius linked to geography more than genes, says author Eric Weiner

Guests: Eric Weiner

[Music: Theme]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Still to come, we've got dispatches from the Danish meatball war. As that country deals with an influx of Muslim refugees, another Danish town invokes the so-called Danish food culture card by making pork mandatory on the menus of public institutions. Weâ€™ve got that in half an hour, but first, it's been said that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, but what if it's really about location, location, location?

[Music: Eine kleine Nachtmusik â€“ 1. Allegro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart]

AMT: The unmistakable sounds of an unmistakable musical genius. But what may be even more remarkable than Mozart's rare gift for composition was the fact that he wasn't alone in Vienna during what's called the city's golden age. Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, were all fruits of the same time and place as Mozart, which to Author Eric Weiner is more than a mere coincidence. For his new book, he argues that geography may be even more important than genes when it comes to producing works of genius. The book is called, The Geography of Genius, and Eric Weiner, former international correspondent for NPR, is with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

ERIC WEINER: Hi, Anna Maria.

AMT: So, how do you define genius?

ERIC WEINER: Ah. You know, I subscribe to what I call the fashionista theory of genius, which is essentially that a genius is someone who we declare a genius, that it is a social verdict. We decide who gets to be a genius. And I think that's the best definition, because otherwise, you are making sort of arbitrary decisions about who gets to be a genius and who isn't. Let's say you return to your apartment and you start working on the great Canadian novel, and you're convinced it is a work of genius. But none of your friends agree, none of your co-workers agree, no one will publish it. Are you a genius?

AMT: Well, maybe after I'm dead, but not now.

ERIC WEINER: Exactly. So the point is it takes both the creator and an audience to make a genius. And that you need both elements. But to give you a simpler answer to your question, I like a quote from the German philosopher Schopenhauer. Talent, he says, hits the target no one else can hit. Genius hits the target no one else can see. So, there's always a conceptual leap. The genius is making this leap. It's not just an incremental innovation, it's a jump. It's a jump that Einstein made, and that Darwin made.

AMT: Youâ€™ve got another quote that I really liked, and itâ€™s a quote from Genius, as you're talking about China, and it's something about, a genius looks at what everyone else is looking at, and sees something different.

ERIC WEINER: And that's one of the key points here, is that when I talk about genius, I'm not talking about intelligence. It's not about just having a high I.Q., and it's not about just knowing a lot. The genius is not a know-it-all. Theyâ€™re a see-it-all. They're seeing connections that other people don't see. Einstein, during his time, there were other physicists who knew more physics than Einstein, actually knew more. But Einstein saw things that the others didn't. He made connections that other people didn't. And that is creative genius. Itâ€™s not being a smarty pants, itâ€™s about seeing things that others donâ€™t.

AMT: So, how often do we see these kinds of people emerge in clusters?

ERIC WEINER: Almost all the time. You know, you look at the world map over time, and you plot where the geniuses appear, and itâ€™s not like you see one in La Paz, Bolivia, one in Moscow, and one coming from Windsor, Ontario. You see them in groupings, in what I call genius clusters. Certain places at certain times produce a mother lode of brilliant minds and good ideas, and the question is why? What was in the water back then, and can we bottle it?

AMT: So, what kinds of locations are the most common?

ERIC WEINER: Cities. It's almost always a city. You know, there's that old African proverb, it takes a village to raise a child, well, it takes a city to raise a genius. With very few exceptions, Silicon Valley, which we can get to, is one of those. But for the most part, it's densely populated cities, and that's where genius blossoms.

AMT: So, why do you think location has something to do with the emergence of genius?

ERIC WEINER: Because I think that we have this myth of geniuses being just genetic, or geniuses are born, or it's hard work that they're made, and we ignore the soil. We ignore the fact that creative genius is always in a context of a place. It's a relationship to the place, and it grows out of the soil. It's like an apple tree. You need the seed, you need the water, but you need the right soil. And one of the important roles that place plays is audience. You know, you began the segment with some beautiful music from Mozart. Well, he was coming of age, professionally, in Vienna of the 18th century. And he actually moved there from Salzburg, because it was the place to be, and one things he one of the things he loved about Vienna was this audience. And the audience pushed him and prodded him, and in a way, you could say the audience was a co-genius along with Mozart.

AMT: An enabler, almost, yeah.

ERIC WEINER: Enabler in a in a good way, yes.

AMT: Yeah, yeah, okay. So, well, take us on this journey. Let's start with Greece, because you went there first.

ERIC WEINER: It seemed like the place to start. I have to confess that, like most people, I had some passing knowledge of ancient Greece, and Athens in particular, but I didnâ€™t realize the extent to which we are all a little bit Greek, whether we know it or not. And the question, the mystery, really, is why. Not just why Greece, because there wasn't one Greece, there were hundreds of Greeces, these small city states that populated the region, and Athens was probably one of the least likely to become a golden age. The land was barren, it was not the biggest of the city states, not the wealthiest, not the most powerful. Yet, it's the one that flourished more than any other. And so I approached it sort of like a detective. Why Athens, why this one city?

