Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 17
December 21, 2014
Angela Merkel has faced down the Russian bear in the battle for Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
In 2014, the battle for Europe’s future has been fought between two leaders: Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel. The contrast between them could not be sharper. There the Russian man: macho, militarist, practitioner of the Soviet-style big lie (Russian soldiers in Crimea? What soldiers?), a resentful post-imperial nationalist who in a recent press conference compared Russia to an embattled bear. Here the German woman: gradualist, quietly plain-speaking, consensus-building, strongest on economic power, patiently steering a slow-moving, sovereignty-sharing, multinational European tortoise. 19th-century methods confront 21st-century ones; Mars, the god of war, against Mercury, the god of trade; guns versus butter. For the first half of 2014, the bear was making the running, but now, with the Russian economy close to meltdown, it seems the tortoise may be winning after all.
Merkel has long been recognised as Europe’s leading politician, but this year, during the crisis over Ukraine, she became its leading stateswoman. I remain critical of her handling of the eurozone crisis, but I have only admiration for how she has addressed the return of war to European soil on the hundredth anniversary of 1914.
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December 7, 2014
Let the next generation speak up for Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
“I was mad at you,” says Mario, an Italian student. He was angry about a column I wrote just after the European elections in May arguing that to choose Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European commission was the wrong answer to the continent-wide discontent those elections revealed.
Well, as the commission president, Juncker, proposes a prestidigitated investment package to boost the European economy, and the former Polish prime minister Donald Tusk prepares to chair his first summit of EU heads of government, it’s worth asking again who is going to save the European project. My answer: it will not be saved without the more active engagement of Mario and his contemporaries – the Erasmus and easyJet generation.
Continue reading...November 5, 2014
The fall of the Berlin Wall: what it meant to be there | Timothy Garton Ash
We throw chocolates up to the putty-faced East German frontier troops, as they stand guard against whom? defending what? atop a Wall that since yesterday has become useless. They push the chocs away with their boots. One of the West Berliners standing next to me tries again: Wouldnt you like a West-cigarette? Sheepish refusal. Then I ask: Why are you there? This time, I get an answer: Interview requests must be registered in advance, on this side as on yours.
Lines scribbled in my notebook. Surreal moments from the greatest turning point of our time. In German, all nouns take an initial capital letter, so even a bungalow wall is a Mauer with a capital M. In English, there are many walls, but only one Wall. Its the one that fell on the night of Thursday 9 November 1989, giving us historys new rhyme: the fall of the Wall.
It was the other side of the concrete barrier that mattered, the side that people had risked their lives to climb over
The multitude of those who recall that they somehow foresaw these events has grown like the relics of the true cross
Continue reading...October 31, 2014
A small miracle in the tortured history of Polish-Jewish relations | Timothy Garton Ash
In Warsaw, the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews is an occasion for real hope
Mir zaynen do! (We are here!) The defiant Yiddish refrain of a Polish Jewish partisan song, written in the darkest days of the second world war, rings out in the winter sunlight, echoing between a sombre monument to the heroes of the Warsaw ghetto rising and the shining, brand-new Museum of the History of Polish Jews. The words are spoken, with passion, by a Polish Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, Marian Turski, who remained in Poland after the war. Here, still here, or here again, where so much of European Jewish life was lived for so many centuries. If an electric tingle does not go up your spine at such a moment, there is something wrong with your spine.
Then we pass into the museum, through a giant twisting canyon of sand-like stone, conceived by the architect to recall Mosess parting of the Red Sea. Down a curling marble staircase we find a multimedia exhibition that documents 1,000 years of Polish Jewish history. The Holocaust is there, of course, but the story does not begin or end with the Holocaust. It is not a museum of the Shoah, says the president of Israel, at this opening ceremony. It is a museum of life.
Continue reading...October 13, 2014
Should the US have chosen Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama? | Timothy Garton Ash
Whatever happened to the messiah? He for whom Americans danced in the streets chanting yes we can! on that unforgettable election night just six years ago. He whose name was on every European tongue. He who promised that humankind would look back and remember this moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
As we approach the midterm congressional elections on 4 November, six years to the day after Barack Obama was elected, Democratic candidates dont want to be seen with him. Elizabeth Drew, a veteran observer of US politics, writes: Probably not since Richard Nixon have so many candidates shied away from being in the presence of their partys president when he shows up in their states. His approval rating is down to around 40%. In Europe, we barely talk about him any more: he has gone from being Obama! Obama!, via No-drama-Obama, to Nobama.
