Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 18

This week's crucial vote is in Europe – but not in the European Union | Timothy Garton Ash

If Ukraine can hold a democratic election for its president next Sunday, there's a hope it can return to peaceful negotiations

This week Europe will have 30 elections: 28 national ones for the European parliament, one European Union-wide vote to anoint a so-called Spitzenkandidat to lead the European commission, and Ukraine's presidential election on 25 May. Between them, they will draw the map of a continent in disarray.

Unless all the opinion polls are wrong, the 28 national elections will produce a large vote for a zoological array of "anti" parties – from Ukip in Britain, Jobbik in Hungary, the Front National in France to Syriza in Greece. Most of these are on the xenophobic right, but you can't say that of Syriza or Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement in Italy. The one thing they all have in common is that they are anti. Anti the established order; anti the mainstream parties; anti the EU as it is at the moment.

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This week's crucial vote is in Europe but not in the European Union | Timothy Garton Ash

If Ukraine can hold a democratic election for its president next Sunday, there's a hope it can return to peaceful negotiations

This week Europe will have 30 elections: 28 national ones for the European parliament, one European Union-wide vote to anoint a so-called Spitzenkandidat to lead the European commission, and Ukraine's presidential election on 25 May. Between them, they will draw the map of a continent in disarray.

Unless all the opinion polls are wrong, the 28 national elections will produce a large vote for a zoological array of "anti" parties from Ukip in Britain, Jobbik in Hungary, the Front National in France to Syriza in Greece. Most of these are on the xenophobic right, but you can't say that of Syriza or Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement in Italy. The one thing they all have in common is that they are anti. Anti the established order; anti the mainstream parties; anti the EU as it is at the moment.

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We still don't know who'll win the global battle for free speech | Timothy Garton Ash

Threats such as the fatwa on Salman Rushdie may have eased, but elsewhere fanatics and oppressive states are still trying to exert control

Twenty-five years ago, four big things happened that still shape our world. The Berlin Wall came down, and with it the empire that Vladimir Putin would love to restore. The Tiananmen Square massacre launched China on a completely different trajectory, which has made it what it is today. A then little-known British boffin called Tim Berners-Lee invented what would become the world wide web. And Ayatollah Khomeini delivered his fatwa on Salman Rushdie.

Last Sunday I sat down with Rushdie in New York, at the American PEN World Voices festival, to discuss the consequences of those events for freedom of expression around the world. I asked him how he had experienced the velvet revolutions of 1989 and where he had been when the wall came down. He could not exactly remember some safe house presumably and he confessed to having felt a tinge of envy at watching others, including Nelson Mandela a few years later, walking to freedom while he was still in durance vile.

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Putin has more admirers than the west might think | Timothy Garton Ash

Russia has found out who its friends are recently and thanks to some old resentments, that includes India and China

Tell me your Ukraine and I will tell you who you are. The Ukrainian crisis is a political Rorschach test, not just for individuals but also for states. What it reveals to us is not encouraging for the west. It turns out that Vladimir Putin has more admirers around the world than you might expect for someone using a neo-Soviet combination of violence and the big lie to dismember a neighbouring sovereign state. When I say admirers, I don't just mean the governments of Venezuela and Syria, two of his most vocal supporters. Russia's strongman garners tacit support, and even some quiet plaudits, from some of the world's most important emerging powers, starting with China and India.

During a recent visit to China I was frequently asked what was going on in Ukraine, and I kept asking in return about the Chinese attitude to it. Didn't a country which has so consistently defended the principle of respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of existing states (be they the former Yugoslavia or Iraq), and which itself has a couple of prospective Crimeas (Tibet, Xinjiang), feel uneasy about Russia simply grabbing a chunk of a neighbouring country?

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Welcome to China's political gamble of the century

President Xi Jinping has put the burden of modernisation squarely on the single ruling party. It is quite an experiment

As export-hungry Europeans have feted president Xi Jinping on his imperial progress across the continent over the past week, how many have realised just how extraordinary is the political experiment he is leading back home? In essence, he is trying to turn China into an advanced economy and three-dimensional superpower, drawing on the energies of capitalism, patriotism and Chinese traditions, yet all still under the control of what remains, at its core, a Leninist party-state. He may be a Chinese emperor but he is also a Leninist emperor. This is the most surprising and important political experiment on the face of the earth. No one in the 20th century expected it. No one in the 21st will be unaffected by its success or failure.