AMT: And what did you find in Athens that then kind of replicated itself as you went along?

ERIC WEINER: one of the common threads is something that's going to sound very simple, and that's walking. They walked a lot, and Aristotle founded the Peripatetic School of Philosophy, which was walking and talking. And Socrates was a huge walker. And as I looked into this, I realized a lot of geniuses walked. Charles Dickens walked through the streets of London in the middle of the night, turning over the plot of whatever novel he was stuck on, and Mark Twain was a huge pacer, he would pace in the room until the ideas came. And, in fact, some recent research out of Stanford University finds that when you put people on a treadmill for as little as 15 or 20 minutes, they then produce more creative ideas than the people who are sitting in a chair like you and I are right now.

AMT: [laughs]

ERIC WEINER: Not having a creative thought enter our minds. So there's something about putting one foot--

AMT: [interposing] Youâ€™ve done the work already, I'm just listening.

ERIC WEINER: Okay.

AMT: [laughs]

ERIC WEINER: But we should be on treadmills, really.

AMT: Okay.

ERIC WEINER: While weâ€™re doing this. And, you know, putting one foot in front of the other, itâ€™s something about that simple act that that makes us more creative, because weâ€™re entering the incubation stage of creativity. We're not thinking consciously. Now that's just one small example, there was--

AMT: [interposing] Because they didn't just walk, they walked to, what was it called, the Agora?

ERIC WEINER: The Agora, the marketplace.

AMT: They walked to, like, a marketplace. They walked to a place of chaos and life.

ERIC WEINER: There was life.

AMT: Stuff going on.

ERIC WEINER: I mean, hereâ€™s a dirty little secret about ancient Athens, the cradle of Western democracy and civilization, is that it was kind of a dump. It was a dump, even by the dumpy standards of the day, really. The walls were so thin on the houses, that robbers simply dug through them. In fact, the ancient Greek word for robber means, literally, one who digs through walls. And it was smelly, and visitors would come from other city states and say, essentially, what a dump. But that's one of the first threads I found about these genius clusters, is theyâ€™re not paradise. This notion we have that creativity only happens in the perfect setting is totally wrong. In fact, a lot of these places are difficult, and they give us something to push against. Because creativity, and creative genius by extension, is always, I think, a response to a challenge. And Athens, the topography of Athens, the society of Athens, challenged people. And they responded in very creative ways.

AMT: So remind us, who did Athens give us?

ERIC WEINER: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, not necessarily in that order. Sophocles, the playwrights, and so much else. But just one more thing about Athens is, I think the real key to Athenian genius was its outward orientation. The dirty little secret about the Athenians is that they didn't invent as much as we think. They perfected a lot. They mooched, they were moochers.

AMT: So there was a port--

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] There was a port, Piraeus, and went out and they sailed. And they didn't invent statuary. They borrowed that from the Egyptians, and the same thing with mathematics, and other things that we associate with the Greeks. And Plato once said, what the Greeks borrow from foreigners, they perfect. This is something I saw in all these places, and you still see in Silicon Valley today. These golden ages are not necessarily places where great ideas are born, it's where they come of age, itâ€™s where they learn how to walk.

AMT: Okay. Well, let's walk to Florence during the Renaissance.

ERIC WEINER: Okay.

AMT: It was like nothing seen since Athens, what kind of characters are we talking about in this age?

ERIC WEINER: We're talking about some very well-known characters like Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and slightly lesser known characters like Filippo Brunelleschi, who built that iconic duomo that any visitor to Florence today will simply stare and wonder--

AMT: [interposing] Thatâ€™s right, and that whole structure, actually, the creation of that duomo, the architectural wonder of that was, no one had ever done that.

ERIC WEINER: No one had done it, absolutely. And mainly artists, but also some incredible thinkers, and humanists, as they were called, to this day there's the lingering presence of not just the Renaissance, not just the Italian Renaissance, but the Florentine Renaissance. Again, one specific place.

AMT: So, what was it about that place? We know that the Medici family had a lot of money and it was a big patron, what was going on there?

ERIC WEINER: Money. It was actually, I subtitled that chapter, genius is expensive, purposely being a bit provocative, because we don't normally associate money and genius. We think the creative genius is just off doing his or her thing, and they don't need money, but that's not true. It was once said of Mahatma Gandhi by his aides, it takes a lot of money to keep the Mahatma in poverty. And it takes a lot of money to keep a starving artist starving, likewise. The Medicis were amazing patrons. I'll give you just one brief story, is at the time, one of the head Medicis was Lorenzo, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. And he's wandering around the palace grounds, and off into the Medici Gardens, he notices a young stone cutter who couldn't be more than 14 years old. And he spots something about that kid, and says, kid, you've got talent. You're really good. You should come live with me, be a member of my family. I'll give you the best teachers and the best material in the land. And it was a wise investment, because today that kid is best known as Michelangelo. Who was the genius, was it Michelangelo, or was it Lorenzo, or was it the whole city of Florence?

