Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 16
May 3, 2015
England must vote to ensure Britain’s liberal centre holds | Timothy Garton Ash
This country-defining general election is also the most European one Britain has ever seen. With a pivotal role played by smaller parties, and diverging politics in different regions or nations within the state, the outcome will almost certainly be a coalition or minority government: all frightfully un-British and typically continental. Yet this most European of elections could result in Britain leaving the EU and Scotland then leaving the UK. It could also mean drastic cuts to some areas of public spending and more inequality, especially in England, and a further erosion of our civil liberties.
As an English voter, those are all things I want to prevent. I want Scotland to stick with England, Britain to stay in the EU, and a British society that tries to combine the efficiency of a market economy with social justice and environmental sustainability – and I want us to have the greatest possible individual liberty compatible with the liberty of others. How do we achieve that? Most of Britain’s pre-election newspaper and magazine editorials have ended up urging us, as in the old days, to plump for Labour or Conservative. Now, plainly, the only two people who have a chance of being prime minister are David Cameron and Ed Miliband. But my choice as an individual English voter is more complicated than that.
Complicated some of these judgments may be, but the general message is clear: vote with your head
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April 19, 2015
There is another Russia beyond Putin | Timothy Garton Ash
Russia has lost an empire and not yet found a role. Only the Russians themselves can decide what that should be, and it will take some time. The new Russia will certainly not arrive this 9 May, when Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin celebrates the 70th anniversary of the end of what Russians call the great patriotic war. It may not emerge until 9 May 2025, or even 2045, but we should never abandon hope for that other Russia, and we must keep faith with the Russians who are working for it.
The phrase “lost an empire and not yet found a role” was first applied to Britain, by a former US secretary of state. The British know as well as anyone how initially uncomfortable it is to lose an empire, and how difficult to find a new role. Some would say that Britain has still not got there. And, by the way, the fate of the original, heartland empire, the one that forged the four nations of these islands – England, Wales, Scotland and (now only a small part of) Ireland – into a supposedly United Kingdom, is still unresolved. That is a major theme in Britain’s general election.
Related: Western leaders' snub casts shadow over Russia's lavish Victory Day celebrations
The Nemtsov murder has galvanised attempts to unite a fragmented opposition
His long-term vision is for Belarus to become something like Switzerland. Well, still a little way to go perhaps
Continue reading...April 3, 2015
Can Ukraine save itself from Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs? | Timothy Garton Ash
‘Welcome to the nation state of Ukraine,” says Mustapha Dzhemilev, a diminutive, soft-spoken 71-year-old leader of the Crimean Tatars, gentle on the outside, hard as steel within. He was deported from Crimea on Stalin’s orders in 1944, when he was just six months old, along with so many fellow Tatars. Persecuted under Soviet rule, he went on hunger strike for 303 days. A year ago, after Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea, this quiet fighter was banned from re-entering the peninsula his forebears had inhabited for centuries, long before the Russians did. And now here he is in Kiev, welcoming us to a new Ukraine.
“Putin can win some battles but Ukraine will win the war – with our passion, with our willingness to die,” says Hanna Hopko. For now “we have the political nation”. Hopko, 33, is the chair of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, one of a vanguard of young female MPs, self-professed heirs to the Euromaidan demonstrations, who now rattle off the details of political transformation plans faster than a rapper on speed.
Here is a state so corrupted that those who should be its doctors are its poisoners
Related: Europe must not treat Ukraine like another Greece | George Soros
Continue reading...March 27, 2015
It is not just parliament’s buildings that require extensive renovation | Timothy Garton Ash
The most famous parliament in the world is falling apart. That neo-gothic pile on the banks of the Thames needs a multi-year, multibillion-pound restoration. But it’s not just the building that’s in disrepair: the institution itself cries out for a thorough overhaul.
Yesterday, when MPs left Westminster to plunge into the election campaign, John Bercow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, survived a slimy government manoeuvre intended to make his own re-election unlikely. Bercow’s personality may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but he has been a genuinely reforming Speaker. Over the fixed term of the next parliament, he should lead a renovation not merely of its stones but of its democratic functioning.
Related: Parliament is falling down. So what can be done about it?
Related: Pass notes No 3,213: spads
One grilling by Jeremy Paxman achieves more than a hundred parliamentary exchanges
Continue reading...March 8, 2015
Europe is being torn apart – but the torture will be slow | Timothy Garton Ash
“If the euro fails, Europe fails”: thus spake Angela Merkel. Unfortunately, the euro is failing, but it is failing slowly. Even if Greece grexits, the eurozone seems unlikely to fall apart in the near future, although there is still a chance that it will. There is a much higher chance that it will grind along like a badly designed Kazakh tractor, producing slower growth, fewer jobs and more human suffering than the same countries would have experienced without monetary union. However, the misery will be unevenly distributed between debtor and creditor countries, struggling south and still prospering north.
