The Ambassador of Germany about the Media Influence, Information Security, and the Future for Eastern Europe

— Your Excel­len­cy, could we start with easy ques­tions, please? It is sum­mer time now. It is the usu­al time for diplo­mats to go on hol­i­days. Do you have any spe­cial plans for your hol­i­days this year?

— As for me, I will go on hol­i­days since mid-August this year. As an exclu­sion to the gen­er­al rule, it will con­sist of two parts this time. First­ly, we will take a short tour to the Baltics. Then, we will go to the sub­urb of Berlin, as usu­al, where our fam­i­ly house is locat­ed.

— Are there any places in Belarus you like most of all?

— Gen­er­al­ly, I like trav­el­ling across your coun­try, since you can observe such splen­did views out of your car win­dow. How­ev­er, I’ve been impressed with two-three vis­its to Belavezh­skaya Pushcha and some cities most of all. I would­n’t like to offend the dwellers of oth­er local­i­ties, but I real­ly appre­ci­at­ed vis­it­ing the cities of Hrod­na, Polatsk, and Vit­sieb­sk, which got sig­nif­i­cant­ly improved in the recent years. Also, e.g. the city of Brest with its cen­tral part and pedes­tri­an area is to my lik­ing.

— You have notices changes in the images of our cities. Have you also noticed any changes in the soci­ety since the time of your arrival in the coun­try?

— None of fun­da­men­tal changes have tak­en place in the Belaru­sian soci­ety as a whole. How­ev­er, I have such an impres­sion that in com­par­i­son with the first peri­od of my stay in your coun­try in 2009–2013, the Belaru­sian soci­ety has become more con­fi­dent and more open-mind­ed to a cer­tain extent. These are my per­son­al obser­va­tions, and they can be argued indeed.

— You applied for being del­e­gat­ed to Belarus for the sec­ond time. Appar­ent­ly, Belarus is not the eas­i­est coun­try for a diplo­mat. Is it easy for you to work here?

— First of all, I would like to note that none of the coun­tries, where I worked, was easy. I can tell you a lot of sto­ries about oth­er coun­tries of the world that show Belarus as a prac­ti­cal­ly ide­al case com­pared to them. At the same time, it is more inter­est­ing and excit­ing to work in the com­pli­cat­ed states. I would­n’t say that my work in your coun­try is linked to some spe­cial dif­fi­cul­ties.

— Could you share some of the sto­ries from your expe­ri­ence to com­pare Belarus with oth­er states?

— The pub­lic ser­vices oper­ate here per­fect­ly well. The sphere of pub­lic admin­is­tra­tive pro­ce­dures is arranged effi­cient­ly. Due to the fact, e.g. it is pos­si­ble to have your car reg­is­tered and com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nels updat­ed in no time. In my opin­ion, Belarus has high-qual­i­ty and quite high-speed Inter­net con­nec­tion. There’s a whole range of things that look absolute­ly dif­fer­ent in oth­er coun­tries of the world in com­par­i­son with your coun­try. I won’t men­tion the states, since it would be impo­lite. How­ev­er, e.g. the reg­is­tra­tion of my car in Belarus took two days. At the same time, the same pro­ce­dure would require more than half a year in a dif­fer­ent coun­try of the world. Obvi­ous­ly, it makes a con­sid­er­able dif­fer­ence in the qual­i­ty of life in the coun­tries.

— The prob­lem of secu­ri­ty in Europe has become a pri­or­i­ty issue of pub­lic con­cern. The real­i­ty has changed con­sid­er­ably since the recent years. The seri­ous chal­lenges con­cern every­one. We won­der if your coun­try has changed since recent years in con­nec­tion with the grow­ing flow of migrants and the lack of per­son­al safe­ty both out­doors and at home.

—Glob­al­ly, it can be stat­ed that the ‘old’ notion of secu­ri­ty we expe­ri­enced 5–10 and even 20 years ago is not valid any longer.  Obvi­ous­ly, the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion in the Mid­dle East and in Africa, includ­ing the so-called ‘migrants’ cri­sis’, has exert­ed impact on the Euro­pean Union as a whole and Ger­many in par­tic­u­lar. As you prob­a­bly know, Ger­many host­ed the largest quan­ti­ty of asy­lum-seek­ers in 2015 and in the fol­low­ing months. No doubt, it makes the Ger­man soci­ety con­cerned with the trend. You cer­tain­ly know how many ter­ror attacks and acts of vio­lence have tak­en place since the recent two years in France, the Unit­ed King­dom, and Ger­many. The acci­dents inevitably make the soci­ety wor­ried and con­cerned. In these cir­cum­stances, politi­cians should intend to ensure pub­lic safe­ty for all coun­try res­i­dents, both the cit­i­zens and the migrants. The safe­ty poli­cies should be equal for every­one.