AMT: And, you know, I was just in Florence this summer, and I was really struck by the fact that these artists then were given the opportunity to do more things, you make the point that Michelangelo starts as a sculptor, he ends up painting in the Sistine Chapel.

ERIC WEINER: Right.

AMT: Like, once you show talent, you get opportunity to show more talent.

ERIC WEINER: And to show more--

AMT: [interposing] And he rose to it, obviously.

ERIC WEINER: And to show more talent in unrelated fields, I think that's the key. And that's what separates Florentine genius from our version of it today, is today, we tend to play it safe. You know, we only hire people for job X if they've already done job X somewhere else. But Pope Julius II, I believe it was, who was a Medici himself, was looking for someone to do some ceiling work, you know, in the Sistine Chapel. And he says, I want that Michelangelo guy. And I'm sure his aides said, but, he's mainly a sculptor. He hasn't done much painting, and nothing on this scale. And the pope essentially said, I don't care. I'm going to place a huge bet on this guy for a seemingly impossible task. And thatâ€™s the sort of risks they took and the leaps they made that I don't know if we are so up for today.

AMT: Something else you point to with the Florentine crowd, and it carries over to other things, is that a lot of these people have dead dads.

ERIC WEINER: Dead dads, yes. Dead dads are important for genius. Sartre once said, the best gift that a father can give to his son is to die young. And that's based on some research that shows that a disproportionate number of geniuses lost a parent, usually a father, at a young age. And that speaks directly to this connection between trauma and genius. There seems to be a connection on a personal level. And the same thing for the places, though, Anna Maria, that a lot of these places suffered trauma just before their golden age. Athens was sacked by the Persians before Pericles rebuilt it grander than ever. Florence was decimated by the Black Death, the bubonic plague, just a few generations before The Renaissance blossomed. It seems that you need a stirring of the pot.

AMT: Eric Weiner, you found some differences between genius in the East and West. Tell us about your visit to China, and how do I pronounce it, is it Hangzhou?

ERIC WEINER: Hangzhou.

AMT: Hangzhou.

ERIC WEINER: Yeah, Hangzhou was the place to be in the 13th century in the world. City of a million people. You know, when Europeans were picking lice out of their hair and wondering when the Middle Ages would ever, ever end, the people of Hangzhou, in the capital of the Song Dynasty, were inventing the compass, inventing toilet paper, no small thing, wood block printing, creating beautiful art and poetry, and just thriving. And one visitor to Hangzhou was Marco Polo, who was blown away. In fact, he wrote about Hangzhou, and people back home didn't believe it. They called it, Il Milione, the million, as in a million lies. They couldn't believe there was such a place. But there was, and you're right, that it is Chinese creativity is somewhat different from Western creativity. In the West, we're really focused on novelty. That something, to be creative, has to be new and surprising, have that shock effect. In the Eastern, particularly the Confucian version of creativity, it's more a matter of usefulness. If something isn't useful, it won't be considered creative. It's a slightly different approach.

AMT: Itâ€™s so interesting, especially with China, because that's a history that in the West we don't know enough about, all of the amazing things that came out of China.

ERIC WEINER: And it's true, and the West does not have a monopoly on creative genius by any extent. And today, the Chinese are wringing their hands collectively, wondering why so much is made in China, but so little was invented there. You know, when will they see a Chinese Steve Jobs? And I met with a man there named Jack Ma, who is the founder of Alibaba, one of the wealthiest men in the world now, and he told me something surprising. When I asked him what it will take for China to regain that creative spark, he said they need to return to their roots, to their spiritual roots of Confucianism and Taoism and Buddhism, and these old notions of creativity, as being something actually, and this is going to sound really weird, but creativity that's based on tradition. And that sounds weird to Western ears, because we think that creativity is, by definition, a slap in the face try to tradition, but it's not. Every creative development is always based on what came before. Is Isaac Newton's old standing on the shoulders of giants, that's how we could see further. And I think in China, they acknowledge those shoulders more than we do here in the West.

AMT: You also profile Calcutta, now called Kolkata.

ERIC WEINER: Correct.

AMT: Tell us about the Bengal Renaissance.

ERIC WEINER: This was probably the most surprising, and I think a lot of people might say, what is Calcutta doing in a book about creative genius, because it's so associated with poverty and despair today, but for a while, in the late 19th, early 20th century, it was a golden age. And it produced its own renaissance man, Rabindranath Tagore, who was a poet, essayist, activist, educator and the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for literature. And he was one of many writers, there were scientists, including Chandra Bose, who may or may not have invented the radio before Marconi, and there were more books published in Calcutta at the time than any city in the world except for London. It's little known today, but it seemed like an interesting place to explore the connection between chaos and creative genius.

AMT: Tell me more about that.

ERIC WEINER: Well, we think of them as being just antithetical, like, that the genius sort of makes order out of things. And that's true, but first, they create chaos. Einstein's hair was chaotic. Beethoven's desk was chaotic.

AMT: His whole life was chaotic.