Continue reading...September 21, 2014
Let’s not fear the F-word or the C-word: we should move to a federal Britain in a confederal Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
It’s a pity that FKB sounds like one of Vladimir Putin’s secret services, because the Federal Kingdom of Britain is what the British now need. Otherwise, the United Kingdom will become an Untied Kingdom. To achieve this federal solution, we must create across the whole of Britain what Scotland has just magnificently rehearsed for us: a democratic, constitutional moment. It is insulting to the peoples of England, Wales and Northern Ireland to suggest, as David Cameron has done, that this can be achieved in a few months.
The honouring of specific promises made by British political leaders to the Scots, including that tight timetable, must therefore be separated from a constitutional convention for the whole country. This convention should bring its proposals to an all-British referendum before the end of the next parliament. What is more, this constitutional settlement must address the question of what is done at the European level, as well as at the British (federal), national (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) and lower levels of government. In short, what we need is a coherent, carefully crafted, popularly deliberated and democratically decided proposal for a federal Britain in a confederal Europe.
Continue reading...Lets not fear the F-word or the C-word: we should move to a federal Britain in a confederal Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
Its a pity that FKB sounds like one of Vladimir Putins secret services, because the Federal Kingdom of Britain is what the British now need. Otherwise, the United Kingdom will become an Untied Kingdom. To achieve this federal solution, we must create across the whole of Britain what Scotland has just magnificently rehearsed for us: a democratic, constitutional moment. It is insulting to the peoples of England, Wales and Northern Ireland to suggest, as David Cameron has done, that this can be achieved in a few months.
The honouring of specific promises made by British political leaders to the Scots, including that tight timetable, must therefore be separated from a constitutional convention for the whole country. This convention should bring its proposals to an all-British referendum before the end of the next parliament. What is more, this constitutional settlement must address the question of what is done at the European level, as well as at the British (federal), national (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) and lower levels of government. In short, what we need is a coherent, carefully crafted, popularly deliberated and democratically decided proposal for a federal Britain in a confederal Europe.
Continue reading...September 16, 2014
Ukraine: how to close the door on Putin | Timothy Garton Ash
The European Union must develop a 10-year plan for Ukraine. This plan will also define what Europe itself will be a decade hence. In tribute to Europes pivotal politician, who has clearly led Europes evolving policy towards Ukraine, we might call it the Merkel plan. If it succeeds, a characteristically European version of liberal order will have prevailed over the conservative, nationalist recipe for permanent, violent disorder represented by Vladimir Putin. If it fails, Europe fails again.
Our plan should have three main prongs military, political and economic each of them with multiple components, all to be adapted as circumstances change. The US has its part to play, but in a supporting, not leading, role.
Continue reading...July 31, 2014
A century on, the first world war is still being played out | Timothy Garton Ash
From Ukraine to Syria these wars are a legacy of the 1914 clash of empires and the patchwork territories left behind
There is war in Europe. No, Im not using the historic present tense to evoke August 1914 (and rile John Humphrys). Im talking about August 2014. What is happening in eastern Ukraine is war ambiguous war, as a British parliamentary committee calls it, rather than outright, declared war between two sovereign states, but still war. And war rages around the edges of Europe, in Syria, Iraq and Gaza.
I do not say Europe is at war. I leave the hyperbole to Bernard Henri-Lévy. Most European countries are not directly engaged in armed conflict. Still, we should be under no illusions. For decades we have lived with the comforting notion that Europe has been at peace since 1945. This was always an overstatement. In parts of eastern Europe, low-level armed conflict continued into the early 1950s, followed by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In the 1990s, former Yugoslavia was torn apart in a series of wars as a recent report by the EUs special investigative task force, credibly charging Kosovo Liberation Army leaders with war crimes, has just reminded us.
Continue reading...May 26, 2014
Europe: the continent for every type of unhappy | Timothy Garton Ash
On the day the Bastille was stormed in 1789, King Louis XVI wrote in his diary, "rien". Few European leaders will have typed "nothing" into their iPads today, but there is a real danger that, in response to the revolutionary cry across the continent, they will in effect do nothing. Today's rien has a face and a name. The name's Juncker. Jean-Claude Juncker.
A disastrous "the same only more so" response from Europe's leaders would be signalled by taking Juncker Spitzenkandidat of the largest party grouping in the new European parliament, the centre-right European People's party and making him president of the European commission. The canny Luxembourgeois was the longest-serving head of an EU national government, and the chair of the Eurogroup through the worst of the eurozone crisis. Although he has considerable skills as a politician and deal-maker, he personifies everything protest voters from left to right distrust about remote European elites. He is, so to speak, the Louis XVI of the EU.
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