How­ev­er, should you ask me if I feel very anx­ious in Ger­many, I would tell you that I’m not, since the sit­u­a­tion is far from being extreme­ly grave. On the oth­er hand, I’m per­son­al­ly very wor­ried with the fact that the readi­ness to prac­tise vio­lence is extreme­ly high all over the world nowa­days. It con­cerns both the sphere of high pol­i­tics and the grass-root lev­el of pub­lic rela­tions. I don’t have any clear expla­na­tion for this phe­nom­e­non, but I con­sid­er it to be a high­ly wor­ry­ing issue indeed.

— Talk­ing about the Ger­man mass media, do you think that they cov­er the sit­u­a­tion with the asy­lum-seek­ers and the dan­gers of ter­ror attacks in the prop­er way? Are there any cas­es, when the Ger­man media dis­sem­i­nate some rad­i­cal appeals?

— No, there aren’t def­i­nite­ly any cas­es of this kind there. When I look through on-line media every now and then I come across quite fre­quent crit­i­cal remarks, blam­ing the print and broad­cast media for cov­er­ing the issues in the extreme­ly reserved way. Our news­pa­pers and pub­lic broad­cast media nev­er deal with stir­ring up the rad­i­cal­iza­tion of our soci­ety in their reports. Just on the con­trary, they intend to avoid pre­sen­ta­tion of any rad­i­cal views in their mate­ri­als.

— Our media space is some­times filled with dis­tant man­i­fes­ta­tions of provoca­tive ‘leaks’, such as a sto­ry with a girl, named Liza, or sto­ries with par­tic­i­pa­tion of asy­lum-seek­ers. Do we wit­ness ran­dom or sys­tem­atized attempts to aggra­vate the present-day sit­u­a­tion?

— Every­one decides for him­self whether the cas­es are ran­dom or sys­tem­atized. To my mind, they can be regard­ed as ran­dom.

I think that we failed to get it well long time ago what effects could mass media cre­ate through their con­stant­ly broad­en­ing chan­nels.

Con­se­quent­ly, we appeared unpre­pared for the immense influ­ence of elec­tron­ic media on the pub­lic opin­ion and pub­lic trends. It is only since recent­ly that the whole scope of this impact has become well under­stood, when dis­cus­sions about fake news and sim­i­lar phe­nom­e­na have become wide-spread in the soci­ety. I would­n’t regard it straight­for­ward­ly as a ‘dan­ger­ous’ process, but it should be close­ly con­sid­ered from the polit­i­cal point of view for sure.

We’ve cre­at­ed the fan­tas­tic world of the Inter­net, on-line and social media, which we use, includ­ing Face­book, Twit­ter, Google, Wiki etc. All of us have been excit­ed with the won­der­ful new open world.  How­ev­er, we dis­re­gard­ed the neg­a­tive con­se­quences of its exis­tence, in my opin­ion. Thus, any per­son can share cer­tain opin­ion, con­nect­ed to a cer­tain event, hav­ing noth­ing in com­mon with the real­i­ty. Con­se­quent­ly, each of us has to ask your­self how deeply you should inves­ti­gate the issue, in order to get it clear if it is true or false, if it’s pro­pa­gan­da or not. As well as in order to under­stand how dis­sem­i­na­tion of this report may influ­ence cer­tain events in dif­fer­ent coun­tries.

— Could you kind­ly reveal your per­son­al infor­ma­tion sources? Is it Rus­sia today, Radio Lib­er­ty, Süd­deutsche Zeitung? What is your per­son­al selec­tion of mass media you read? Do you have any pre­ferred media among the Belaru­sian news resources?

— Tak­ing into account the said above, you cer­tain­ly under­stand that I do not have time to look through all the men­tioned media in prin­ci­ple. I get around 40–50 brief news reports on Europe and East­ern Europe from the Ger­man Press Agency every day. These are brief facts only. Addi­tion­al­ly, I watch TV-news on ARD and ZDF once a day and read Die Zeit week­ly that pro­vides com­ments and detailed analy­ses of events, dwelling upon their rea­sons in the pre­cise way. As for the Belaru­sian media, I must con­fess I’m too lazy and lack­ing time to indulge in read­ing texts in Russ­ian. There­fore, I adress to the media with the Eng­lish ver­sion, includ­ing BelTA, Bela­PAN, and TUT.BY, first of all.

— What is your vision of East­ern Europe in twen­ty years? Do you have any ide­al vision in this respect?

— I see it as a large com­mu­ni­ty of nations, liv­ing in peace and under­stand­ing that only due to exert­ing com­mon efforts and avoid­ing con­flicts it will be pos­si­ble to have hap­py and nor­mal future for our chil­dren. Maybe, it is not easy to imag­ine nowa­days, but we should do every­thing pos­si­ble to make it a real­i­ty.