ERIC WEINER: He was a slob. I mean, he kept moving from apartment to apartment in Vienna, because landlords kept kicking him out because he was it was such a mess in his, in his various apartments. There's something to this. There are recent studies that show that if you put people in a very pristine, super neat office setting, and give them a creative thinking exam, they don't do as well as when there's a little bit of a mess. And if you think about it, if you're trying to come up with a new idea, you have to enter through a state of chaos. It's ignorance, chaos is a form of ignorance. It's your brain trying to form a new pattern around this information. And in Calcutta, there's chaos everywhere. There's stimuli coming at you, whether you want it or not. I think thatâ€™s one reason why cities are so creative. There's just, you walk down the street, even in a city like Toronto, and stuff is coming at you, and you never know--

AMT: [interposing] So you have to think differently.

ERIC WEINER: You have to think differently, and you never know where that stuff might lead.

AMT: Well let's get back to your fashionista theory of genius, then.

ERIC WEINER: Right.

AMT: And talk about, because we've been talking about people in the past, and that you can identify, but Silicon Valley, which is underway--

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] Yes.

AMT: And so many people point to geniuses. Help us--

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] Steve Jobs being the best example. And my cocktail party question when researching the book was, was Steve Jobs a genius, yes or no? Everywhere I go, with the exception of Silicon Valley, where they all say yes, it's pretty much divided 50-50. Some people will whip out their iPhone and say, my God, yes he was. Look, this device changed the world, it changed the way we do everything. And other people say, no, he didn't really invent anything, he was maybe a marketing genius, not a real genius. And the point is, one, is that it's a little close. It's a little recent for us to make that judgment, we need a bit of time. And the other point is, look, we get the geniuses that we want and that we deserve, and in 18th century Vienna, they cared a lot about music, what we now call classical music, and they got a Mozart and a Beethoven and others. What do we care about now? We care about technology. And who are our geniuses? Steve Jobs.

AMT: So what sets Silicon Valley apart?

ERIC WEINER: Well, it's an outlier in a couple ways. One way is that it didn't start as a city. And this, I have to admit, I've not fully figured out why and how it did that. But it started in this farmland, essentially, that it was best known as the prune capital of America.

AMT: But if thatâ€™s where it started, I suppose you could say that people kind of flocked to it, though, I mean, and money played a role.

ERIC WEINER: Yes, this is the magnetic theory of genius. That places of genius were places where people were attracted to, and that's true, but they have to be attracted there for a reason. It's not a coincidence that Silicon Valley blossomed on the West Coast. Think about it. All the money, all the power, all the brains were in the East Coast. But, you know, in the late 19th century, a U.S. Senator named Leland Stanford starts a school called Stanford University. And what did a New York newspaper say at the time, they sniffed. They literally sniffed. California needs an elite university about as much as Switzerland needs a retirement home for sea captains. And I'm sure that pissed off Californians.

AMT: [laughs]

ERIC WEINER: And they had a chip on their shoulder, right, not a microchip yet, that hadn't been invented, but the other kind of chip, and they were out to prove those East Coast snobs wrong. And that was a driving force behind Stanford University, a driving force behind Silicon Valley. And thereâ€™s also the freedom out there. The freedom to fail.

AMT: No rules.

ERIC WEINER: No rules. A founder of one of the early computer companies there said, well, in Silicon Valley, if you fail, your family won't know and your neighbors won't care.

AMT: So Silicon Valley, it's full of the beanbag chairs, it's got slides in the officesâ€¦

ERIC WEINER: Yeah.

AMT: Itâ€™s got fully stocked fridges. Yet, you argue that making life too comfortable does not encourage a creative genius.

ERIC WEINER: You know, where are the beanbag chairs at CBC, by the way? I have not seen any.

AMT: We donâ€™t have any.

ERIC WEINER: No. Then that's good, that's why you're so creative here because-- and no ping pong tables, right?

AMT: No ping pong tables.

ERIC WEINER: Right. That's why this is a bastion of creativity, is because you don't make life too comfortable and too easy for people, right?

AMT: Well, that's true, actually.

ERIC WEINER: [laughs] Right. And that's good, because again, you need something to push against. That creativity actually thrives when we're confronted with constraints. Which again, sounds counterintuitive. We think, give everyone, give our employees everything they need to be creative. And that's not the case.

AMT: So you look at the geography of genius. You're not immune to trying to grow genius, even in your own family. Like, parents want to somehow nurture genius, kind of.

ERIC WEINER: [interposing] Everyone wants a little Einstein and a little Mozart, right.

AMT: Yeah, but maybe we shouldnâ€™t be thinking that way?

ERIC WEINER: Thatâ€™s okay, no, I want my daughter to be a genius, I have to be honest. [laughs]

AMT: So where should she be living?

ERIC WEINER: [crosstalk] I want her to be happy, too.

AMT: So where should you be living, then, right now?

ERIC WEINER: Thatâ€™s the big question. I could lie to you, I could say, like, La Paz, Bolivia, but not for another ten thousand years. You know. [laughs]

AMT: Because I won't be able to hold you to account.

