Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 15
November 29, 2015
Europe’s walls are going back up – it’s like 1989 in reverse | Timothy Garton Ash
The walls are going up all over Europe. In Hungary, they take the physical form of razor and barbed wire fences, like much of the old iron curtain. In France, Germany, Austria and Sweden, they are border controls temporarily reimposed, within the border-free Schengen area.
And everywhere in Europe there are the mind walls, growing higher by the day. Their psychological mortar mixes totally understandable fears – after massacres perpetrated in Paris by people who could skip freely to and fro across the frontier to Belgium – with gross prejudice, stirred up by xenophobic politicians and irresponsible journalists.
Related: When Sweden shut its doors it killed the dream of European sanctuary | Andrew Brown
Related: To turn on refugees because of Paris is weak and absurd | Ian Birrell
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November 12, 2015
Europe is in crisis: this is no time for petty-mindedness | Timothy Garton Ash
‘Ask not what Britain can do for Europe. Ask what Europe can do for Britain!” Thus David Cameron’s bathetic inversion of John F Kennedy’s famous rhetorical trope. This at a time when the European Union faces one of the largest challenges in its history, with its nations staggering under the burden of desperate migrants from the Middle East and Africa.
Related: An EU cliffhanger: that’s how the Cameron box set will end | Rafael Behr
Related: David Cameron signals flexibility on migrant benefits in EU letter
Continue reading...October 26, 2015
Poland has survived worse than this shift to conservatism. Don’t despair | Timothy Garton Ash
““Putinism with a Polish face!”, “Cultural revolution à la Polonaise!”, “Orbanisation on the Vistula!” (Orbanisation refers of course to the model of illiberal democracy practised by the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán.) I listen to my Polish friends’ Cassandra cries after voters handed victory to a conservative Eurosceptic party in Sunday’s general election, and I think “Hang on a minute, old friends, let’s see what comes, and what we can do about it. Poland has been through worse than this, and there will be other elections.” Yet on one thing we must all agree: this matters. Poland is the biggest success story of post-communist Europe and the leading regional power between an overstretched Germany and a rampant Russia. As Spain and Italy struggle with the effects of the eurozone crisis, and Britain has marginalised itself until its referendum on EU membership, the rest of Europe needs Poland more than ever.
Related: Poland lurches to right with election of Law and Justice party
We may look back and say ‘these were years when Poland moved like a crab: backwards, sideways, but a little forwards'
Continue reading...October 15, 2015
If US relations with China turn sour, there will probably be war | Timothy Garton Ash
What is the biggest challenge facing the next president of the United States? How to deal with China. The relationship between the emerging and the enduring superpower is the greatest geopolitical question of our time.
If Washington and Beijing do not get it right, there will probably be war somewhere in Asia some time over the next decade. Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperialist Russia and the brutality of Islamic State are medium-sized regional challenges by comparison. Climate change and the world economy cannot be managed without American-Chinese cooperation. All this demands a bipartisan American grand strategy for the next 20 years, but US politics seems incapable of generating anything more than a partisan soundbite for the next 20 minutes.
Related: What’s behind Beijing’s drive to control the South China Sea? | Howard W French
Republican presidential candidates make random, sometimes wild comments about China
Continue reading...October 1, 2015
The billion-dollar question – when will America repair its damaged democracy? | Timothy Garton Ash
To watch American politics today is to watch money speaking. The 2016 US elections will almost certainly be the most expensive in recent history, with total campaign expenditure exceeding the estimated $7bn (£4.6bn) splurged on the 2012 presidential and congressional contests. Donald Trump is at once the personification of this and the exception that proves the rule because – as he keeps trumpeting – at least it’s his own money. Everyone else depends on other people’s, most of it now channelled through outside groups such as “Super PACs” – political action committees – which are allowed to raise unlimited amounts from individuals and corporations.