These different national experiences will be reflected through elections, creating more tensions of the kind we have already seen between Germany and Greece. Eventually something will give, but that process may take a long time. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” said Adam Smith. Given the extraordinary achievements of the 70 years since 1945, and the memories and hopes still invested in the European project, there is a lot of ruin still left in our continent.
The structural problem here is that the monetary area is European but the democratic politics are still national
Related: European disunion: Tsipras, Merkel and the conflict at the heart of the EU
Continue reading...February 16, 2015
There’ll be no peace while Putin is squatting in Ukraine’s living room | Timothy Garton Ash
“Never again!” Europeans cried after the first world war. Then it happened again. “Never again!” Europeans cried after 1945; then it happened again. “Never again!” Europeans cried after Bosnia, in 1995, and now it has happened again. I hope as strongly as I doubt that the Minsk ceasefire agreement, brokered by Angela Merkel’s heroic efforts, will lead to peace. Yet even in the unlikely event that it does, look what we have already allowed to unfold.
Related: Ukraine ceasefire in tatters as fighting escalates in east
Related: Ukraine points towards the start of a tumultuous new era in world politics | Dmitri Trenin
Continue reading...February 1, 2015
Putin must be stopped. And sometimes only guns can stop guns | Timothy Garton Ash
Vladimir Putin is the Slobodan Milošević of the former Soviet Union: as bad, but bigger. Behind a smokescreen of lies he has renewed his drive to carve out a puppet para-state in eastern Ukraine.
Innocent bystanders are killed in the Black Sea port of Mariupol. In besieged Debaltseve, a woman scoops water from a giant puddle in the road. The rubble that was once Donetsk airport recalls a scene from martyred Syria. About 5,000 people have already been killed in this armed conflict, and more than 500,000 uprooted. Preoccupied by Greece and the eurozone, Europe is letting another Bosnia happen in its own front yard. Wake up, Europe. If we have learned anything from our own history, Putin must be stopped. But how?
Like Milošević, Putin is prepared to use every instrument at his disposal, with no holds barred
Related: Ukraine crisis: dozens die as rebels shell Mariupol
We need to counter this propaganda. No one is better placed to do this than the BBC
Continue reading...January 18, 2015
Germany’s anti-Islamic movement Pegida is a vampire we must slay | Timothy Garton Ash
As suspicion of Muslims grows in Germany and France, the danger of a vicious spiral is palpable. We need to counter this xenophobia now – before it is too late
No, no, surely not. On top of everything else, not that. Three days before a young Eritrean was murdered in Dresden, a swastika was daubed on the door of his flat. On the evening he was stabbed to death, last Monday, the xenophobic movement already known around the world as Pegida had held its largest demonstration so far in that lovely city on the River Elbe. And it’s not just Germany. As a foiled Islamist terrorist plot in Belgium follows hard on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, politicians on the xenophobic, anti-immigration far right are looking to pick up votes across Europe. There is a real and present danger of a downward spiral in which radicalised minorities, Muslim and anti-Muslim, will drag anxious majorities, non-Muslim and Muslim, in the wrong direction. Only a conscious, everyday effort by each one of us will prevent it.
The Dresden case is fortunately, thus far, not typical of Germany as a whole. Dresden sits at the scenic heart of a quite unusual corner of the former East Germany. Unlike most big west German cities, it has a low level of immigration, and little experience of living with cultural difference. In communist times, this corner was known as the “valley of the clueless”, because its inhabitants could not receive West German television broadcasts. Reports suggest that, so far, most of the participants in the Pegida demos have been middle-aged, and therefore shaped by a sheltered life in the old East Germany.
Continue reading...January 13, 2015
Did Charlie Hebdo's cover get it right? | The panel
• Charlie Hebdo: first cover since terror attack depicts prophet Muhammad
• The Guardian view: show solidarity, but in your own voice Continue reading...
January 4, 2015
What is Britain? The right answer could win the next election | Timothy Garton Ash
Angela Merkel will visit a fine exhibition about Germany at the British Museum when she comes to London this week. What we need next is an exhibition about Britain at a museum in Berlin. For instead of the German question, Europe now faces the British question. “Germany, but where is it?” asked Goethe and Schiller, but that was long ago, and today everyone is asking: “Britain, but where is it?”
Like the German question of old, the British one has an internal and an external aspect. The external: will Britain leave the EU? The internal: how can the UK accommodate growing English demands for more self-government, in response to what Scotland has won?
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