ERIC WEINER: Exactly, those are the best kind of predictions. The honest answer is I don't know, but I can tell you where it's not going to be. It's not going to be in Pyongyang, North Korea. Is it because they don't have good genes there, no. Is it because they don't work hard, oh, they work plenty hard. It's because it's not an open system. Right? It doesn't have that fundamental ingredient of diversity and tolerance and openness that all these places have. So I place more of a bet on Tallinn, Estonia, which, wonder if you know this, but Skype was invented there, and they have a flourishing high-tech sector, and they have a strong culture, and they have an openness to the outside world. So, it may seem weird now, because it's so small and obscure, but it's possible, absolutely.

AMT: Thanks for coming in.

ERIC WEINER: Thank you. I feel that we're both more genius-like after this.

AMT: Well, at least we know maybe how to recognize it in others.

ERIC WEINER: Exactly, exactly.

AMT: Eric Weiner, thank you.

ERIC WEINER: Thanks, Anna Maria.

AMT: Eric Weiner's book is called, The Geography of Genius, he joined us in our Toronto studio. What do you think about the idea that genius is in clusters, you can't force it on someone, not about genes as much as geography? Let us know. Tweet us, we're @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Find us online, cbc.ca/thecurrent, click on the Contact Us link. And stay with us, speaking of openness, getting to the meat of Denmark's refugee debate, where some towns are putting in mandatory pork on a menu. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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Meatball War: Denmark seen as anti-refugee by mandating pork on menus

Guests: Claus Omann Jensen, Michala Bendixen, Bo Lidegaard, Henning Meyer

[Music: Theme]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and this is The Current. As countries across Europe grapple with the ongoing refugee crisis, you may have heard about a controversial measure adopted by Denmark last week. The Danish parliament instructed authorities to begin seizing asylum seekersâ€™ assets on arrival. Items of non- sentimental value worth more than the equivalent of $2,000 Canadian dollars can be confiscated. Now officially, this is to help offset the cost of housing and feeding refugees, though it will also have the effect of telling asylum seekers to move on from Denmark. The move was condemned around the world but beneath those headlines another heated issue involving refugees in Danish society has been simmering away and it is called the meatball wars. It's all about pork. Forbidden in the Muslim diet, yet a national dish of Denmark. Laws have been sprouting up to make pork a mandatory item on the menu of certain public institutions. Now the Danish town of Randers is the latest to pass such a law and Claus Omann Jensen is the mayor of Randers. He's on the line from there now. Hello.

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: Hi.

AMT: What's so important about pork?

CLAUD OMANN JENSEN: Pulled pork been part of the Danish tradition and culture of eating for centuries and we are one of the largest exporters in the world of pork. Since it has been part of the tradition and a part of our way of cooking, of course it should continue like that.

AMT: And why legislate the availability?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: The issue is that, we in Denmark, we try and integrate with everything we can. We are serving meat for other religious beliefs, The Muslim people etcetera. We also serve meat for people who are diabetics etcetera, so we really try and make everybody welcome in our institutions and there is one institution that decided not to serve pork in their meals and actually removed it from their agenda and that's why we found it a bit odd that they did that.

AMT: One institution removed it? What was the institution?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: There was a kindergarten that removed it. Actually theyâ€™ve done that for many years and suddenly the media found a story about it and their own administration became aware of it and they had a discussion with a local leader and said could we find a pragmatic way of solving this? And they did until the politicians started to make this an issue for the city council. It wasn't really an issue at all.

AMT: Well, I don't understand. A kindergarten, why did they take pork off the menu?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: They wanted to make sure that the people with another religious belief would not accept pork in the food in the kitchen. But though they removed basically, the pork from the kitchen, which is fair enough because they wanted to try and respect other religious beliefs. The problem is that we should take big considerations in terms of new people coming to our country, but it should not be on the behalf of the Danish tradition. We should add it on, that's the key question here. We should add new cultures and traditions into our culture and institutions and not by deducting them.

AMT: Okay, I just want to continue to clarify here. The religious belief is Muslim?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: It was about Muslims, yeah.

AMT: Okay, and so you see this as an integration issue?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: What I think is wrong when we try and integrate, is that we should try and respect everybody that comes to our country. I think we are a very welcoming country, but the problem is that if you remove the Danish traditions, and just add the others but deduct from the Danish traditions, I think that is mis-integration. The Danish people, we are we are community in Denmark and we're very proud of our community. Our forefathers have built this country and we should of course, protect that.

AMT: So, what does the law actually say that you brought in?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: It says that we want to make sure that in the municipality institutions, that we want to ensure Danish food culture, and secondly we said, no institution should force anyone to eat meat contrary to their beliefs and religion. Thirdly, that institution should be very flexible in this matter and have the necessary respect for allergy sufferers, religious beliefs, diabetics, etcetera.

AMT: So, the kids in the kindergarten, are they served pork?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: Oh yes, they are now. We have parent boards so I'm pretty sure they will make sure this works perfectly fine.

