Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 14
April 28, 2016
How the west was lost – and why we need it back | Timothy Garton Ash
Whatever happened to the west? Barack Obama just visited Europe to praise and strengthen the west, urging Britain to stay in the EU and Germany to support the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). Reactions in Britain, Germany and the United States suggest that he was praising a ghost. Or at least, a ghost of a former self.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, the hymn sheet of the English conservative middle class, Obama recalled all the institutions Britain and America have worked together to create since 1945, and how the EU has helped “spread British values and practices – democracy, the rule of law, open markets – across the continent and to its periphery”.
Related: Barack Obama says world needs a united Europe
The vision of the west put forward by Obama is a genuinely liberal internationalist one
Related: TTIP is a very bad excuse to vote for Brexit | Nick Dearden
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April 15, 2016
England can be true to itself, if liberals reclaim patriotism | Timothy Garton Ash
And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? No. And was the holy lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen? No. And did the countenance divine shine forth upon our clouded hills? No. Yet I’m sure that we, the English, should adopt William Blake’s Jerusalem as our national anthem and sing it on all possible occasions.
Related: EU referendum: Arron Banks abandons legal challenge to Vote Leave leading Brexit campaign – live
We intone God Save the Queen – supposed to unite the English, Scots and Welsh. Anyone for warm beer and cricket?
Related: Jeremy Corbyn's EU passions are inflamed by prospect of Tory 'bonfire'
Continue reading...March 31, 2016
The BBC is too timid. Being impartial on the EU is not enough | Timothy Garton Ash
Can the BBC’s coverage of Britain’s EU referendum be both impartial and robust? The pressure is enormous, at a time when the future of the BBC is in the hands of a culture secretary who is also a leading Brexiteer. The best news organisation in the world faces its biggest challenge since the Iraq war.
Related: On Brexit, gender, age and political party are no guide as to how we’ll vote | Simon Jenkins
Continue reading...March 17, 2016
Can Angela Merkel prevent Europe being eaten away at its core? | Timothy Garton Ash
Why did you come to Germany and not Italy? I ask Jawad, a skinny 16-year-old from Afghanistan, standing outside his family’s blanket-tented six square metres of home at an emergency refugee reception centre in an east Berlin sports hall. Six months ago he spoke no German, but now he replies without hesitation: “Italien hat kein Geld!” Italy has no money! Short and to the point. A million Jawads arriving in a single year have so shaken up rich and bourgeois-liberal Germany that a xenophobic, anti-immigrant party has just won nearly a quarter of the vote in one east German state. Around the world people are asking: can Europe’s centre hold?
Politically and economically, Germany is the centre of Europe. The “grand coalition” government of centre-right Christian Democrats and centre-left Social Democrats is the centre of Germany. And Angela Merkel is the centre of that centrist government. In a real sense, therefore, Merkel is the centre of Europe.
Related: German elections: the candidates who backed Merkel's refugee stance – and won
Merkel’s plan requires an alarming dependence on two erratic and undemocratic rulers, Erdoğan and Putin
Continue reading...March 3, 2016
Rhodes hasn’t fallen, but the protesters are making me rethink Britain’s past | Timothy Garton Ash
The Oxford students have a point. We do need to acknowledge the pain caused by empire
Rhodes Must Fall has failed. Rhodes Must Fall has succeeded. The statue high up on the wall of a college building on the High Street in Oxford will not be removed, instead receding into its former pigeon-spattered obscurity. But the student protest movement has sparked a valuable debate about how Britain deals with its colonial past. I think both these results are good ones.
It was a brilliant stroke of student activism to identify that obscure statue as the target. Every newspaper could print photographs of the honeystone facade in which it stands, looking Brideshead Revisited-cliché Oxford. Dave Spart biffs Evelyn Waugh.
Related: Topple the Cecil Rhodes statue? Better to rebrand him a war criminal | David Olusoga
Continue reading...February 19, 2016
Here’s how to argue with a Brexiter – and win | Timothy Garton Ash
A new battle of Britain has begun. On its outcome will depend the fate of two unions: the United Kingdom and the European Union. If the English vote to leave the EU, the Scots will vote to leave the UK. There will then be no Britain. Meanwhile, the shock of Brexit to a continent already staggering under many crises could spell the beginning of the end of the European Union.
Related: This EU referendum doesn’t matter. But the next one will | Simon Jenkins
Related: US warns Britain: If you leave EU you face barriers to trading with America
Continue reading...February 4, 2016
When economists ignore the human factor, we all pay the price | Timothy Garton Ash
Economics is not a hard science, and mathematical models won’t explain why people behave as they do. A much broader perspective is needed
The Guardian recently asked nine economists whether we’re heading for another global financial crash and they gave many different answers. Yet still we turn to economists as if they were physicists, armed with scientific predictions about the behaviour of the body economic. We consumers of economics, and economists themselves, need to be more realistic about what economics can do. More modesty on both the supply and the demand side of economics will produce better results.
Following the great crash that began nearly a decade ago, there has been some soul-searching about what economics got wrong. Probably the self-criticism should have been more far-reaching, both in academia and banking, but it’s there if you look for it. In particular, the economic thinkers loosely clustered around George Soros’s Institute for New Economic Thinking (Inet) have produced a telling account of what went wrong.
The dominant strain of academic economics failed to see the crisis coming, and actually contributed to it
Continue reading...January 21, 2016
Whether Brexit or Bremain, fear will triumph over fear | Timothy Garton Ash
Both sides in the EU referendum are urging voters not to take risks. The in campaign needs to be lightened by a dash of hope
Brexit or Bremain? That is the question British voters may have to answer in just five months’ time on 23 June, if David Cameron’s renegotiation ends with a deal at the EU summit in February. The result of that renegotiation is at once essentially irrelevant to the question before British voters and quite crucial to how they will answer it.
Related: David Cameron close to EU deal on child benefits
As the head prevailed over the heart of Midlothian, so the head will prevail over the heart of Middle England
Related: David Cameron to urge business leaders to back bid for staying in the EU
Continue reading...January 7, 2016
The pillars of Poland’s democracy are being destroyed | Timothy Garton Ash
Poland, the pivotal power in post-communist central Europe, is in danger of being reduced by its recently elected ruling party to an illiberal democracy. Basic pillars of its still youthful liberal democracy, such as the constitutional court, public service broadcasters and a professional civil service, are suddenly under threat. The voices of all allied democracies, in Europe and across the Atlantic, must be raised to express their concern about a turn with grave implications for the whole democratic west.
Related: Polish president signs bill putting state media under government control
Continue reading...December 10, 2015
After her finest hour, Merkel now needs help from all Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
Like floodwater rising towards the castle at the heart of a medieval city, Europe’s multiple crises are now afflicting its undoubted leader. For Angela Merkel, being made Time magazine’s person of the year on Wednesday will be small consolation as she faces the prospect of something close to revolt at her party conference next week. The youth wing of the Christian Democratic Union wants to propose an upper limit to the number of refugees allowed into the country and it has been estimated that 40% of delegates might support it.
Related: Angela Merkel named Time's Person of the Year – the first woman since 1986
Germany became the promised land. The Statue of Liberty took up temporary residence in Berlin
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