E125 - Sebastian Schäffer: Immediately

Dr. Rod Berger sits down with Sebastian Schäffer, who wrote a book with his mentor arguing that the Balkans belong in Europe. Not eventually. Immediately. The mentor, former Austrian Vice-Chancellor Erhard Busek, died in March 2022, weeks after Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine and the argument the two of them had spent years making became the most urgent question on the continent. Schäffer is still making it.

Born in Munich, he gave his career to somebody else's neighborhood. He directs the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe in Vienna, a think tank founded in 1953 an...