AMT: It seems strange that a city council would actually legislate the availability of meat. If an institution decides it has a lot of people who don't eat pork, why would City Council legislate it back in?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: Because we don't have a tradition of doing that in other institutions and somebody was afraid that it could be a group pressure. For instance, let's say 50 percent were of Muslim origination, and maybe there was 20 percent who felt it was wrong to raise this issue because then they were found as racist. That was why the city council decided to do this, which by the way, the city council really, in my opinion, shouldn't have done anything about because it was done on an administration basis. There was no need for political involvement in this area. But that was the case and I believe in it, you know. I don't think it is right integration to remove Danish traditions and Danish culture. This is Denmark and we're proud of our country and we welcome refugees and others who want to seek our neighborship. But we are Denmark, and we have traditions. We respect their traditions but we also need to respect our own heritage.

AMT: You are not the first community to do this. Three others have done it in the last year and a half. What do you say to those people who say that making any kind of a bylaw or a piece of legislation to say pork has to be available, sends a message to those refugees for whom pork is against their religion. It sends a message that is racist. How do you respond to that criticism?

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: I basically just tell them what I just told you. If you come to my country, you need to understand that we have certain traditions and culture and I hope you respect them and honour them as well as I would respect your requirements. I could understand it if I was called a racist if I did not make sure that they had meat. We serve meat that is halal, you know, and I think that Denmark can be very proud of how we welcome people, really try and put a lot of effort into it and that's also how we perceive ourselves as Danes.

AMT: Okay, Mayor Jensen, thanks for speaking with me today.

CLAUS OMANN JENSEN: Okay, you're welcome.

AMT: Claus Omann Jensen is the Mayor of Randers, Denmark. Well, my next guest works closely with refugees who come to Denmark. Michala Bendixen is with the NGO Refugees Welcome. We reached her in Copenhagen. Hello.

MICHALA BENDIXEN: Hello.

AMT: Well, what do you think of what the mayor had to say about his view of the pork issue?

MICHALA BENDIXEN: Well, I'm happy that he said he makes sure that Muslims and Jews and everybody else can get their special meals if they need to, but I disagree with this issue about the pork in general. I think there is no reason to keep something like that but I think why it has gotten so much attention in the international press. Also, because it comes in line with a long row of negative information from Denmark created by our governments, mainly.

AMT: Take me through what other measures have been brought in in the country.

MICHALA BENDIXEN: Well, this government we have right now is very concerned of scaring refugees away from Denmark. That is their obvious goal and intention, which they say quite openly, that they want to make sure that Denmark is not as attractive to refugees as it has been until now. So, they have introduced a long line of changes in the legislation to scare people away, to send a message that people are not welcome here, and targeting the ones who are already here, to make sure that they have less opportunities and fewer options to, for instance, bring their family here, which will also send a message through to the people who consider coming here in the future, that they shouldn't pick this country, they should go somewhere else.

AMT: Denmark has also instituted some kind of new rule on how much money you can have coming in as a refugee, has it not?

MICHALA BENDIXEN: Yeah, well it's one of the long line of tightenings and restrictions now which has got a lot of attention. This one about seizing the valuables that refugees have on them when they arrive to Denmark and the argument is that we will we need to cover the expenses that we use and what we spend on refugees, so that they should provide for themselves. It's really a completely hopeless argument because refugees are not allowed to provide for themselves when they arrive to Denmark. They are forced to live in asylum camps, which are a much higher standard than in many other countries, I will admit that. Still, they're not free to live where they choose to live and they're not free to buy their own food. or do what they like. So, in that way, it's quite a strange way that you take away the few things that people have left and then you force them to live in a camp that they didn't choose to live in and eat food they didn't choose to eat and so on. I think this is just a symbolic act along with all the other restrictions really, that it's about sending out a signal that refugees should not to choose Denmark, they should go to another country.

AMT: And you know internationally, it's getting headlines about meatballs for the pork, and jewelry for the valuables.

MICHALA BENDIXEN: It's a strange thing happening in the media right now about Denmark, that everybody is focusing on these small and quite symbolic and very inferior things in the Danish situation and the Danish legislation. What we really have as a problem right now is that we are cutting down on the rights of refugees very, very seriously. Maybe the most dramatic one is that refugees who get a certain kind of status as refugees seeking shelter from a general danger, for instance from Syria, who are not individually persecuted, they get a certain status now in Denmark with only one year of residence permit. They will have to wait three years, so they will have to get their residence permit extended three times before they can apply to have their closest family members brought here, and that is an extreme breach of The Refugee Convention and other conventions as well. So, this is really serious step towards not respecting the rights, the human rights of refugees.

AMT: And in fact, your government has taken ads out in papers in Lebanon as well to make sure people know these changes, am I right?

MICHALA BENDIXEN: That how it started, yes. This scare-away campaign, that's the first thing they did. Actually, before they made the worst changes, they already started by announcing in the media in Lebanon that it would be a bad idea to go to Denmark because we had very strict rules and it would be difficult to get asylum here. At that time, was actually not quite true. They were manipulating and changing the information in those ads to make a much worse impression of Denmark than the situation was at that time. Just recently last week, they actually passed a long line of laws which makes Denmark quite a tough place to ask for asylum. So, we can say they started by having a false campaign and then later on they actually made this information in the campaign true.