Related: 'They could be Isis.' Donald Trump warns against taking Syrian refugees
Continue reading...July 26, 2015
Why a Germany of robust debate would be better for Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
If I think of Germany at night, I still sleep soundly. But after the recent bruising assertion of German power in the eurozone, especially during the hellish all-night Brussels dance along the precipice of Grexit in mid-July, I’m not alone in feeling the first twinges of insomnia. The fact that there are so many things the Germans have got right should not stop us, and them, from asking what they have got wrong – or at least, could do better. I have been chewing this over, and come up with a surprising thought: to achieve more consensus abroad, perhaps Europe’s leading power needs less consensus at home.
As it happens, this week sees the 40th anniversary of the signing of the Helsinki Final Act, a milestone on the journey that led eventually to today’s united Germany, with its East German chancellor and president. It is interesting to go back and sample the style of German foreign policy at that time: patiently multilateral, modest, humble even, and yet with touches of the inspirational, as in the rhetoric of Willy Brandt and Richard von Weizsäcker.
Related: Why is Germany so tough on Greece? Look back 25 years | Dirk Laabs
I don’t think the homespun wisdom of Dr Schäuble’s granny should be the thread upon which the future of Europe hangs
Related: ‘We need permanent revolution’: Thomas Piketty, 2014’s most influential thinker
Continue reading...July 9, 2015
With 28 versions of Europe, it’s no wonder we barely recognise each other | Timothy Garton Ash
Whom the gods will destroy they first make bored. We have seen so many “last chance” eurozone summits about Greece that many Europeans have almost lost consciousness. We doze in the passenger seat even as the car goes over the cliff.
But this is it. If the EU’s heads of government don’t find a way forward at their emergency summit this Sunday, then on Monday a 70-year-old project of European integration may start to unravel. If you think it’s just the future of Greece that’s at stake, think again.
Related: Greek debt crisis: Tsipras gets ultimatum to reach deal or face Grexit - as it happened
The Belgian foreign minister says he is the only one who can’t blame it on Brussels
Continue reading...June 15, 2015
Europe must save Greece to save itself | Timothy Garton Ash
Europe must save Greece. The consequences of keeping Greece within the eurozone will be bad, but those of its leaving would be worse. They would be not just economic, but human, geopolitical and historic. Europe would never be the same again.
I was in Greece two weeks ago, and grasped this at every turn, from standing on the ancient Pnyx, the birthplace of democracy, through talking to business leaders, journalists and academics, many of who were witheringly critical of the current Syriza government. But since then I have been back in northern Europe, in England, Belgium and now Poland, and in the north I find not just relative indifference (Greece is more often the subject of jokes than of deep concern) but also two dangerous illusions.
Continue reading...May 31, 2015
Xi Jinping’s China is the greatest political experiment on Earth | Timothy Garton Ash
Can Xi do it? This is the biggest political question in the world today. “Yes, Xi can,” some tell me in Beijing. “No, he can’t,” say others. The wise know that nobody knows.
There is a great debate going on in Washington about whether the US should change its China policy in response to Beijing’s more assertive stance under President Xi Jinping. This includes the reported stationing of artillery on the extraordinary artificial islands it is building on underwater reefs in the South China Sea. It also matters to everyone everywhere whether China can sustain its economic growth as it exhausts its ready supplies of cheap labour, avoiding the traps into which some middle-income economies have stumbled. Yet even more than in other countries, the future of China’s foreign policy and its economy depend on the quality of decision-making produced by the political system. It’s the politics, stupid.
Related: South China Sea islands are Chinese plan to militarise zone, claims US
It’s likely Xi’s brand of smart authoritarianism will keep not just his party in power but the whole show on the road
Continue reading...May 9, 2015
There is one solution to our disunited politics: a Federal Kingdom of Britain
A shaky future in Europe and political discord in the union means the shape of this country is now at stake. But building a federal state would make regional self-determination and accountable government a greater reality
So now we need a Federal Kingdom of Britain. Otherwise this most dramatic British election result could mark the beginning of the end of Britain, and of Britain in the EU.
With leftwing Scottish nationalists sweeping the board north of Hadrian’s wall while rightwing Eurosceptic Conservatives form the British government only because they triumphed in England, the two largest parts of our increasingly disunited United Kingdom, England and Scotland, are doomed to discord.
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