Back in 1989, as communism was trembling in Warsaw, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing, who would have predicted that 25 years later we would be poring over the 60-point Decision of the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Party Congress, so as to understand exactly how the party leadership proposed to keep China both economically growing and politically under control? After the trauma of the Bo Xilai affair, Xi has moved decisively to strengthen central party power and his own position. Besides taking the traditional commanding heights of the military as well as state and party more rapidly than his predecessors, he has created at least four other central command committees or "small leading groups" on economic reform, state security, military reform and, tellingly, the internet. "More than Mao!" cries one disgruntled party reformer.

Welcome to China's political gamble of the century | Timothy Garton Ash

President Xi Jinping has put the burden of modernisation squarely on the single ruling party. It is quite an experiment

As export-hungry Europeans have feted president Xi Jinping on his imperial progress across the continent over the past week, how many have realised just how extraordinary is the political experiment he is leading back home? In essence, he is trying to turn China into an advanced economy and three-dimensional superpower, drawing on the energies of capitalism, patriotism and Chinese traditions, yet all still under the control of what remains, at its core, a Leninist party-state. He may be a Chinese emperor but he is also a Leninist emperor. This is the most surprising and important political experiment on the face of the earth. No one in the 20th century expected it. No one in the 21st will be unaffected by its success or failure.

Back in 1989, as communism was trembling in Warsaw, Berlin, Moscow and Beijing, who would have predicted that 25 years later we would be poring over the 60-point Decision of the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Party Congress, so as to understand exactly how the party leadership proposed to keep China both economically growing and politically under control? After the trauma of the Bo Xilai affair, Xi has moved decisively to strengthen central party power and his own position. Besides taking the traditional commanding heights of the military as well as state and party more rapidly than his predecessors, he has created at least four other central command committees or "small leading groups" on economic reform, state security, military reform and, tellingly, the internet. "More than Mao!" cries one disgruntled party reformer.

All we can do for Syria now is donate to the relief effort

Politics is blocked a solution to the cause of the crisis is not likely any time soon. But we can at least treat the symptoms

Some 18 million British children, women and men have fled their homes as a result of the civil war that has torn Britain apart over the last two years. About 280,000 people have been killed, and many more wounded. That, proportionately translated, is the scale of the Syrian tragedy. And there is no end in sight.

The Guardian today documents individual human stories from this disaster. They are more moving than any statistic. But the numbers are eloquent too. Some 6,000 refugees pour out of Syria every day, straining international humanitarian aid resources and destabilising the country's neighbours. Syrian refugees already make up 10% of the population of Jordan. That's like the whole of Bulgaria moving to Britain.

This crisis resolves little in Syria but says a lot about the United States

The nation is sick and tired of foreign wars, and may never play its role of global anchor again. We may live to regret it

In all the long history of US presidential addresses, has there been an odder one than this? With the solemn grandeur appropriate to a declaration of war, president Barack Obama informed the American people on Tuesday night that a congressional vote on military action had been postponed because Russia was now brokering a diplomatic initiative that might, or might not, put Syria's chemical weapons under international control. A Gettysburg address this wasn't.

With Angela Merkel's Germany at the helm, Europe will remain a tortoise

Don't expect much more from Merkel and Brussels but the US and Chinese competition has problems too

So the German people have spoken, and the European Union will continue to be a tortoise. Next May, following elections to the European parliament, we will discover just how slow and unhappy a creature it is. Then, across the next decade, a larger, Aesopian question will be posed: can the European tortoise somehow outrun the American eagle and the Chinese dragon? Or will it at least keep pace with them?

Resounding though Mutti (Mummy) Merkel's election victory was, Germany's new government still has to be formed. In the federal republic, such coalition talks traditionally happen at the pace, and with all the grace, of tortoises mating. Assuming the result is a so-called "grand coalition" with the Social Democrats, there should be a small but desirable adjustment in Germany's policy towards the eurozone.

Americans need to discover how the world sees them

There's little awareness of how the budget crisis has eroded US credibility. It's time for a reverse Christopher Columbus

On Monday, government offices were closed in Washington DC, to mark Columbus Day. Except that most of them had been closed anyway, because of the US government shutdown. As everyone knows, Christopher Columbus was an Italian navigator who, in the service of the Spanish crown, supposedly "discovered" America and reported its potential to a wondering world. I have spent the summer in the United States watching, with growing alarm, a country engaged in a degree of self-harming which, if observed in a teenager, would lead any friend to cry "call the doctor at once". As I set course back to Europe, my conclusion is this: America should do a reverse Columbus. The world no longer needs to discover America; but America urgently needs to discover the world's view of America.

Ordinary Americans, and especially the small minority active in Democrat and Republican primaries, must learn more of what people across the globe are thinking and saying about the US. For if you follow that, you realise that the erosion of American power is happening faster than most of us predicted while the politicians in Washington behave like rutting stags with locked antlers.