REVIEW
How the European Project Fell Apart
Timothy Garton Ash’s latest book traces what went
wrong—and holds some lessons for the continent’s future.
OCTOBER 29,
2023, 7:00 AM
By
Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton University.
Anyone old
enough to have lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall is likely to feel
melancholic reading Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of
Europe. 1989 was a year of miracles—and not just for Garton Ash, the
distinguished British historian and journalist who identifies “Europe” and
“freedom” as the causes closest to his heart. Today, as the continent sees the
rise of anti-liberal populism and its largest land war since World War II, that
moment of triumph has become a distant memory.
The
downward turn of recent years serves as a reminder that the democratization of
European states is a much more recent and fragile process than many Europeans
realize. Garton Ash was born in 1955 into a Europe of dictatorships. In his
youth, 289 million Europeans lived in democracies, while 389 million suffered
under authoritarian regimes—not just the ones beyond the Iron Curtain but those
in Southern Europe as well. Francoists would still raise their right arm with a
fascist salute; the Greek colonels who came to power in 1967 would not only
torture and kill but also ban “long hair, mini-skirts and the study of
sociology,” he writes.
It was the
collective memory of war and authoritarianism, in Garton Ash’s telling, that
drove postwar European peace and integration. Yet, after two decades that
consolidated a free way of life on the continent, Garton Ash writes, this
“memory engine” appears to be sputtering. No country has joined the European
Union since 2013; Britons voted to leave the bloc; war and the entrenchment of
autocratic figures such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban have threatened the EU’s
eastern flank.
Homelands
deftly traces the transformations of the European project. It is a deeply
moving journey through the past 50 years, as well as a reckoning with
liberalism that holds lessons for what Garton Ash sees as a new era beginning
with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It is also a
meditation on the very nature of history itself and on what it means to write
its first draft—an art that Garton Ash, straddling journalism and academia, has
been refining for half a century.
Garton Ash
is the most European of Englishmen but also the most English among Europeans.
Fluent in many languages, a tireless traveler on the continent where he
considers many countries “homelands,” he has long sought to explain to the
British the people they regard as funny foreigners. (He and other historians
convinced former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that German
unification posed no perils. In the end, he writes, the Iron Lady decided to
“be very nice to the Germans.”) He has also been an important voice in foreign
policy elsewhere: Former U.S. President George W. Bush, before his first trip
to Europe, asked him innocently whether the United States should want the EU to
succeed; generations of German politicians, especially when post-1989
insecurities about a new global role for the country became acute, have sought
Garton Ash’s counsel.
In
Homelands—a personal, but not intimate, book—Garton Ash recounts his youthful
travels around the continent when it was still a world of borders and different
currencies scarcely imaginable to today’s youth, used to the euro and
low-budget airlines. He settled in East Berlin to work on a doctorate in German
history but was drawn into writing about current affairs. After writing a book
on the dictatorship in East Germany, he witnessed the beginnings of Solidarity,
the Polish trade union striving for freedom, in the early 1980s.
Garton Ash
shows brilliantly how different factors aligned for Europe to triumph in 1989.
The ’80s were the age of Eurosclerosis, when the project of integration was
stalling and public debates across the continent were dominated by fears of
nuclear war and environmental catastrophe. (Garton Ash noted in his diary on
Dec. 31, 1980, in all capital letters: “We will see a nuclear war in this
decade.”) In his account, it was individuals who made the difference: Thatcher,
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, obviously,
but also German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and European Commission President
Jacques Delors.
The
prospect of completing the single European market by 1992, along with plans to
introduce the euro—which preexisted the fall of the Wall—made Europe look
attractive again. Even Gorbachev saw what he called a “giant rising” next to
the decaying Soviet empire—an impression that strengthened his resolve to
create a “common European home” (one of the many expressions in the book one
cannot help but read with bitterness after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb.
24, 2022).
Leaders
came to trust one another, and changes in leadership were fortunate: Gorbachev
preferred the sober George H.W. Bush—who wisely refrained from any triumphalist
talk when the Soviet Union crumbled—to his predecessor. Leaders also came to
trust different European peoples: Gorbachev, for instance, was moved by his
enthusiastic reception in West Germany in the spring of 1989, not least among
steelworkers in Dortmund, where chants of “Gorbi, Gorbi” gave rise to the
neologism “Gorbimania.” The Soviet leader left convinced that the two German
states might be allowed to unify without threatening European peace.
The danger
was that, in retrospect, reaching political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “end
of history”—or the triumph of liberal democracy—could seem inevitable. In fact,
Garton Ash writes, it was a “one-in-a-million piece of historical luck.”
Contingency always matters; sometimes stars, and human courage and luck, align
in what Garton Ash calls the “struggle for freedom”—and often, they just don’t.
The years
between the fall of the Wall and the financial crisis feature in the book under
the somewhat deceptive heading “Triumphing.” As we know now—and as Garton Ash
makes abundantly clear—they are better described as decades of hubris and
disillusionment. Freedom no doubt advanced, as Central and Eastern European
countries, in fits and starts, established democracies and markets and prepared
to join NATO and the EU. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik once put it,
Central Europeans just wanted “Liberty, Fraternity, Normality.” Yet, Garton Ash
writes, “getting to that non-experimental normality would require a huge
experiment,” often in the form of shock therapies, as liberal democracy and
capitalist economies were created simultaneously. That experiment was not
always unsuccessful: While it may have seemed at the time that Poles were
getting only shocks and no therapy, the average Polish family may have a higher
standard of living than the average British one by the end of this decade.