AMT: Do these new policies mirror the publicâ€™s sentiment toward refugees?

MICHALA BENDIXEN: That's a very difficult discussion, and it's going on in all our neighbor countries as well. I think Danes are not more hostile or more xenophobic than any other people in Europe. Maybe, on the contrary, we are, as the Mayor said, we are actually quite open, and tolerant, and helpful, generous people. All the refugees that I've talked to, when they tell how their personal encounter with Danes have been, they are usually very positive and it's very, very rare that I hear refugees meeting any kind of personal racism or bad behavior from the Danes. On the opposite, they are very welcomed and get a lot of help and support in their daily life. It seems like a paradox that the Danes vote against the refugees and for some very, very strict rules. At the same time, when they meet refugees in person, they are actually very helpful and very open towards them. I think that's a paradox and quite strange for me to understand how people can be so different in their personal, everyday life and in the more general, abstract way of making choices.

AMT: Okay, Michala Bendixen thanks for your perspective on this.

MICHALA BENDIXEN: Welcome.

AMT: Michala Bendixen is with the Danish NGO, Refugees Welcome. Well, pork meatballs and sausages may all be a part of Danish tradition, but to some of those watching the current tensions around refugees in the country, it seems to be out of step with another Danish tradition. Bo Lidegaard is a former Danish diplomat and the author of a book about Danish humanitarian actions in the Second World War. He edits the daily political newspaper, Politiken, and we've reached him in Copenhagen. Hello.

BO LIDEGAARD: Hi.

AMT: Remind us of Denmark's humanitarian history in World War Two and the aftermath.

BO LIDEGAARD: Denmark joined the world war, it was the only European country under Nazi occupation, which actually never introduced any legislation against its Jewish population. And when the masses turned towards the Jewish minority, Denmark rounded them up in October of 1943. The Danes, in general, the very last wide segment of the population, helped the Jews to escape to Sweden and by this, helped almost all the Danish Jews escape Nazi persecution. Also, at the end of the war, Danish volunteers, together with Swedes and Norwegians arranged for the white bosses to collect prisoners from the German concentration camps and managed to save some 40,000 Scandinavian men and women before they were obliterated in the camps.

AMT: And then after the war, Denmark was the first signatory to the Geneva Convention on refugees, was it not?

BO LIDEGAARD: It was indeed, and it has been among the top two or three countries, in terms of providing develop assistance ever since develop assistance was introduced in the sixties and onwards. So, Denmark has a very strong record for both long-term development corporation and indeed, for humanitarian assistance. And we are still proportionately what other countries providing most financial assistance in the border areas to Syria, for the refugees in the camps there.

AMT: Well, help me understand attitudes. First of all, what was it that spurred Denmark to place such value on protecting the persecuted, specifically protecting the Jews from the Nazis in the Second World War?

BO LIDEGAARD: It was a fundamental understanding of the fact that once you start persecuting somebody, the entire foundation under democracy will falter. So, there was this strong public sentiment that the protection of the individual, which is inherent in democracy, would be threatened if the Nazis were allowed to go after Danish citizens who happened to be of Jewish origin.

AMT: How different is today's Denmark from the country at that time?

BO LIDEGAARD: Iâ€™m not sure it is that different in those terms, but of course, you have a discussion throughout Europe about managing a growing influx of refugees and combining them with welfare systems like the ones you have in Northern Europe. It is not an accident that you see most of the refugees coming into Europe, going north to the countries of the [unintelligible] and south to Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, because those countries have the most generous welfare systems. When it comes to the Scandinavian countries with tax based universal welfare models, there is a chance in trying to integrate new commerce fast enough in order to have the welfare systems break down. So, there are real dilemmas here and you can tell those dilemmas, both in Denmark and in Sweden, who have taken many more, and in Germany, who have also taken more. Itâ€™s very hard to have, over an extended period of time, a system under which anyone literally can travel illegally into Europe, and then within Europe, settle into whichever country he or she likes. You don't have such a system anywhere in the world where-- there is open entry to Canada for example, for anyone in the world wanted to settle in Canada.

AMT: Okay. Well, thank you for speaking with me.

BO LIDEGAARD: Thank you.

AMT: Bo Lidegaard, editor of the daily political newspaper, Politiken. He joined us from Copenhagen. Well, let's broaden this discussion for the rest of the European Union because similar tensions appear to be playing out across the continent. Henning Meyer is a Research Associate at the public policy group at the London School of Economics. He's also the editor-in-chief of the digital publication, Social Europe, which has been tracking the movement of refugees in Europe. Henning Meyer is in London, England. Hi.

HENNING MEYER: Hello.

AMT: So, as you listen to this and the talk of what's going on with Denmark, what are you thinking about? What's going on in the rest of Europe?