Still, moving quickly created many injustices. In the felicitous phrase of the
social theorist Ernest Gellner, the “price of velvet”—that is, velvet,
nonviolent revolutions—was that the nomenklatura retained privileges and had a
head start in the quest for economic and political power.
The
transition exacted a huge cost in social cohesion. Workers in Poland once
chanted, “There’s no freedom without Solidarity”; by the early 2000s, the
slogan had become, “There’s no solidarity in freedom.” The Gdansk shipyard,
where the Solidarity movement had begun in 1980, went bankrupt in 1996. But
freedom, understood as some basic control over one’s everyday life, also
suffered: As Garton Ash puts it, “The locus of unfreedom moved from the state
to the workplace.” The story of freedom in Europe did not proceed in a single
straight line.
This was
not the only disillusionment: Heroes of dissident movements in Central and
Eastern Europe turned into ordinary politicians—which, in some cases, meant
corrupt politicians. Even Czechs eventually tired of such a towering figure as
Vaclav Havel (whom Garton Ash knew well); by the end, they no longer saw
exemplary courage and integrity but only, Garton Ash writes, “theatrical
gestures and moralistic preaching.”
Meanwhile,
the self-restraint of Bush gave way to the hubris of his son’s America, where
the financialization of everything and the trust in so-called self-regulating
markets rightly discredited Western versions of capitalism after the 2008
crisis and where the belief in spreading democracy through military conquest,
sorely disappointed in Iraq and Afghanistan, made Western freedom rhetoric ring
hollow. The global war on terrorism turned out to be a colossal failure of
political judgment; Garton Ash thinks Beijing should posthumously award al
Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden its highest honors for leading Washington into a
decade of “strategic distraction.”
And so the
downward turn began and, arguably, continues today. Anti-liberal populists
started to score victories across Europe. 2016 saw the greatest political
defeat of Garton Ash’s life: Brexit. Garton Ash tells a familiar story about
Britain’s decision to leave the EU, appearing contrite in the face of the
supposed rebellion of those “left behind” by liberal elites. But he also offers
a more interesting narrative—one that underlines his larger point about the
role of individuals (and contingency) in history. Figures such as British Prime
Minister Tony Blair, he writes, simply did not dare to make the case for the EU
to the British people. Blair would never fail to say he was a “passionate
European,” but he would only do so in Strasbourg. As a result, arguably, it was
not just the economically deprived who voted for Brexit. Garton Ash reports
that an old friend of his voted Leave; his father, he’s sure, would have done
the same. Today, the British are paying the price for a failure of
politicians—and intellectuals—to transform people’s mental map of where Britain
truly belongs.
Review
Homelands by Timothy Garton Ash review – Europe’s
story
The author and journalist charts some of the lessons
learned from the Hungarian revolution to the invasion of Ukraine
John Palmer
Fri 24 Mar
2023 09.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/24/homelands-by-timothy-garton-ash-review-europes-story
Timothy
Garton Ash has combined work in academia, journalism and political analysis for
nearly half a century. Europe – its role in the making of the modern world and
the challenges it faces today – has been his unflinching focus. His new book is
an insightful analysis of the transformation of central and eastern Europe in
the decades between the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and the Russian invasion
of Ukraine.
Garton Ash
first encountered “Europe” as a teenager bewitched by its character and tragic
history, very different from the insular and arrogant sense of superiority of
much of British – actually English – society at that time. He has been a
witness to uprisings in various of the Soviet Union’s European “client states”,
and his contacts with many of those who inspired or led the revolts provided
much of the valuable material for this book.
The
corruption and intolerance that has episodically marked the long transition of
these countries into the orbit of the European Union is not glossed over. The
bloc’s enlargement has brought difficult political, legal and social changes.
Indeed, an explicit warning of this was given by Jacques Delors when, as
president of the European Commission, he visited the aspirant candidate
countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The
sometimes bureaucratic and sluggish dynamics of EU processes rightly meet with
the author’s disapproval. But things are very different today from when I was
reporting for the Guardian in Brussels in the 1970s. The dynamic of ever closer
EU integration continues, but not at the expense of the new European member
states.
Global
population movements should be seen as a potential positive, not a threat
It would
have been interesting to have some discussion of what relationship a more
democratic post-Putin Russia might have with Brussels, short of membership. The
EU is being pressed to agree to the accession of ever more candidate states in
the Balkans and even the Caucasus. What should define the eventual limits of EU
enlargement?
Garton Ash
lists some of the lessons learned from the past half century. These include the
clumsy and inhuman attempt to create a “Fortress Europe” against immigration,
which, predictably, has encouraged a revival of the racist far right. Global
population movements should be seen as a potential positive, not a threat –
especially by countries facing serious demographic decline.
Any states
that join the EU in the future will almost certainly be joining something more
like a democratic federal European Union. Climate crisis and the pressure to
deal with poverty and social inequality seem likely to further redefine the
frontiers of democratic governance at the national, European and even global
level. One sad fact is how little much of this even registers with the
contending political forces struggling in a UK beset by post-Brexit decline and
government chaos. Might this be a topic for Garton Ash’s next book?
Homelands:
A Personal History of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash is published by Vintage
(£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, buy a copy at
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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