HENNING MEYER: I mean, what we see at European level is in my mind, quite clear. If you look at what the European social model is from a European perspective, it's basically a collection of different national welfare systems. Now your previous speaker has mentioned a few models, the Nordic model for instance, but you know, on a European level, we just have to join in agreement that we will have a welfare system, but the actual delivery of it is national. So, now we have a problem that is not national, it is European. Everybody agrees that refugees coming into Europe is not a Greek problem, itâ€™s not an Italian problem, is not a Maltese problem, especially if they want to travel to Germany, Denmark or Sweden. It is actually a European problem. We simply do not have the mechanisms at the European level to deal with this. So, therefore we have a sort of a cacophony of different national responses to this and unfortunately not a joint European response. I think that's the first part of the puzzle. The second part is that, from a German perspective, you know I was in Berlin yesterday as well, talking about these issues, we have to bring two elements together. The one is the legal entitlement as well as what we Germans consider a moral obligation to help refugees. There is no quantitative limit to this, to legal entitlement or a moral obligation. However, of calls down in the municipalities, in local communities, there are hard limits of housing, how many people you can integrate and so on and so forth. So, we'll have to bring these two things together and it's actually important to actually also realize what the hard limits are because we want to maintain these universal entitlements going forward. Just to give you one example, I mean if you just assume to pluck a number out of the air, that 3,000,000 was the hard limit and you fill you know, these places up in years one and two, what happens with refugees in years three, four, five? You can't offer any help to any of them after that. So, that's a tension.

AMT: Right. So, talk to me a little bit about how different countries are struggling with this because I notice even Angela Merkel is now saying something to the effect of you know, when the war is over, we do expect some of the people we're taking in to go home.

HENNING MEYER: Well, it depends on what the legal entitlement is. Some have a temporary right to stay, some want to stay for the long term, it really depends on the actual case. If you look at the German asylum application numbers, only about 50 percent of last year's applications came from people coming from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. So, that means 50 percent are still coming from all other places. You really have to make a distinction in the system in order to be able to maintain these sorts of moral obligations and this entitlement going into the future. Nobody knows where these hard limits are, but everybody knows there are limits. So, you have to bring these two elements together somehow.

AMT: And of course this is coming at a time of economic instability. To what degree does economics play into the way the EU countries are handling this, and even seeing it?

HENNING MEYER: Well, I mean many European Eurozone countries are still in economic hardship. You know, my recent analysis was that there's also a significant downside risk for Germany itself because if you look at the numbers of last year, there were 1.1 million people that registered in the easy system, which is basically the registration system at the point of entrance, but there were only 480,000 asylum applications. So that means there is a backlog in the system because the system at the current time cannot process more asylum applications. While people continue to come in, we create this backlog. The second time delay is basically when these people will come into the labor market, and that is usually after the asylum application has been processed. There is a double delay in the system and if you look at past experience, in terms of labor market integration of refugees, you see that we can integrate 10 percent within year one and, after 50 percent within five years. So, the challenge will be to provide skilled opportunities, educational opportunities to the people as soon as they arrive because they're on average, quite young. That's your opportunity. Otherwise, if that is not being done, you potentially store up problems in the system going forward when people are actually coming through the system. At the same time, you probably talked about the global economic risks extensively, Germany is a very export dependent economy. So, there could be an external shock to the German economy as well just at the time when there is labor market pressure as a result of the system handling the incoming refugees.

AMT: What is at stake for the EU at large?

HENNING MEYER: Well, the EU, as you know, has been in the process of slowed renationalisation, if not to say, disintegration for some time. Youâ€™ve seen the way the Eurozone crisis has been handled, or has not been handled, and this is just an additional challenge that is thrown at Europe. You know, where I mentioned at the beginning, the mechanism to deal with this at the European level, are simply not there. So given that you know, that you have to resort to national solutions, this is another element that leads into direction of renationalisation because the European Union level at the moment at least, is not being seen as very capable of handling this problem.

AMT: Okay, and so, how do you how do you move forward?

HENNING MEYER: Well, I think that they want this question in Germany, in Europe in general, is about borders. Thereâ€™s a distinction between external versus internal borders. So, the discussion goes into that direction if you want to maintain the [inaudible] area, which is the border less travelled, amongst the countries that are signed up to the Schengen Agreement, you will have to protect the external borders better. That doesn't mean just turning people away, but you have to have a better system of control actually handling the situation better all the way back to the crisis areas. I think this is an area where agencies such as Frontex, the European border agency, can have a bigger role and this is an area that seems to me more likely where we can come up with the European solution.

AMT: Right. Henning Meyer, thanks for your thoughts today on all of this.

HENNING MEYER: Thank you.

AMT: Okay, that is Henning Meyer. He is a Research Associate at the Public Policy Group at the London School of Economics, editor-in-chief of the digital publication Social Europe, which is tracking the movement of refugees in Europe right now and he joined us from London England. Let us know what you think of what's happening, specifically in Denmark and in the wider European context with the overwhelming number of migrants that the countries are now confronting. Go online cbc.ca/thecurrent. Let us know what you're thinking. That is our program for today.

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Feb.3,2016 Episode Transcript

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